Did you have to balance not taking this movie too seriously?

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 455.

What kind of beer was in the skull in the film?

Nicolas Cage: “Oh, I love that. First of all, Billy Burke is hilarious in the movie. I love his performance. He's just so much fun to watch in that part of King. Believe it or not, I was reading a lot of Walt Whitman at the time, our poet laureate, Leaves of Grass and somewhere in Leaves of Grass Whitman just says in a stanza 'drinking mead from a skull.' I thought to myself, 'I like that, I would like to find a way to drink beer from a skull in this movie.' And the reason being kind of partly because I wanted Milton to have this kind of Celtic and Wotanic kind of modern primitive style about him. And also I wanted to see if there could be any way in my presentation of the skull, and I put a lot of thought into that - even did a few takes of it almost like a commercial, a beer commercial - to find a way to make the beer slosh out of the eye in such a way that my cup runneth over and have it look really inviting and appetizing and make people in the audience go, 'Wow, I know it sounds crazy, but I'd really kind of like to drink beer from someone's skull right now.' That was the challenge.”

Nicolas Cage: “I mean, even today the way we're getting a chance to talk a little bit about it, I think you can see that anyone involved in the movie didn't take it too seriously. There was a real sense of absurdist fun about it, knowing full well that the movie was going to be over the top and extreme and sort of celebrating the fun of that. But having said that even still, there is a heart in the movie and the heart is generated by Amber Heard's performance and the relationship between her and my character because you see that it's not really a romance. It's something even more affectionate that goes into a familial place where it's almost like an older brother or a paternal situation where there's kindness towards one another, even though there are these two whacked out outlaws on the road. They still have feelings for one another, and I like that aspect of it as well. A good movie has to work on more than one level.”