Nicolas Cage

perhaps more than anything else, is what has enabled me to endure.

People that I gravitated towards, like James Dean, when he did Rebel Without a Cause, he was speaking to, I was 15 when I discovered it, I knew what that felt like.

And so I think as a person that enjoys being an audience member, I find these actors or personalities in cinema that have helped me find my own identity or understand what I was going through in my own life.

It happened, you know, with Bruce Lee.

It happened with Travolta and Saturday Night Fever.

And it gave me a feeling of like, oh, I can do this.

Sure.

Sure.

Well, what happened was... Yeah.

What's funny... Your co-star in Face Off.

Right, right.

What happened was, literally, I was going to Horace Mann Elementary School, and I used to go to the tropical aquarium store.

Even then, I was interested in fish.

And I had these two buckets of...

tropical fish in my hands, and I had the t-shirt with the, you know, just no sleeves, walking with the buckets.

And I thought I was Tony from Saturday Night Fever walking down the street.

And lo and behold, I'm at the stoplight waiting to cross near the school, and up glides John Travolta in a blue Adidas tracksuit and a gold

I think it was a 250SL Mercedes and he's looking at me and I'm looking at him like, oh my God, I'm you right now and you're over there with my buckets of not paint, but fish.

That happened and then kind of willed it into face-off.

I'm in your hands.