In 1983's Valley Girl, Nicolas Cage plays Randy, a hopeless romantic who sets out to win a girl's heart. Imagine, if you will, Randy, hair coiffed and wearing a leather tie, bouncing around the Hollywood hills on a quest for love.



Now, drift into the hills for about four hours. The temperature will drop, and it'll begin to get dark. You're in the Shadow Mountains, nestling up against the Mojave desert.

It's still 1983, mind you, but something has gone wrong here — and this is where Panos Cosmatos's film Mandy takes place. Nicolas Cage resides here too, only now he's playing a grizzled, exhausted but exceedingly kind logger named Red, who undergoes a terrible transformation after his wife, Mandy, is murdered by a nightmarish cult in the Shadow Mountains.

Mandy — played by Andrea Riseborough — lives a peaceful live until cult leader Jeremiah becomes obsessed with her. ( Supplied: Monster Fest )

The world of Red is just four hours' drive and yet a universe away from Randy's home in sunny, carefree Hollywood. But they're both Nic.

"Well, I hadn't really thought about it in those terms," Cage admits when I raise this idea.

"But it is a very interesting observation, thinking about it, because Red and Randy are diametrically opposed characters … Nothing about the two of them would even appear to be the same … actor, really.

"And it was literally lifetimes ago for me, back when I played Randy, and Red is operating in the more … fantastical realm of possibilities of 1983 that come from the inner worlds of Panos Cosmatos."

Cage's latest cinematic outing is, in a word, intense. It's an exceedingly violent revenge tale told from the perspective of characters on an array of staggering hallucinogens, and contains more gore than anything in recent memory. There's even a chainsaw duel in a quarry.

Watching Mandy is like living through a bad trip, a fever dream.

Cage asks me if I liked it — but further, he asks if it seeped into me, got into my bloodstream like it did for him. I tell him it got into my lungs, that I practically had to chew my way out. He laughs appreciatively.



Cage has had a career so varied, so diverse, so ostensibly erratic (yet deliberately so) that as a performer he seems almost elemental.

Holly Hunter and Nicolas Cage in the Coen Brothers' 1987 film Raising Arizona. ( Supplied: IMDb )

Starting with Valley Girl, he went on to work with his uncle Francis Ford Coppola (Cage changed his name to skirt any claims of nepotism) on Rumble Fish. He then worked with Lynch on Wild at Heart, the Coen brothers on Raising Arizona, Spike Jonze on Adaptation. Across the years, add Leaving Las Vegas, The Rock, Con Air, Face/Off, National Treasure.



He's made some of the most bonkers yet iconic films of the last few decades. His characters are extraordinarily complex, and they tend to stray into darkness.

In Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Cage plays a bent cop addicted to vicodin and coke, but still trying to do his job somehow.

In Scorsese's Bringing Out The Dead, he plays a burned out hospital paramedic who takes drugs on duty and crashes his ambulance while drunk.

Nicolas Cage and Lucius Baston in Werner Herzog's 2009 film Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. ( Supplied: IMDb )

Cage's characters want to do the right thing, or some iteration of it, but often get dirty doing so. They're muddy.

Red is perhaps his muddiest (and bloodiest); he has a lot of blood on his hands by the end of Mandy. Does dipping into the muck of these violent, erratic people rub off?



"Well, I have the weekends to enjoy some red wine to shut my head off."

"I find movies I can watch so that I can decompress for a minute, then I'm … well, back to work again on Monday."



I ask him if he thinks that Red, specifically, has any heroism in him, any redeeming qualities.

"I do, actually. I think that after he drinks the skull juice" — you'll have to watch Mandy for the specifics on this — "he becomes a monolith of sorts, almost like a golem … I mean the ancient Jewish golem, a statue that came to life to wreak havoc based on a sorcerer's will. And in this case, I would say the sorceress is Mandy, guiding Red through this fantastical 1983 landscape, hunting down demon bikers to get justice."

Cinematographer Benjamin Loeb says although the film was shot digitally, the gritty filmic look was achieved by using filters and lenses favoured by cinematographers in the 1980s. ( Supplied: Monster Fest )

This might be the most Nicolas Cage thing I've ever heard Nicolas Cage say.

He chuckles and continues: "I do, though, I find him heroic. Anti-heroic on some level, yeah, but heroic."

That's a neat way of summing up most of Cage's most iconic roles through the years: good men pushed past their breaking point, discovering what they're capable of. Golems, roused towards a pursuit of justice.

"Panos had me watch Conan, the R-rated fantasy, and Red is, I guess, a barbarian of sorts, but his strength comes from his heart. Uh … his loss.



"You know, if you scratch the surface of any man, if you do it long enough, you're going to reach the inner caveman."

"And I like that [Red] doesn't look like a Marvel superhero, he's … an everyman. He's you or I. And there's something cathartic about seeing someone like me and you achieve these things."

Cage pauses for a moment before continuing. "Yes. I find that very empowering. There's a kind of heroic quality to rising above your physical nature through sheer willpower and heart. Maybe that's what I do."

Maybe that's why Cage continues to be such a fascinating performer to watch, if at times confronting. When he bursts onto screen, he's an everyman driven to breaking point. He's an anti-hero. He has an internal fire that you rarely see in Hollywood.

He's a statue that came to life to wreak havoc.

Mandy will screen for at selected cinemas nation-wide for one night only, September 21, as part of Monster Fest.

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