Stormy Weather Man
For all his success alternating between starring roles in action extravaganzas like National Treasure and The Rock and quirky character turns in dramas like Adaptation and Leaving Las Vegas, there’s one kind of movie genre that you may be surprised that Nicolas Cage has been itching to take on.
“I’ve really wanted to make a family drama,” revealed the actor, who recently became a father again to the newborn (and heroically named) Kal-El with his third wife Alice, and is dad to 15-year-old Weston from former girlfriend Kristina Fulton. “That’s a genre that I think does the most good for people, because we can relate. We can go get a beer and maybe grow in some way, or learn something, but it’s also the hardest kind of movie to make because it can lapse into saccharine. It can really be kind of Hallmark card or episodic TV shows. I don’t want that at all.”
The Academy Award-winning actor got his wish when he found The Weather Man, an alternately funny and poignant, observant and existential study of callow Chicago weather forecaster–not a meteorologist, it’s important to distinguish. Cage plays Dave Spritz, who despite his seeming success in local television, sees himself paling in comparison to his revered and acclaimed author father (Michael Caine), alienated from his soon-to-be-ex-wife (Hope Davis), and unable to bond with his disconnected son and daughter. He even lacks a bond with his loyal viewers, some of whom often feel compelled to randomly and inexplicable fling fast food at him when they spot him on the street.
The sorry state of his life plunges him into a desperate, soul-searching bid to reconnect and rebuild the ruins of his relationships, with hardly a greeting card cliché or sappy sit-com sentiment in sight. “With my goal being the family drama and also my artistic aspirations of doing things which are a bit edgy, I found a really happy marriage in The Weather Man, because [director] Gore [Verbinski] went outside of the box and did something personal and artistic, but at the same time it hits all the right notes. It’s sort of kids going through a divorce or husband and wife and what they’re doing in a way that’s not Pollyanna or saccharine or b.s.”
Partly Cloudy
Although Spritz’s entire life seems to revolve around his relationships–or lack thereof–with his immediate family, they do very little to help him make the kind of emotional connections he’s so desperate to establish.
“These characters are plotting against Dave Spritz as he makes his journey,” said Verbinski. “I think that he naively thinks that if one thing had changed, his life would be different–if he would have remembered that one thing. He is a shallow character who you want to smack and who you want to give a hug to at the same time. He is a sound-byte. He has to sum up something very complicated, which is the weather, and package it and distill it down and present it. And that process, I think, has contributed to the fact that he is trying to distill down his life, and predict it, and control it. He’s trying to double down and roll the dice one more time and put it all together, and he’s not seeing the bigger picture and complexities.”
Cage admits that he’s felt as stymied and frustrated as Dave at various points in his own life, under very similar circumstances, and that he specifically used this moviemaking experience to help him deal constructively with his baggage. “At the time that I agreed to do The Weather Man I was going through a divorce and I was trying to figure out how I could take the negative and turn it into a positive,” said the actor. “I had received the script for The Weather Man and I thought, ‘Oh, well, he’s a parallel.’ Sometimes I do movies that can help me, like therapy, help me do something positive with a negative emotion. This film was an opportunity to just take all this well of feeling that I had and funnel it into this script. Dave and I have all these similar experiences, and so it became an overlay with my life and Dave Spritz’s life. ”
Scattered Showers
Verbinski said that once he and Cage sat down to discuss the project–they’d been hoping to work together for some time–it became obvious that the actor had a special connection to Spritz that couldn’t be underestimated. “He said, ‘I am this guy. I don’t have to act this time,’” said the director. “He’s been through marriages. He goes out and people harass him publicly. He’s got father issues and he’s struggling, like all of us, against mediocrity in our lives. So there was really no one else to play the part. I think that he just has a lot of personal experiences to draw upon to bring to this performance. He gets stalked by people in cars who go, ‘Hey! My girlfriend thinks that you’re cute. I think that you’re an asshole.’ So he has to deal with that.”
At least Cage hasn’t had to experience the random fast-food-flinging–thus far. “I wish that I could say all the time, but I’ve never had anything thrown at me,” admitted Cage. “At least not from someone that I’ve never met before. Yes, there have been times when in the past girls have thrown things–like glasses–at me.” But he did feel a definite connection to the character, especially in the way that he is recognized and reacted to by complete and total strangers nearly everywhere he goes.
“I don’t relate in that I have bad relations with people on the street,” said Cage, saying that while his experiences don’t exactly echo ones like the scene in the film in which Spritz has a fan-provoked meltdown at the DMV, he recognizes the connection. “I try to make an effort to meet people well. I know that if it weren’t for my fans I wouldn’t be here, and so they are very important to me. And I know what it’s like to meet someone that you admire and have them be complete jerks, and then I don’t know if I can enjoy their work anymore. So I always want to meet people well and give a picture and sign every autograph, and it’s a pleasure for me to do it.”
[PAGEBREAK]Warm Front
Actress Hope Davis, who plays Spritz’s increasingly distant and emotionally exasperated wife Noreen, can only toss compliments–rather than Frostys from Wendy’s–Cage’s way: she signed on to the project as much for the opportunity to work opposite the Oscar-winning actor as for the strength of the script.
“I just love his work,” Davis said. “He’s an actor’s actor. He’s really into it, extremely creative and fun to work with. You always learn something when you’re working with someone of that caliber. I’m always trying to get it right, and if I do something right, I’m trying to get it right again in the next take, and he’s much freer than I am. He’d just try something new in every take, and he’s extremely alive and in the moment, and he’s very free, and it was good for me to see somebody like that.”
Dave struggles to find common ground with his loved ones, attempting to bond with his daughter Shelly (Gemmenne de la Peña) when she expresses an interest in archery. Dave takes to the sport in unexpected ways, and Cage, too, learned that there was an archer inside of his just waiting to launch an arrow at the bull’s-eye.
“There aren’t too many things that I’ll come out and say that I’m a natural at, and there’s only thing that I knew I was,” said Cage. “When I started doing archery, it was the first time that I ever found something where I went, ‘Wow. Maybe I can really do this.’ The archery in that movie is all mine, and I’m happy to say that. There was one shot where Gore said, ‘Can you get the arrow a little closer to the camera?’ It’s the scene where I’m drawing down on my nemesis, and we had to get the arrow really close to the camera and the arrow went right through the matt box and Gore kept it. I was very, very happy about that.”
Indeed, archery becomes a means of expression for Dave, something he can’t help but be proud of when he masters it–so much so that he clings to it throughout the remainder of the film as a symbolic example of his ability to improve. “I hope that people will see this in the movie that we all want to be more,” said Verbinski. “We want to be better lovers, better parents, better at our jobs. And yet at some point we have to face the music and stop trying to be something and realize who we are. There’s just an impossible gap between Robert Spritzel and Dave Spritz. Robert is filet mignon and Dave is an Egg McMuffin. And there’s no way [Dave’s] ever going to get there. So what he can do, hopefully, is realize that he’s not going to get there and realize that his father isn’t expecting him to get there and come to terms with who he is.”
Cage found the high standard that Robert represented and the intrinsic differences between he and his son very akin to his own relationship with his dad. “My father had that aura about him,” said the actor. “He was a very highly regarded professor of literature, and that’s a lot to live up to. He has a PhD. I was not a good match for school. I wasn’t a good match for high school, and I went to my father and I said, ‘Dad, this isn’t me. I want to act. I want to work. This isn’t right for me and it’s affecting my self-esteem.’ And instead of pushing me, he said, ‘That’s fine. Just get the equivalency.’ So I studied and I got the GED and I got the diploma and I left. Then I went right to work. He was also frustrated with the educational system and allowed me to go pursue my other goals.”
High-Pressure System
The casting of the Robert Spritzel, a distinguished and dignified man of letters who stands in sharp relief to his forecasting son, required particular care. Verbinksi had to find an actor who could measure up to–and indeed, frequently dominate–an actor who commands the screen as much as Cage, even in his sad-sack mode. The director found the perfect counterpoint in Michael Caine, who–adopting a flat Midwestern accent and an distant demeanor–delivers one of his most memorable performances in the film.
“This script required an Atticus Finch or Gregory Peck kind of unbelievable character–something impossible to live up to, and to me that’s Michael Caine,” said Verbinski. “It’s rare that you get star struck when you meet a lot of actors, but Michael Caine is that way for me. You want to touch him to make sure that he’s really there…That character was written somewhat cold. Michael Caine can be cold, but he can never not be warm, and that was really important. He’s not in that many scenes, and yet you feel his presence and you feel that it’s unattainable to live up to.”
And far from being intimidated by the screen legend, Cage was eager to seize the chance to go toe-to-toe with Caine. “It’s always fascinating to work with the best in any field, and Michael Caine for me has always been one of the best in acting, so I was exhilarated. It was a wonderful opportunity to study him and look at his very seasoned approach to film acting. I was watching him and there were actually moments where I would think ‘Wow! Michael Caine just did that thing that I saw him teach about in his video.’”
Davis, too, was was something of a student of Caine’s on-camera performing methods beforehand as well. “I read his book on film acting before I ever stepped onto a movie set and poured over it, and tried to remember the most important tips, because his book is really about how do you work in front of a camera,” said the actress. “He is so sweet, and he introduces himself to every extra standing on the set, he tells the best jokes, and he’s so just funny and delightful. The day he left and drove off some people cried. Everybody was really sad when he finished. We missed him a lot when he was done.”
Sunny Forecast
In the end, the all-too-human elements of The Weather Man were what made the experience of making it worthwhile for Verbinski, who’s better known for helming high-profile, production-heavy projects like The Ring and Pirates of the Caribbean. “What’s nice about making this kind of movie is that you don’t have pirate ships or cannons or car chases,” said Verbinski, who was in Los Angeles on a break from filming two back-to-back Pirates sequels in the Bahamas. “You can actually spend time sitting right where we’re sitting now and read the pages and talk about the scene, and it really makes a difference if you can get the process out of the way and talk about acting and make it simple.”
As for Cage, he seems to have learned his own life lessons after taking Dave Spritz’s journey, trying to find a happy medium between living in ecstatic highs or depressing lows. “I want to be right in the middle,” he said. “I think that I can be better in all ways if I adopt that attitude–as an actor, as a father, as a husband. You can’t get anything done if you’re jumping up and down and so excited that you can’t see an accident about to happen. And if you’re down in the dumps you’re not going to be any good to anyone, either. I’m not saying that I have any control over my destiny–I don’t. But I would like to be able to just get better at surfing the cycles of life.”