Top 279 Quotes & Sayings by Nicolas Cage - Page 4

Yeah, my real name is Coppola. I changed it because they'd think I was some nepotism-oriented kid.

I believe that everybody has the right to believe what they want to believe and to knock somebody's faith and religion is foolish, whatever it may be - Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism.

I needed to change my name just to liberate myself and find out I could do it without walking into a Hollywood casting office with the name Coppola.

I always say, if you think it’s over the top then tell me where the top is first. I don’t think anyone can. But if you can tell me where the top is then I’ll tell you whether or not I’m over it.

I think anything that opens my mind and triggers my imagination I'm reading. I like to read science fiction and imagine the character. Anything that keeps my imagination flowing.

I've been lucky to work with some of the most creative people and it's true that I enjoy filmmaking and I'm an enthusiast.

I think that movies can help guide us through those experiences [the problems that are happening in our daily lives, the stresses between countries, the economy and global warming]. I think all art tries to grapple with, redefine, come to terms with, express what's happening now when it's working. You can be entertained, but you can also be stimulated to think about things.

With my name in cement, I feel actualised. - On cementing his hand prints on Sunset Boulevard

I'm not really interested in playing famous people. I prefer to create characters. And I hope I have an exciting enough life that somebody might make a movie about that one day. I don't want to make movies about other people. I was once approached about playing Salvador Dali, which I thought would've been fun until I found out that he was proud of kicking a blind man across the street. So, I decided, I didn't want to play that guy. So, I think I'll just keep it the way it is.

Well, good science fiction is intelligent. It asks big questions that are on people's minds. It's not impossible. It has some sort of root in the abstract. So automatically you're getting closer to potentially divine sources of interest because it is abstract. It's one of the only ways that a film actor can express himself in the abstract and have audiences still go along for the ride. They don't contend it. They accept it, that they're going to go places that are a bit more of the imagination, a bit more out there, and that's more and more where I like to dance.

My direction as a person working in film has been to never get comfortable with anything I was doing. At the time that I decided to do action films, people were telling me, "Well, you can't do it. You're not that type. It's not going to work." And so obviously that made me think, "Well, that's not comfortable. Maybe I should try it. What can I do with it?" So I did that, and I'm glad I did it. I'll probably do it again, and I did other kinds of things that seemed like challenges for me, because I like being on the high wire.

One of the first signs of being depressed is that you lose interest in things. That's why I think it is important to stay passionate.

I like to work with young people, because young people haven’t had their dreams kicked out of them yet. Full of confidence, and imagination, and vision, and when they score that all gets empowered.

Feel like real time unfolding. It's going to smack of reality and feel as real as it can ... The buildings themselves aren't (shown) ... The movie's about what happened amongst this handful of men when the buildings came down.

My best takes are my first two takes.

I think that if you go about making movies to win Oscars, you’re really going about it the wrong way.

I think I've become more relaxed throughout my career. I don't feel the need to jump up and down and make a big noise to get people to pay attention to me. I don't need to do punk rock gestures or eat a cockroach or do something weird to say I exist.

I have a love/ hate relationship with the city of New Orleans, which is the strongest kind of relationship.

Tattoos to me are the outward symbol of the inward change within my soul.

Picasso said art is a lie that tells the truth. What if you just want to tell the truth and not lie about it?

If you have people that totally support you and have your back, I feel like you have all the confidence in the world, and you believe that you can do things that most people can't achieve. I feel that's really important.

I'm always going to judge somebody on their work ethic, and whether or not they made me feel something, or whether or not I felt they did a good job. To me, it's important to try to block anything personal out and look at the performance, in any field.

Remakes are always a challenge and they always are sitting ducks.

It's always exciting when you can go into a mode where you can be both spontaneous and choreographed. Sort of in control and out of control at the same time.

There are over 550 million firearms in worldwide circulation. That's one firearm for every twelve people on the planet. The only question is, how do we arm the other 11?

I will promise you that if I can give you two good scenes -- which is what I always try to do in every movie -- then I feel like I'm doing my job.

I love it all. I don't want to go through my career with one hand tied behind my back. I love making kids happy. I love the midnight audience. I like intense dramas. And I like high-adrenaline action films.

I generally enjoy the rehearsal process because that's where you can share your ideas, get your thoughts and feelings out and see whether or not they're going to land, whether or not people are going to agree with them, particularly the director. So you can sort out in that process any elements that need to be sorted out before you're on the set, and of course that saves time and it also makes everyone more comfortable working together.

It's kind of a unique concept, but it's totally real, isn't it? ... I mean, these paramedics put themselves in incredibly stressful situations, are killing themselves to save our lives and they're not really regarded or appreciated.

Without mentioning any names, I looked at pretty much every story that may come to your mind about a politician on the rise who was stopped short or dragged down by personal flaws and then became just a media storm. I see this as a thing that continues to happen in America and I wanted to say something about that.

Well, Amber [Heard] is still raising her eyebrow at me because I said that I've been 180 miles per hour on the 405 freeway on a motorcycle and she doesn't believe me but it's a true story. I did it coming home from work at 3 in the morning on another movie I made about cars called Gone in 60 Seconds. I bought a Yamaha-1 and I was doing 180 miles per hour home on the 405 and that's really, really crazy but I did it.

Peter Fonda is the reason I became a motorcyclist. I saw Easy Rider and I bought a motorcycle the next day, and I rode it all the way from LA to San Francisco.

I have a love-hate relationship with New Orleans, which is the strongest sort of relationship. I've had some extraordinary, beautiful, poetic experiences in this city and I've had some terrible experiences in this city. I'm drawn to New Orleans, in many ways feel I grew up in New Orleans, even though I'm from the West.

I didn't play the Ghost Rider in the first movie. That was a stuntman. In this film, the Ghost Rider feels much more alive because I did put some thought into how he should walk and into how he should move. I was so into the character, in fact, that I would paint my face with white and black makeup to look like a skull. And I put on blacked-out contact lenses, so I almost looked like an Afro-New Orleanian voodoo icon by the name of Baron Samedi. Oh man, I would walk around the set without saying a word to anybody, and I could see the fear in my co-stars' and co-directors' eyes.

One of the great bonuses of being a film actor is that I get to go to different places, meet inspiring people and learn different things. So all those details add up.

It's important to keep the eccentric spirit alive, because when that goes, the work will go.

I think on some level, all of us have a little bit of belief in the possibility of different energies and forces and things like that. Otherwise, we wouldn't be afraid of them. Or there wouldn't be so many movies about them.

With the advent of this kind of TMZ culture, it sadly seems to have infiltrated the vanguard of film commentary. I see these reviews sometimes where I think, well, you have a right to say whatever you want about my work, and I will listen whether it's good or bad and see if there's something that I might work with, but personal issues don't have a place in film commentary.

First of all the criteria that I have that goes into any career decision is whether or not I have the life experience, emotional resources to play the part truthfully or the imagination. Second, would be the director.

The only way the devil really exists in my opinion... is in interactions with people who don't walk the walk and talk the talk; people who act one way, or talk one way and then do another. Those are the deals with the devil. I don't see the devil as somebody who is a horned, goateed guy with a fork in his hand that's there to continuously stab me and send my soul to hell. I don't see it that way at all.

I see myself as a student. I would never call myself a master or a maestro. If you take the path of the student, that means you have to try a little bit of everything in hopes that you're going to learn something or strike some kind of new note, expression in the process. I'm not going for grades; I'm going for an education. I'm going to continue experimenting and trying new things to try to evolve and learn.

I do understand sometimes when actors say there's no one to talk to, or you can't react to, there's truth in that, but for me, I've always enjoyed green screen, and blue screen.

Nobody can make a movie as exciting as Jerry Bruckheimer. When it's a Jerry Bruckheimer movie that it's going to have lots of chrome and gloss, it's going to be sexy, and it's going to be big and fun.

If you get a chance, whenever you're traveling, do go to the local boutique comic book shop and don't buy your comics online 'cause those guys are going to go extinct, in a minute here, and we want to be able to have those experiences with our kids.

I was thinking about being more global in my work, which means trying more foreign countries and working with foreign filmmakers, hoping they would give me a new take on my work, a new point of view, reinvent me in some way.

Halloween has always been fascinating to me from a very young age. I think any actor would be fascinated by Halloween because it's one of the only holidays that advocates dressing up in makeup and costumes and transforming oneself.

I think that the best characters are the ones who both manage to be attractive and repulsive at the same time.

I would like to hook up with one of the great Japanese filmmakers, like the master that made Ringu, and I would like to take 'The Wicker Man' to Japan, except this time he's a ghost.

Actors work with their look. I come from the Lon Chaney Sr. school of acting. I'll wear wigs, I'll wear nose pieces, I'll wear green contact lenses in my eyes. I'll do whatever I need to do to create a character.

With every action oriented or adventure film, there's going to be a moment when every actor becomes a stuntman and every stuntman becomes an actor. You try to do as much of it as you can, but inevitably the studio wants you to finish the movie. So you've got to slow down and you're really got to defer to your team to make sure you do.

I wasn't any good at romnace. I was a total nerd. My thing is, I was just too romantic. I was the romantic goofball. I wasn't cynical enough or harsh enough. I cared too much, so I always made a fool out of myself.

That was one of the reasons why I wanted to tell the story of Colin Price. I saw someone in this fictionalized political character that was trying to do something important for his city. He meant well, but then you see that the human flaws had really derailed his past. It seems to be happening more and more in our country. I wanted to hold a mirror up to that.

I never say never, but I haven't been given the quality of script to compel me to go on television.

Helen Mirren is someone that I have really admired ever since I saw her in Excalibur. That was the first thing I said to her. "I loved you as Morgan Le Fay."

The most meaningful movies I can make are the ones where parents can share them with their children and children can look forward to sharing them with their parents, a ritual if you will, where they get to spend time together and the kids are smiling.

My father always used to say to me, it doesn’t matter what the profession is, but if they’re the best in their field, it will always be fascinating to watch.

I try to keep my characters raising more questions than giving answers. I don't want to leave too much on the table. I want you to have your connection and your secret understanding of the character.

I'm always fearful of something happening to people I love. That doesn't go away.

I would say that I'm 98 percent skeptical, but the other 2 percent [is] open for the possibility of things.

When you have 400 people watching you making a movie, it doesn't go where you want it to go. It's a lot of pressure.