Vampire's Kiss, (1988)
Nicolas Cage is Peter Loew
"In my own mind I was convinced that there could be a new expression in acting. I was weaned, oddly enough, on German expressionistic films like Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and I wanted to use that kind of acting. Which, shockingly enough, you allowed me to do; you allowed me to go there. I don't think any other director would have let his actor go there. I don't even know if I could do it now or again."That's Nicolas Cage speaking to director Robert Bierman on the commentary track of Vampire's Kiss. I wrote in my Raising Arizona post about how frustrated Cage was that he wasn't allowed the kind of freedom he wanted by the Coen brothers. Vampire's Kiss is an example of what happened when a young Nic Cage was given that kind of freedom.
Coming off his breakout turn in Moonstruck - a film Cage says he didn't actually like until years later when he was, in his words, "mature enough to understand it" - our man was feeling the pressure of success. After initially agreeing to star in Vampire's Kiss Cage was convinced by his agent to drop out, that a manic turn in a no-budget black comedy about a deulsional man who thinks he's turning into a vampire would be career suicide. Bierman then signed Judd Nelson only to have him pull out as well. Despite having been greenlit and budgeted it looked like Vampire's Kiss wasn't meant to be until Cage called again and asked to be taken back. He needed to "blow it out" after Moonstruck and make a "punk rock movie" and commit to a sort of Brechtian primal scream of a performance. Which is really just an elevated way of saying that Nicolas Cage needed a role in which he could go absolutely apeshit bonkers. If Cage was trying to change acting and challenge his critics no performance in his career has been more challenging than his turn as Peter Loew in this film. It is truly one of a kind.
The two most obvious films Vampire's Kiss resembles are George Romero's Martin and Mary Harron's American Psycho. Like American Psycho Vampire's Kiss concerns a yuppie with a taste for cruelty, power and degradation. Like Martin, its main character is convinced that he is turning into a vampire but the audience is left doubting that conviction. Both Harron and Romero's films are clever, effective thrillers but Vampire's Kiss exists on its own unclassifiable plane somewhere between comedy, horror and absurdist provocation.
Peter Loew is a high-level muckity-muck at a publishing firm whose job seems to mostly consist of laughing it up with the boys and ordering the firm's downtrodden female secretaries to find files for him. The most downtrodden of all is Alva (Maria Conchita Alonso), whom Peter berates with growing intensity throughout the film as he fixates on her inability to find the publishing rights to a book called Rattlesnake Hills. Peter yells at Alva, literally chases her around the office and even shows up at her house when she refuses to come into work. When he's not menacing women at work Peter goes clubbing or return to his apartment where his roommate, a possibly imaginary vampiress (Jennifer Beals), drinks his blood and forcibly fucks him.
If Peter Loew is supposed to have a character arc from your average yuppie playboy to a raving lunatic Cage makes extremely short work of it. Though his life has all the trappings of success - nice apartment, promising career, beautiful girlfriend (Kasi Lemmons, the future director of her own outre film, The Caveman's Valentine) - Peter never seems not completely out of his mind. Cage affects a weird, semi-British accent that comes and goes, reads his dialogue like a martian, intercutting it with nonsensical sounds and physical tics. It's a performance so over the top that it transcends all my notions of "good" and "bad" acting. It even transcends all my notions of acting itself. I would call it fearless but fear doesn't even seem to factor into it; it's more like watching someone act on their every compulsion. You can watch some of the most extreme moments below (but if you haven't seen it you should really just watch the movie).
I had no idea how to approach writing about Vampire's Kiss but I was delighted to find the aforementioned director/actor commentary track on the DVD. It's a very charming listen because both Cage and Bierman take great pleasure in watching the film they created, laughing just as incredulously as I did at how gonzo the whole thing is. ("This expression on my face is just absurd!" says Cage at one point) Plus neither, they admit, know what the film is about. "It was done completely on instinct" says Bierman.
The commentary gives some great context to what Cage says is one of his favorite performances. According to Cage, Peter Loew's physical tics are inspired by Marlon Brando in Reflections of a Golden Eye, Max Shreck, Mick Jagger and his own family members, "Which goes to show you where I came from," he laughs. Even Peter's wavering accent is based on an affectation Cage says his literature professor father used to sound smarter and more "continental".
In the commentary for Vampire's Kiss Cage admits he didn't really know where his head was at at the time. He was living in a New York hotel with a vampire bat skeleton and his cat, with whom he would practice his scenes. Deeply committed to his method acting ideals, it was Cage's idea to eat a live cockroach (Bierman made him do it in two takes, though it really only took one, to punish him for being difficult the previous day). Cage also insisted that, in the scene where a bat flies into Peter's apartment, a live bat be used. He threw a tantrum about it until Bierman, having failed with more logical arguments, convinced him that Cage could contract rabies if they didn't use a mechanical one.
Bierman and Cage both claim that Vampire's Kiss wasn't received well on its release because it was so ahead of its time. I don't know if that's accurate because there has never been another movie like it in the two decades since. Who would bankroll such a movie? More importantly, who would star in it?
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