When you’re debating the career of Nicolas Cage, one thing fans can seem to agree upon now is the actor is currently undergoing a career renaissance with his newer films. Made with an odd meta self-awareness, these films feel less like a single auteur’s vision more like a partnership onscreen between the eccentric larger than life actor and a director who is tasked with harnessing Nicolas Cage while he channels their script on screen. One such film in this new cannon is Between Worlds, which world premiered at Fantastic Fest and is the second film from director Maria Pulera. To say that she challenged Cage with one of the strangest roles you may see him in all year is no small feat by any stretch of the imagination.
Between Worlds stars Nic Cage as Joe, a lonely trucker whose new girlfriend’s daughter is possessed with the spirit of Joe’s recently deceased wife. If you’re thinking this couldn’t get any weirder, it does, because his new girlfriend, played by Franka Potente, has the ability when on the brink of death to travel the spirit realm and shepherd souls back to the living; and she has mixed up the souls of her daughter and Joe’s wife. I got a few moments at Fantastic Fest to speak with Maria Pulera about the film, its script, and what’s it’s like working with Nic Cage. I wasn’t disappointed to hear not only how much of a fan she was of the actor, but how he influenced his character and how that changed the film we saw on screen, just by being Nicolas Cage.
First off I have to ask, what inspired the script?
I grew up in Wisconsin in the trucking culture and I wanted to make a film that was a thriller that gave a single mother, who was also a trucker, some unique characteristics and created kind of a strange family situation where we can use the thriller genre to mix it up a bit.
The fact that they were truckers was such an interesting choice.
Yeah, I love trucking culture, I’m fascinated, I got to drive a big rig, I love hanging out at truck stops. I love it.
So when did Nicolas Cage get attached to the project?
Obviously, I wanted Nicolas Cage from the beginning. We approached him when I was writing, because I was writing the script with him in my mind. I am a huge fan of old-school Nicolas Cage, back in the early ‘90s; Wild at Heart is one of my favorite movies. So when we approached him, I met with him and presented to him my idea for the film and he was definitely into the movie. Then once he was involved we shot with him for two or three months, when he had availability, we shot straight away.
Cage has become known for these eccentric character flourishes; how much of his performance was on the page and how much did he bring to the role?
You know he brought his magic to the role. Many of these things were. When we first got to set I had two days with the main actors for working with them, and I don’t do table reads or anything like that. I don’t even like working with the script. I like to go with a feeling, and when he was doing the improvisation, oh my gosh, he blew me away! The stuff he could come up with was phenomenal! You know immediately I was like wow, this is just brilliant.
So yeah the script was a guideline to keep the story beats. Mr. Cage brought a lot of the character to life, with this strange beauty he brought, and a lot of these lines are all Nicolas Cage. “Does the Tin Man have a sheet metal cock?” I mean this is Nicolas Cage, you know.
On set we had some work being done to assemble the footage so I could kind of see what’s happening, and there was a point where the assembly team was taking out all of the beauty, all of the Nicolas Cage. I was like what the heck is this? I can’t even watch this? Then we brought Tim Silano, who by the way did several movies with Nicolas Cage for Paul Schrader, and Tim, he loves Nicolas Cage as much as I do. So we’re like we are really going to put the fire in this baby, and put it all back in there. Because that was the energy, the soul of Joe, and it filled the movie.
The film has a surrealness to it, that thanks to Cage’s performance only compounds it. Was that something you always saw for the narrative?
Filmmaking has so many lives. First you have the life on the page, then you have the life when the actors come and when they are doing it, it takes it to a whole new plateau, and then in editing and music. So, in editing, Tim is a phenomenal editor and he took some of these moments and spun it so you’re basically wondering to yourself is Joe creating this reality, is it real, or is actually happening? So, we really liked playing with the uncertainty, making it into this kind of post modernistic journey into the abyss, you know. This was kind of the life and the dynamic of the movie.
I have to bring up Franka, who’s amazing in this film, but whose performance is a bit more grounded than Cage’s. How did she come to the project and was her approach intentional?
I loved Franka back from Run Lola Run, and Franka is a great actress; she’s also worked with our producer before David Hillary. I tried to keep Penelope and Franka grounded in their characters, because it wouldn’t have worked otherwise. I kept telling them to stay to character as it was written and this will work well, otherwise it will be just too chaotic; even though I do love chaos.
Yeah, they did it and it must have been extraordinarily difficult from time to time with Nicolas reading from the book of memories or taking himself out of frame. I was just wondering how they couldn’t just bust out, I’m sitting there and I have to turn away because it’s just too funny, it’s just fucking awesome, it’s brilliant. But they were great and didn’t break character at all during the entire shoot, which was an amazing feat.
Now how much did you discuss Franka’s gift and the more supernatural elements in the film, and did you lay down any ground rules for how it could and couldn’t be used?
We had talked quite a bit about it. That she comes to death, or very, very near death, for her to be able to use the power, which is kind of a strange. I know some people would say have her get close to overdosing on drugs, or something like this, but her character is not a drug person, she’s very straight. She’s a very responsible, hard working mother, who can’t be using any type of narcotics to bring her to that state, it;s got to be something that is much more self inflicted, but that she has control of, so this is what we came to.
She realized the power when she was a child, and I think a lot of the times people who have the sixth sense of whatever nature, it comes to them at some point in their teenage years, sometimes sooner. But they realize they need to keep it a secret, and here she is living her life in middle America as a truck driver struggling to keep her daughter straight and narrow, and she has this very powerful gift and she doesn’t use it very often. Sharing it with Joe is a very intimate thing, you know, and it;s accidental, but then she needs him for it, which is kind of a complication of her character.
We did have rules in place and spoke quite a bit about it.
So the film treads this really fine line of not getting too salacious with Joe’s relationship with Billie. How did you decide how far to push that dynamic, while still not going too far to have the film turn into a skinamax movie?
You know this is very interesting, because this was one of the most complicated things I had to deal with, because there is so much sex in this movie. I am looking at it going oh my gosh, there is so much sex in here. To me, it was the tone that I wanted. These scenes are uncomfortable, because they are awkward. That is the awkwardness and insanity of the movie. So we wanted the sexual scenes to have the same tone and feel to that, and I think we succeeded in doing so, but I also wanted to use kind of a primal feel to the sexuality as well. So combining that and this kind of insane, wacky tone, yes we got some very interesting things in there.
We always kept the shooting very “dirty” you know, we didn’t adhere to the traditional framing when it came to the sexual elements. To keep the same kind of strange, dirty, but not dirty in a sexual way, but more in the shooting dynamic, we used different mechanisms to keep it consistent with the tone, but not salacious in there, soft porn like you said; we wanted to make it very different from that. So I took some risks and I ultimately think that we succeeded in keeping the tone consistent.