Nicolas Cage

Thanks, David.

Thanks for having me back.

I enjoyed our last conversation seven years ago in Nevada.

I felt like I did it on Bad Lieutenant with Werner Herzog.

And Werner was an influence on that particular speech because I remember he said, if you don't have the money to make the movie, you have to steal the camera and you have to steal the film and make the movie.

Do it any way you can.

You've got to make the movie.

And I think it was saying something about passion, about the passion of

facing the odds to get to the truth of what it is you hope to express as an artist.

Sometimes you have to be willing to, within reason, allow your instrument, your psyche, your imagination to go to very uncomfortable and dark corners of your memory or of your thoughts

in a scene that is perhaps disturbing or dangerous in nature so that it doesn't feel phony.

I'm not saying go out and do something dangerous, but I'm saying sometimes you have to allow your psyche, if you will, to embrace that dark corner of your mind.

And I think that's partially what I was talking about in that speech about

As you reiterated, go up the devil's ass.

It's not always a fun process to go there, to go back in that dark corner of your mind or that memory or even look around you at current events in a newspaper to get to that place where you feel the emotion and you feel the grief or you feel the anger so that you don't feel like you're faking it.

Certainly.

I remember specifically on a little movie I made called Joe.

Joe, yeah.

And...

I was having trouble getting to that feeling of intense anger.