Nicolas Cage

I do enjoy animated movies.

I care about the connection with the audience. Film is such a powerful medium. Movies can change the way people think.

I like fantasy. I like horror, science fiction because I can get avant-garde with those performances in those movies.

I'm the first to admit that I like going to, or my memories at least of going to Clint Eastwood movies or Charles Bronson or James Bond.

I don't want to just do independent movies and I don't want to just do adventure films. I enjoy both, and I think both are cogent.

I have eclectic tastes in the movies I want to do.

I'm an enormous admirer of Christopher Lee. He's somebody, along with Vincent Price, who I celebrate, and I wanted my movies to show that celebration and that honoring of these great film stars that were unafraid to go into horror and Grand Guignol and the macabre.

I do like to move and get physical in my movies.

I want to make all kinds of movies. I do want to make big movies that are a lot of fun to go to, but I also want to make movies that are going to stimulate some thought and maybe raise some awareness.

And what I like about it is it makes me happy and I think it makes a lot of people happy to go to the movies and to not think about the problems of the day or the problems of tomorrow or the yesterday and just go on for the ride and have the fun of losing oneself in a fantasy.

I was always shocked when I went to the doctor's office and they did my X-ray and didn't find that I had eight more ribs than I should have or that my blood was the color green.

If I could have been a marine biologist I would have, but I didn't have that kind of intelligence. Numbers were never my strong point.

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.

I hit the ground running, without a lot of training, so I had to do whatever I could do to survive as a professional, and if that meant being that character 24/7 and acting out, I was going to do that. I lived those characters, I brought them home with me.

It's a family that's loaded with grudges and passion. We come from a long line of robbers and highwaymen in Italy, you know. Killers, even.

How do you rebel in a family of rebels?

It's amazing marrying someone who wants nothing to do with Hollywood.

I may be alone in this, but I do sense the power of film, in that movies have the ability to literally change people's minds. That's pretty powerful stuff when you consider that.

I think I jump around more when I'm alone.

At a young age, I was interested in comic books, which was really how I learnt to read. The name Cage came from a comic book character called Power Man.