Nicolas Cages eat the rat scene in The Surfer was inspired by Humphrey Bogart
If you had Billy Wilder's 1954 rom-com Sabrina in your mind while watching The Surfer, turns out you got what Nicolas Cage was throwing down.
Mashable UK editor Shannon Connellan spoke to the Hollywood icon alongside director Lorcan Finnegan about the psychological thriller, which draws inspiration from '70s Ozploitation movies of the Australian New Wave like Wake in Fright. In particular, Cage spoke about managing the art of the unravel within his character, a man who endures a never-ending supply of misfortune in one Western Australian beach parking lot.
"I always believe that if you scratch the surface of any man or woman long enough, you will eventually reach the inner caveman."
"I wanted to make that distinction very clearly in the beginning that what appears to be a fairly well put together, normal man with a job and a son, a teenage son, and a nice Japanese luxury car, slowly unveils little holes in his personality and also his life," Cage told Mashable.
"For me, as an actor, I wanted to incorporate how much it would affect my voice. Like the sunlight, the dehydration. The scene where you really hear the change in the voice is outside the car with Julian [McMahon]'s character, Scally, when he's tormenting me with the burger and with the beer...Then he's just kind of a humiliated puddle of tears and weeping. I wanted it to be so far removed from the guy we met in the beginning.
"You know, I always believe that if you scratch the surface of any man or woman long enough, you will eventually reach the inner caveman."
But how does Sabrina come into all this? Cage told Mashable that he came up with his character's dramatic "eat the rat" moment in The Surfer — when his character literally demands that of another — after watching Humphrey Bogart's performance.
"So what happened there is interesting because I didn't really know what I was going to do in that scene with Pitbull in the ocean where the big transcendent moment occurs. I knew I had this prop rat, and the rat was a very good prop. It looked real. It was made of rubber. It looked good. And I thought, you know what? Let's not lose this. And I just tucked it in my pocket. One, because I liked the way the rubber tail looked dangling from the character's pocket, I thought it was amusing. But I also thought, 'Hey, I can use this somewhere'," Cage said.
"I had seen a movie called Sabrina, directed by Billy Wilder. In that movie, Humphrey Bogart removes an olive from his martini glass and he shoves it in his uncle's mouth and goes, 'Eat it.' And I was watching that alone in my bed in Nevada and I was cracking up. I was like, 'I can't believe he just did that to his uncle in a movie.' And I couldn't stop laughing.
"That was in my head and I finally said to Lorcan, 'You know, I think I want to use this rat and I want to shove it in Pitbull's mouth and say, 'Eat the rat, eat the rat!' And it just happened because Lorcan is the kind of filmmaker, not unlike David Lynch, who isn't afraid to foster a feeling of creativity and openness on his set. Plus he has a wicked sense of humor. He's really funny. But he's also not afraid to take wild chances with things. So he let me go for it."