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November 2009 

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Interview: Nicolas Cage & Werner Herzog
This is not a remake

Yes, it has Bad Lieutenant in the title. Yes, it’s about a corrupt cop who’s also an addict. But Nicholas Cage’s new flick has nothing to do with that old Harvey Keitel movie. And if you think it does, director Werner Herzog wants to have a word with you


By Marni Weisz

Take a disturbing script based on the last film anyone would think to remake, put it in the hands of an eccentric and experimental director, and it’s no surprise that Nicolas Cage was interested. As soon as the actor, a bit of an eccentric himself, found out that Werner Herzog wanted him for a remake of Bad Lieutenant — the sinister 1992 flick starring Harvey Keitel as a corrupt, drug-addicted police investigator trying to solve a violent crime — he was hooked.

 

“I immediately thought this is crazy, and therefore wonderful, and I wanted to do this because it seemed so audacious,” Cage says during an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival. “Then I got the script and I read it and started thinking about what I could do with the character and how different it would be from the first movie, which I’m a fan of.”

 

Too bad Herzog had absolutely no intention of remaking Bad Lieutenant.

 

And despite the fact that he’s delivered a picture titled Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans — about a corrupt, drug-addicted police investigator trying to solve a violent crime — the outspoken German director still insists it has nothing to do with the 1992 film. It is neither a remake, nor a re-imagining, nor even an homage.

 

“Even the most uninformed or stupid realize that both films have nothing to do with each other,” Herzog, also in Toronto for the festival, says through his robust German accent. “Put this illegitimate question to rest.”

 

The only reason for the recycled name, according to the director, is that one of the film’s producers owns the rights to the title Bad Lieutenant.

 

“From day one I said this is a mistake, it will backfire, it is wrong,” says Herzog, who’s had enough success working outside the Hollywood system on films like Rescue Dawn, Grizzly Man and Little Dieter Needs to Fly that he doesn’t have to censor himself to please anyone. Yet his complaints are delivered with a warm smile and wave of the hands that makes him seem more whimsical than crusty.

 

“I tried to persuade everyone to accept a different title, Port of Call New Orleans,” continues Herzog. “What we have now is a strange hybrid. I never could prevail. However, I can live with it easily. Those are things I can accept because the more important thing is what do you see on the screen, and I think we have a very fine film with a great performance and a great location and a wonderful story.”

 

It’s true, aside from the name and the premise about a corrupt, drug-addicted police investigator trying to solve a violent crime, the two films have little in common. Keitel’s lieutenant lives in New York and is trying to solve the case of a raped nun. Cage’s lieutenant lives in New Orleans, post-Hurricane Katrina, and is trying to solve the murders of an entire Senegalese family.

 

As the movie opens, New Orleans is still submerged. Lieutenant Terence McDonagh (Cage) and his partner, Stevie Pruit (Val Kilmer), discover one prisoner left behind in a holding cell that’s quickly filling with black, snake-infested water. In fact, reptiles of all sorts — alligators, lizards, iguanas — punctuate the film, a stylistic flourish Herzog added to the screenplay by TV writer William M. Finkelstein (NYPD Blue, Law & Order). “I love to give important parts to animals once in a while,” says the director, “and it should stick out in style, it should be like a demented fever dream of someone on the drugs.”

 

After the two cops spend some time betting on how long it’ll take for the prisoner to drown, McDonagh has a change of heart and jumps from an upper level into the cell to save the man, injuring his back in the leap. He hobbles through the rest of the film, stealing drugs to soothe the pain at every opportunity. But McDonagh has a soft side too, which manifests in valiant efforts to protect his prostitute girlfriend (Eva Mendes) and an honest desire to catch the killers.

 

Originally, the script was set in Detroit, but Cage asked Herzog to move it to New Orleans, a place that means a lot to the actor since he directed his first film, Sonny, there. And although much of the movie doesn’t need to take place in New Orleans (there’s no bayou, no one speaking Creole), Cage says the city informed his performance in profound ways.

 

“New Orleans, as you know, is the birth place of jazz,” he says. “My understanding of jazz is that you perform the lines so well that you can then go off page and improvise and that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to really go for it and open myself up to that spirit along with Eva and with Werner, so a lot of what you see in the movie is very spontaneous and captured very quickly.”

 

Many of the film’s most captivating moments were, indeed, created by either Cage or Herzog on the fly. Like the terrifying scene in which Lieutenant McDonagh shows up at a nursing home to threaten a witness’s grandmother. As he swings open the door, he’s absentmindedly running an electric razor across his face.  

 

“I wanted to do that, it wasn’t in the script,” says Cage. “It was something I thought would add a level of something sinister, but at the same time he was a professional and he was up all night and I thought, ‘Well, when would he have time to shave?’ I thought this would be the perfect time to shave because he still had to report for duty at his office.”

 

Cage has been criticized for bringing an over-the-top quality to most of his roles — sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Here, much like with his Oscar-winning performance in Leaving Las Vegas, it’s an effective match. “I’m interested in characters who let me express my surrealistic or abstract fantasies,” says Cage, “and the best way to make that kind of music is to play characters that are either crazy or high.”

 

Lieutenant McDonagh is both, and if the film does well, Cage may get to play him again. “That’s the idea,” says Herzog. “And maybe if they delete ‘Bad Lieutenant,’ and they have Port of Call: Detroit, Port of Call: Boston, Port of Call: San Francisco. Fine, yes, go for it. But do not try to hang onto a film that was made in the early ’90s and has nothing to do with it.”


Marni Weisz is the editor of Famous.

 

Going Rogue

Wanna learn how to make movies the Werner Herzog way? The eccentric German director (pictured left) has set up the Rogue Film School, a project he calls “totally wild” during a chat at the Toronto International Film Festival.

 

“It will be like a travelling circus,” he says. “Once in a while I will rent a conference room in a hotel and run a weekend seminar.... The first one will be early in January in Los Angeles, the next one might be in Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, the next one might be in New Jersey or Toronto, or Florida, I don’t know yet.”

 

First Herzog will have to pour through all the applications and short film submissions sent in by wannabe Herzogs from around the world.

And potential students should be forewarned. On the website’s homepage (roguefilmschool.com) Herzog counsels, “The Rogue Film School is not for the faint-hearted; it is for those who have travelled on foot, who have worked as bouncers in sex clubs or as wardens in a lunatic asylum, for those who are willing to learn about lockpicking or forging shooting permits in countries not favoring their projects. In short: for those who have a sense of poetry. For those who are pilgrims. For those who can tell a story to four-year-old children and hold their attention. For those who have a fire burning within. For those who have a dream.” 

 

—Marni Weisz

 


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