5 hours ago
2
When I was growing up, I always told my parents, “Don’t expect me to become a doctor.” But in high school I really liked the TV show House and I really liked solving problems. So I never knew what else I wanted to become except for a doctor. I’ve been a practising GP for years now.
This means that, for a lot of my life, I’ve been science-focused. And I wasn’t always a film watcher. I only really started watching movies seriously when I was living in the Gold Coast and studying for my fellowship exams during Covid.
One day I sat down to watch The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, the film in which Nicolas Cage plays a fictional version of himself. I got about 20 minutes in and thought that the movie would benefit from having watched Cage’s other films. So I turned it off then I went and did just that: I watched every single one. He’s made more than 100.
I had rules about how I watched them all. I had to watch them in chronological order. I was allowed to watch other movies during the Cage-watching period but never at my house – if I was home, I had to watch a Cage. If I was with friends and one of them asked me what we should watch, I had to name the next Cage movie. That was a crazy rule, probably. I watched them all in about three months.
I grew to really respect and appreciate their star. I was only interested in his craft: for someone who has spent so much time with him, I know shockingly little about his personal life. I’ve been asked a couple of times if I’d want to meet him, and of course I would. But I don’t know what that meeting would be about apart from discussing his movies.
The vast majority of people have been exposed to the meme version of Cage. With the rise of YouTube that became what he was known for: the freak-outs. Which, when taken out of context, are ridiculous. But if you watch the movies those scenes are in it’s not that crazy what he’s doing. It makes sense.
Cage has obviously made some famously bad movies. He got into a lot of debt in the 2000s and had to take most of the jobs sent his way. The one film I really hated was 211, a politically troubling cop drama.
But overall I loved watching them all. I discovered that Cage is a really good romcom lead – he’s so good in Moonstruck, and a movie called It Could Happen to You, which not as many people have seen. I’d love to see him make a romcom again.
As I was watching all the films my friends were wondering whether it was some kind of sign of mental deterioration. It was the opposite, really. It was so good for me to have a project. It was an easy way to spend time with people, too. Everybody has an opinion about Cage. It’s a really great way to talk to people.
My job means I have to have a work persona and a personal one. As a doctor you’re expected to be warm and personable without necessarily having a distinct personality. You’re there to help. You’re not there to share your life. But during this project, my Cage interest spilled over into my work persona. I have a Cage tattoo – a quote from his film Vampire’s Kiss, one of my favourites – on the back of my arm, where it’s often visible to my patients. So people would ask about it and the Cage project would come up.
I never felt embarrassed about it, or worried about what patients would think. I discovered how warmly people feel about him when I was a contestant on the quiz show Mastermind. Cage was my specialist subject, naturally, and everybody at the TV studio was so excited to talk about him with me.
When I started the project, the latest film he had made was Dream Scenario, which was the last one I watched. When it came out in cinemas, I got all my friends to come and watch it with me. I was sort of sad that my project was over.
I’ve embarked on other film-watching projects since then. I saw Joker: Folie à Deux 10 times in cinemas. This wasn’t because I was a big fan of the first Joker – I didn’t even like it that much. Folie à Deux is better – four stars. This project wasn’t about the movie itself so much. It was about watching the same film in as many formats as I could: I saw it in a drive-in, at the Imax, with friends, alone, once twice in a row.
People really worried about my mental state during that project. But it was fun. There’s so much content in the world that it’s overwhelming to decide what to consume. These little projects make decision-making easier. And it’s really nice to turn creative consumption into its own creative act.
I have tried to watch the entire filmography of other actors since then but I never got all the way through. There’s nobody like Nicolas Cage, I guess.
