Nicolas Cage Watches Famous Scene From NATIONAL TREASURE and Calls It "Profoundly Ridiculous," Yet "Charming"
Nicolas Cage has played many memorable and quotable characters over the course of his career, and one of them is the adventurous historian, treasure hunter and cryptographer, Benjamin Franklin Gates, from the action adventure movie, National Treasure (2004). It has been almost twenty years since the film’s release, and Cage was able to watch a scene from the film for the first time in a recent Vanity Fair video interview. He had a funny response to the scene, in which his character says for the first time, “I’m gonna steal the Declaration of Independence.”
Cage watched, and said:
“How do you take something that is so profoundly ridiculous and really try to sell it? What I really like about that scene just seeing it again for the first time in however many years is I like the positivity of the character. He really believes this. He really reveres it. I think that’s charming.”
He went on to add:
“I can’t even say it without laughing. It has been meme’d so many times. It has been ‘SNL’d.’ But you can’t help but laugh! I think what makes it work is how serious Justin [Bartha] and I are taking it. If you play it for laughs, then it’s screwball comedy and it’s stupid and it’s not my thing. That’s not where I’m at. The fact that we’d played it as dramatic actors makes it even more funny than it might’ve been if it was slapstick. I think Jon Turteltaub shot it lovingly. He made the characters look like they had great reverence and regard [for it] … like a holy object. But to punch it with ‘I’m going to steal it’ is so ridiculous you just can’t help but love it. It’s nice to see that scene again.”
I’m glad that Cage had a good experience watching that scene. That movie is a lot of fun, and it’s cool that he got to enjoy it as a spectator. Cage seems to take his career pretty seriously a lot of the time, and I’m glad he got to feel a bit of the joy he brought to fans when he played that part.
via: Variety