Nicolas Cage says top directors like Christopher Nolan and Paul Thomas Anderson have stopped calling him. This comes as the actor is making a comeback with upcoming projects, Spider Noir, Longlegs, and Madden.
Nicolas Cage talks about Christopher Nolan and Paul Thomas Anderson
In a recent New York Times interview, the veteran actor called out Christopher Nolan, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Woody Allen by name — directors who, he says, stopped reaching out after he passed on their projects.
He turned down Nolan’s 2002 movie Insomnia and has not received a call from the director since. A potential project with Paul Thomas Anderson also fell through early on. “He’d shown me a short film with Philip Baker Hall — and we were going to do something and it didn’t work out,” Cage recalled.
Rather than brush it off, Cage framed it as a recurring industry reality. “Most of them, they get their feelings hurt and don’t call you back. It’s happened a million times to me. It’s happened with Christopher Nolan, it’s happened with Woody Allen, it’s happened with Paul Thomas Anderson. They don’t call me back.”
Against that reality, David O. Russell stood out. After Cage turned down one of his earlier projects, Russell still came back. “David O. Russell offered me a movie a million years ago. It was a good movie, and he offered it, and I said no, and he’s the only director that I ever said no to who actually came back and offered me another movie.”
Now, Nicolas Cage stars in Russell’s Madden, a biopic tracing the life of NFL icon John Madden and his unexpected role in building the Madden NFL video game franchise. The film opens on November 26 and also features Christian Bale, John Mulaney, Kathryn Hahn, Sienna Miller, Shane Gillis, and Joel Murray.
Originally reported by Devanshi Basu on ComingSoon.net.
