Everyone wants a little magic in their lives, and Nicolas Cage is no different. That's why he came up with the idea of making a family film based on The Sorcerer's Apprentice sequence in Walt Disney's Fantasia.
The Oscar winner has always had a fascination with the occult, using the original meaning of the word -- hidden. He's not sure where his interest in magic and acting began but believes it goes back to when his father, August Coppola, built him a wooden castle.
``I would play in the castle and imagine different things. At that age, the castle was a symbol of the imagination for me,'' says the goateed 46-year-old actor, smiling as he remembers.
His father -- the brother of director Francis Ford Coppola and actress Talia Shire -- died in October at 75. He was a professor of literature and philosophy and dean of creative arts at San Francisco State University.
From those early days, Cage became interested in mythology, particularly Arthurian legends and Grail stories. He was searching for such a movie when he and producing partner Todd Garner hit upon the idea for The Sorcerer's Apprentice, which opens Wednesday. They commissioned a script and then took it to über-producer Jerry Bruckheimer, with whom Cage had already made six films.
``Jerry wanted to do it right away, which was very exciting for us,'' Cage says. ``He brought in his team, they started adding even more levels, and it came to life. It was a lot of work, but I knew Jerry's group could do that.''
Jon Turteltaub, whose previous two films were the National Treasure duo starring Cage and produced by Bruckheimer, was brought in to direct. Turteltaub is also an old friend of Cage, having gone to Beverly Hills High School with him when the actor was known as Nic Coppola.
``First of all, let it be known that Jon is a really, really good actor,'' Cage says. ``We both auditioned for the lead in Our Town, and he beat me out. I got to play Constable Warren, which was two lines of dialogue, and he will never let me forget it.''
Now making his third film in a row with Cage, Turteltaub jokes that he doesn't remember what it's like to work with somebody else. But he stresses that despite Cage's reputation, the actor is easy to work with.
``Aside from being very much of a gentleman,'' says the director of hits like Phenomenon and The Kid, ``he's extremely professional, takes his work very seriously. And for somebody who has a reputation of being crazy or a wild man, he's definitely not crazy and he's certainly not wild. He's always the first actor there, on time and knows his lines. . . . I think that surprised people.''
But Cage does bring other surprises to the set, the director says, in the way he plays a character.
``Whatever you had in mind the night before reading the script will sort of be there, but then it will also be Nic's part . . . often amazingly brilliant and that's what makes the movie a little sparkly, a little bit better.''
When they were developing Sorcerer's Apprentice, the pair found themselves back in Beverly Hills High School watching Cage's oldest son perform in the drama department's production of Inherit the Wind. ``Things have come full circle,'' notes Cage, who always seems to be looking for connections.
In Sorcerer's Apprentice, he found some. There is a car chase scene -- this, after all, is a Jerry Bruckheimer film -- using a reproduction of a 1935 Rolls-Royce Phantom. Cage mentions he once owned one. He appears to have sold it before his current well-documented financial woes and reports of excessive spending, which he won't talk about because of legal issues. (He is suing his former manager, while on the end of a number of countersuits and is still paying the IRS back taxes.)
From: http://www.miamiherald.com/
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