Nicolas Cage and Quentin Tarantino feel like the perfect pairing, right? Sort of like the genre moviemaking version of peanut butter and chocolate, but it’s sadly never happened, and the actor seems to be just as confused about those circumstances as we are. When asked by Variety in a recent interview why he’s never worked with a director like Tarantino, Cage responded that they were close friends and have a “mutual admiration” for each other, alongside his personal praise of the filmmaker and even rifts about the filmmaker’s minor contribution to one of his more popular action flicks.
“I have no idea. I would consider Quentin a friend of sorts. He’s someone I occasionally email with, and we talk about movies, and I liked his book about movies and enjoyed looking at the movies through his eyes. It just never happened. I think there’s a mutual admiration. I’ve always thought he was an acrobat with filmmaking. His movies move in a way that are absolutely dazzling,” Cage said.
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He was also reminded by the interviewer that Tarantino helped punch up the script for Michael Bay‘s “The Rock,” giving former James Bond actor Sean Connery one of the more iconic one-liners from the action pic (ala “Winners go home and f*** the prom Queen”). With Cage responding with, “Yeah. But I’m the one who added, ‘Carla was the prom queen.’ And I added, ‘I’m sensing a lot of prepubescent volatility, a lot of “16, I’m angry at my father” syndrome.'” That’s all me. In that regard, yes, we wrote together in collaboration on dialogue.”
Back in 2015, Cage expressed to Newsweek a desire to collaborate with QT and PTA when asked about what directors he’d like to work with, “I would love to work with Paul Thomas Anderson. I think that he’s one of the greats. And he’s certainly a true artist. Quentin Tarantino and I, the two of us, could really do something quite special. But I remain positive and hopeful that it will eventually happen.”
A possible “Pulp Fiction” casting wishlist making the rounds at Reddit suggested that QT was open to Cage playing either Pumpkin (Tim Roth), Lance (Eric Stoltz), and Butch (Bruce Willis), if he couldn’t get his first choices, but that obviously didn’t happen. We can picture that Cage could have easily fit the Clarence part (played by Christian Slater) in “True Romance,” which was a Tony Scott film, but was a Tarantino script, and the character’s obsession with Elvis Presley (the late Val Kilmer playing a dark version in his head that advocated for violence) felt super on-brand or the lead role in “Natural Born Killers” (QT has disowned that pic due all the changes made by Oliver Stone to his original script) that went to Woody Harrelson. Cage would also end up working with one of Tarantino’s favorite filmmakers, Brian De Palma, on the 1990s thriller “Snake Eyes,” so you would assume that the two would have linked up. Maybe they could in the future, or for Quentin Tarantino’s tenth/final film?
Anyways, Cage’s first major TV role in “Spider-Noir” sees the actor back in the world of Marvel Comics after “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” and his two “Ghost Rider” films at Sony Pictures.
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