Shape-shifting Cage and Green unite on 'Joe'

Joe makes a fitting pairing of Cage and Green.

For the haunted, hard-living Texas ex-con of Joe, David Gordon Green was looking for a modern-day Robert Mitchum, someone with an old-fashioned kind of rugged masculinity with an underlying innocence. He thought of Nicolas Cage.

Green wrote Cage a letter, sending along the screenplay, not knowing if or when he’d hear back. Three days later, Cage called. He had read not just the script, but the novel. Twice. The next day he took a plane to Austin, Texas, to meet with Green.

“When I read Joe, I understood him,” Cage said. “I thought, ‘Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to have to act so much in this part. I don’t think I’m going to have to try experimenting with performance style. I think I can really just be and feel these lines and resonate with these lines from my memories.”

Joe makes a fitting pairing of Cage and Green. Both have made a habit of confounding moviegoers by shifting unpredictably between art house and popcorn fare, leaving some fans scratching their heads by pursuing such frightful things as action movies and comedy.

After his Oscar-winning performance in Leaving Las Vegas, Cage turned to blockbusters like The Rock and Con Air. More recently, he’s been increasingly theatrical in movies like The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. Cage says he was trying to be “break the mould of naturalistic film performance” with what he calls “Western kabuki.”

“When people say things like over-the-top, I say to them, ‘Well, you show me where the top is and I’ll tell you whether or not I’m over it,’” says Cage. “I don’t think anyone can answer where the top is.”

In Green, Cage found a director who also can stretch from intimate to broad. Green’s naturalistic acclaimed debut George Washington endeared him to the indie faithful, an association he later upended with a string of studio comedies: Pineapple Express, Your Highness and The Sitter.

“One of the things that’s difficult about being a movie star, or a director for that matter, is that it’s hard to be a character actor,” says Green. “It’s hard to not brand yourself because your name is at a pretty powerful point in the presentation of a film. So sometimes it can be difficult to disappear and challenge people’s perceptions.”

A return to form

Larry Brown’s novel Joe, about a violent man trying to stay out of trouble and help a teenage kid in need (played by Tye Sheridan), had long had a pull on Green. His first filmmaking experience was working as a production assistant on a documentary about Brown, who, Green says, “wrote about characters I could touch, in worlds that I could recognise.”

After Green moved to Austin, he was exploring the ramshackle towns outside the city, where he also set his last film, the road workmen drama Prince Avalanche. Green, who was raised in Texas, shifted the Mississippi story there to make it a contemporary Western, one about a man with his own moral code and little patience for the law.

“If you just would swap out his GMC (truck) for a black horse, you’d have this man searching for redemption, this samurai looking for the perfect death,” says Green.

Green, too, has chafed at the supposed rules. His first job in Los Angeles was working for a movie marketing firm that conducted test screenings for films like American Pie and Ed TV. He watched the idiosyncrasies of movies get stripped away, and resolved to make films that embraced their quirks and rough edges.

“Sometimes I just think: Let me go make something that nobody is making,” says Green.

Joe became something personal for Cage, too. Though he declines to go into detail about the memories he drew from for the part, Cage had a notable run-in with some of the film’s subjects — alcoholism, domestic violence — in 2011, when he was arrested in New Orleans for suspicion of domestic abuse battery, disturbing the peace and public intoxication. Charges were later dropped.

Joe has been labelled a return-to-form for Cage and Green, though neither accepts a default “form.”

“If anything, I think Joe might remind them,” says Cage of his critics. “I’m the same actor in Joe as the actor in Spirit of Vengeance.”