Dangerous obsession

Now you see him, now you don't. Nicolas Cage is an elusive sort of chap. He is happy enough to talk about his latest film, 8mm, and his career. But somehow, although his manners are impeccable, he is not really there. The interview over, he rises, says thank you for listening to him, walks away to the far side of the room and suddenly disappears. No small talk, no smiles or waves, and definitely no autographs or impromptu photographs. It is as if the projector has been switched off, leaving the screen suddenly blank. The performance, which has been faultless, is over and there is no more. Even his publicists, accustomed as they are to the vagaries

of Hollywood's finest, are struck by

his behaviour.

In the flesh, he is slighter than he looks on screen, although he is not, as are so many film actors, vertically challenged. On the other hand, his neat dark suit gives no hint of concealing beneath the blue mohair the rippling muscles he flaunts on screen.

His new film is about a private detective hired by a wealthy widow who has discovered among her husband's belongings a pornographic video. It shows a girl being raped and then killed by a masked man. She wants to know how it came into his possession and is the killing for real?

The detective, a married man with a new baby, is more accustomed to divorce suits and other mundane chores. He takes the job. It pays better than most of the work that comes his way, and he now has a family to support. But the more he finds out about the world of sado-masochistic sex and pornographic videos, the more obsessed he becomes about finding out whether the girl was really killed. In the end he becomes as dangerous a killer as the pornographers.

Cage says the role was a challenge. He had just done City of Angels, in which he plays a heavenly messenger, and wanted to do something more challenging. Then along came this script.

''I thought - there is something here for me,'' he says. ''He is a complicated character. It was the most unusual film I had come across in a long time. I have been making films for a little while now and I want to keep excited about working. That means I have to look in different places to find material that challenges me. I don't think I could handle a life of playing only comedy or action or drama. I need to do a little bit of everything.''

He says the characters that are most fascinating to play are the ones who raise more questions than they provide answers. This man is serious about his work. His wife has just had their first baby. He wants the world to be a safe place for his daughter. Then he gets shown into this other world and becomes obsessed with it.

''It is full of dangerous people interested in hurting each other, in doing terrible acts,'' Cage says. ''He reacts to what he finds. His marriage is not what it should be: it has run out of steam. There is a lack of chemistry. As he goes further into his case he becomes obsessed with the girl who has apparently been murdered. She is a waif-like figure, a runaway, while he is a pack animal who sees others as belonging to him. She becomes his own baby daughter as a teenager with the result he becomes increasingly angry, bewildered and frustrated that someone could kill such a girl. So he snaps and goes over the line. We cannot identify with him any longer. He has become a monster. He, too, is killing. That was what interested me - to take this guy to an audience and show them the frustration he feels.''

His appearance is designed to show how the man changes, he says. The formal suits he wears at the start are replaced by leather gear, not just so that he fits into the S&M milieu he has invaded, but because that is what he is becoming.

''What he finds awakens feelings in him he did not know were there,'' he says. ''The result is he will never be the same. He has lost himself for good. The experience has changed him. He becomes afraid for his family and he cannot go to the cops because he has no evidence. But the pornographers have threatened to kill them and to kill him. He completely loses control.''

Cage did not research the Los Angeles porno underworld. He says he did not need to for the role, and felt the less he knew the better. That way the director, Joel Schumacher, could have something happening on the set and he would react to it with genuine surprise. ''I thought it best I stayed out so that I could be an alien in that world,'' he says.

He does not consider 8mm to be about pornography. It is about a very special sexual sub-culture, about sado masochism and the baser acts people in that underworld do to one another, he says. As for porn, he sees it has having a place in the world. ''It is an $11m industry and there are a lot of lonely people out there for whom it provides a release,'' he says. ''Phone sex seems to me fairly benign. If anything, the film is more about freedoms: the freedom of speech and freedom from censorship. It is a tough, uncompromising movie and in Hollywood today movies like that are not welcome. Hollywood likes its films to

be formulaic.''

He is not interested in doing other things in film, like directing, but he does take an interest in the performances that surround him. ''I like to be involved a little bit in the casting, in the choice of the supporting players,'' he says. ''I like to be on top of that. One thing that takes me out of a movie more than any other is bad acting, even if it is only two lines.'' At 35, Cage, Francis Ford Coppola's nephew, is where he wants to be. He started off as Nicolas Coppola at the age of 17, changed his name for obvious reasons, appeared to some effect in the likes of Rumble Fish, Birdy and Moonstruck, which he followed with Vampire's Kiss and, in 1990, Wild At Heart. Hollywood somehow could not quite place him. He had gained a reputation for wildness, for being experimental, which frightened a lot of people there.

''They thought I was some kind of crazy guy, and I found I was not being offered anything to do that was mainstream,'' he says. ''I realised that after doing all those films I had run out of work.''

By 1994 he was reduced to playing second lead to David Caruso of NYPD Blue fame in the thriller, in Kiss of Death. Honeymoon In Vegas, which he made the same year, changed things. He had to audition for the role, but the film clicked, and suddenly a new door opened for him.

It was Leaving las Vegas, directed by Mike Figgis in 1995 - he plays a drunk who goes there to die and makes friends with a whore played by Elisabeth Shue - which ''put everything into focus''.

It established him as a Hollywood leading man and won him a best actor Oscar. The Rock, the Alcatraz escape drama, in which he co-starred with Sean Connery, showed he could do action, and his versatility was confirmed by the John Woo thriller Face/Off in which he and John Travolta swop identities and faces. His ideal film-maker is someone with a level of confidence in what he is doing, but who is not intrusive, does not try to fix something that is not broken.

If that happens, before you know it the creative flame has died, he says. The best manage to get the spark alive in their actors, give guidance where necessary, but allow them to exploit their range and relax on camera.

Figgis was one of the best directors he has worked with, he adds. ''He was totally in sync with me, and I was with him. That kind of connection does not happen very often and it is hard to describe. But Mike, Elisabeth and I hit a high on Leaving Las Vegas, probably because it was a four-week shoot which moved quickly. We just flowed.

''Now I feel like I am pretty happy. Hollywood has finally accepted I can do anything. I wanted to be what I am today, have a broad range, my pick of genres, and not be stuck in any kind of rut.''

l William Russell's reviews - Page 12

Top five gumshoes

In 8mm, Nicolas Cage plays a private investigator in the Philip Marlowe tradition, but with the latest technology at his disposal. Here are five private eyes who walked those mean streets before him . . .

1. Humphrey Bogart played Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade in the first true film noir, The Maltese Falcon (1941), and he starred as Raymond Chandler's superbly cynical Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep (1946).

2. Jack Nicholson starred as private eye Jake Gittes in Chinatown (1974) and The Two Jakes (1990), which he

also directed.

3. Robert Mitchum waited until he was in his late 50s to play Philip Marlow in two British-made remakes - Farewell My Lovely (1975) and The Big Sleep (1978)

4. Dick Powell, formerly a crooner in many a Busby Berkeley musical, turned to private investigation in Murder My Sweet (1944), aka Farewell My Lovely.

5. James Garner played Marlowe in the 1969 updating of the Chandler book The Little Sister.

The Cage File

Highlights

l Wild At Heart (1990): Cage gets to over-act his heart out as the Elvis soundalike in this violent and occasionally funny David Lynch road movie.

l Raising Arizona (1987): serial convenience store robber Cage and his ex-cop wife Holly Hunter decide to kidnap a quintuplet when they discover they can't have a baby of their own in this delightfully wacky Coen Brothers comedy.

l Honeymoon in Vegas (1992): daft but enjoyable farce in which Cage finally agrees to get married but loses fiancee Sarah Jessica Parker to mobster James Caan in a poker game.

l It Could Happen to You (1994): Cage is delightful as a James Stewart-like character who falls in love with

waitress Bridget Fonda over a lucky lottery ticket in this endearingly old-fashioned romantic comedy from Honeymoon in Vegas director Andrew Bergman.

l Leaving Las Vegas (1995): Cage won an Oscar for his restrained performance

as a suicidal alcoholic who

falls in love with hooker Elisabeth Shue during his valedictory binge.

Lowlights

l Kiss of Death (1995): luckily for his street cred, Cage had only a supporting role to play - as a heavy - in this turgid crime drama which was meant to make TV's David Caruso a feature-film star....

l Trapped In Paradise (1994): Cage stars as one of a pair of brothers who, immediately upon their release from prison, decide to rob a bank in this mega-disappointing comedy.

l The Rock (1996): Cage sounds too dopey to be convincing as the FBI biochemist in this ridiculous action thriller about a

madman threatening to blow up San Francisco from his Alcatraz hideout.

l Con Air (1997): Cage stars as a wrongly convicted good guy who is caught up in a mid-air riot led by dangerous prisoners in this mind-bogglingly ludicrous actioner which is set on a prison transport plane.