thePULSEAn interview with Nicolas Cage on World Trade Center
By Robert Newton
Michael Peña (L) and Nicolas Cage (first from R) with their real-life counterparts Will Jimeno and John McLoughlin in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center. Photo courtesy of François Duhamel
“I think it happened because it was all coming together at a time when I was making a choice to take a stand,” explains actor Nicolas Cage on his involvement in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center. “I like to be open and reflective, but I don’t want to be wishy-washy. I was at a time in my life when I was choosing that I wanted to help others, almost in medicinal kind of way. And Oliver doesn’t like it when I say that, because no one wants to go see a movie with the word ‘medicine’ attached,” he says, lightly.
The film, released last summer, found its largest audience as a best-selling DVD when it hit the market last month. It features the 42-year-old Oscar winner as New York Port Authority police Sergeant John McLouglin who, with fellow officer Will Jimeno (Michael Peña) was trapped under the rubble of the World Trade Center on September 11…and lived to tell the tale.
“Literally, the answer to my prayers was this script by [first-time writer] Andrea Berloff,” soon-to-be Ghost Rider Cage explains. “Within 24 hours of reading it, I knew that this was it — it’s on, and I said yes, as simple as that.”
Stone, who has earned an unjust reputation over the last 20 years as a rabble-rouser and a wild spinner of conspiracy theories, struck a lot of people as not the guy to let make such an important film, especially only five years after the horrific event. Cage is not one of those people.
“It wasn’t twisting anything, it wasn’t trying to politicize anything — it was simply a true account of what happened on that day with John and Will and their families and the rescuers who came in and got them out. I said to myself, ‘Well, that is going to be very encouraging. That is going to be emotional and beautiful and moving, and I think that could be helpful.’”
The shoot was a rigorous one, physically and emotionally, requiring Cage and Peña to remain essentially motionless, covered in debris and dust and allowed to act only with their voices and faces.
“I like to move – I’m a very kinetic actor,” Cage says, “and here I am, boxed into this hole. In an odd way, I found it comforting – it was a challenge to convey emotion through stillness. The biggest thing I was concerned about was the levels of pain that these characters were going through and how to emote that. It builds, and builds, and builds, until the character can’t hold it in any more.”
Cage does not think of trying to elicit sympathy for just doing his job, though.
“It seems so small and so trite, compared to what John really went through. I’d never met anyone who’d been tested to that magnitude before.” McLoughlin, who was trapped beneath the debris field for 12 hours, required dozens of operations to be able to walk again.
“I asked John what he had to do to survive this,” says the Lord of War actor. “He said it was a lot of prayer and images of his wife and children –- but the saddest thing was the incredible guilt he felt, that he had let them down in some way, that he had blown it because of the oath he took to protect and serve. All those things running through his mind make it very emotional, very human.”
World Trade Center is available on DVD in a not-all-that barebones single-disc edition ($29.99 SRP) and in a two-disc Special Collector’s Edition ($34.99 SRP).
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