Nicolas Cage, Kristoffer Borgli and the interpretation of `Dream'
LOS ANGELES >> Dreams can be confusing, revelatory, even emotional; they can go through many movements, like a film of many genres. And all of that is in the surreal, hilarious, disturbing and moving “Dream Scenario,” the second feature from writer-director Kristoffer Borgli. It stars Nicolas Cage in one of his sharpest, most affecting performances (one he acknowledges as a favorite), as Paul Matthews, a man who discovers the dark complexity of fame, with its unexpected edges. And for it, Cage drew on one of the surreal scenarios from his own life, his meme-ification.
“My first response was to the title: two of my favorite words, `dream' and `scenario.' And then I read the script and I felt the originality,” says the Oscar winner. “But then I felt, `I know how Paul feels,' because my response to what happened to me virally was the same thing; My meme-ification is similar to Paul's dream-ification. I said, `Yes, now I can take these heavy feelings and do something constructive, take the lead and turn it into a little bit of gold.'”
Memes of Cage, usually taken from his most extreme moments on film, are all over the cyberverse. Such a thing is inevitable, one supposes, when an actor has been around for more than 40 years and 100 movies, especially when the point of meme culture is to remove all context to fashion something of a web-commenting Swiss army knife.
“I have subsequently made friends with it, but at the time I was discovering it, I was frustrated by it and I was confused, because it wasn't what I signed up for,” Cage says of discovering the “Nicolas Cage losing his s—” variants of clips and photos. He says that when he became an actor in the early `80s, he never dreamed of “technology where you could take mashups of different crescendo moments from movies without any regard for Act 1 or Act 2 and just turn it into a meme.
“Now, I'm happy about it, because it kept me in the [conversation], and some of my more maximalist performances provided vicarious release to some folks. In society, we all want to behave. We all want to be good members of the community, but sometimes we want to scream. And I think that's why it landed with that group.”