Sometimes you’re a little reluctant to work with a big named actor if you’re an indie filmmaker. “When you get involved in a professional relationship with a movie star you never know what’s going to show up—whether or not he’s going to lock himself in his trailer,” David Gordon Green said. “With Nicolas Cage I was relieved to find a guy who knew everybody on the crew’s name and learned about their jobs from them and was involved in the process. He went the extra mile. He wasn’t just the actor sitting in front of a mirror memorizing lines.”
While we’re now in an era where stuff like “Left Behind“ is pretty indicative of the majority of Cage’s oeuvre, thank God for David Gordon Green. The director has given Cage a role with real depth and weight in “Joe,” and the first poster and trailer for the movie has now arrived.
The story follows the bond between an ex-con dodging trouble who becomes a protector and friend to a young teen (Tye Sheridan). “He could handle a venomous cottonmouth snake without protection. That showed me an actor that was fearless. If it was appropriate for the role or his character, he would get in that mind-set and he could do anything—he would do anything. There’s a beauty to that,” Green told EW boasting about his lead. It’s a movie that we called “a satisfying culmination of the filmmaker’s career to date,” and we included it in our 21 Best Films Of 2014 We’ve Already Seen feature so keep an eye out for it when it opens in limited release on April 11th. [EW]