Nicolas Cage’s wildest film yet – cult director Sion Sono on Sundance debutant Prisoners of the Ghostland: ‘We made it as an action movie’
- In Prisoners of the Ghostland, Cage plays Hero, a bank robber on a Max Max-style mission with bombs strapped to his testicles in case he makes a wrong move
- The actor has called it the wildest film he has made, and Sono says if it is wilder than Wild at Heart, a Cage film he loves, then he is ‘really honoured’
In Prisoners of the Ghostland, the combination of renegade Japanese director Sion Sono, 59, and the ever-adventurous Nicolas Cage, 57, is a marriage made perhaps not in heaven – but in hell.
It’s a kind of hell that Cage’s bank robber character, Hero, has found himself in – and his only means of escape from a post-apocalyptic jail, in an Old-West-style Japanese location called Samurai Town, is to rescue the Governor’s granddaughter, Bernice (Sofia Boutella), from the Ghostland. He turns into a kind of Mad Max adventure.
“When I first read the script, it was clear that the Prisoners of the Ghostland story was influenced by Mad Max,” Sono says of the screenplay by Aaron Hendry and Reza Sixo Safai in an interview with the Post. “So I spent time thinking about how to get away from Mad Max.”
Indeed, Cage’s leather-clad character has some typical Cage moments – “some beautiful nonsense”, as Indiewire describes it. At one point geishas gawk at the surprisingly buff actor and he even wears a sumo wrestler’s loin cloth. There are some hilarious lines of dialogue, particularly when Hero is restricted by small bombs, most notably on his testicles, that will explode if he does the wrong thing. Cage has said it’s the wildest film he’s made.
