Nicolas Cage and Maika Monroe only really shared one scene with each other in the horror movie Longlegs. It was a key interrogation scene near the end of the film, and shooting that scene was an intense experience for Monroe.
Throughout the course of filming, director Oz Perkins built up the tension between the two actors by keeping them away from each other during the duration of filming until their first onscreen meeting.
While shooting the scene, Monroe‘s heartbeat shot up to 170 bpm. After watching the scene, it wasn’t really that scary or nerve-wracking. I guess you just had to be there.
Monroe recently talked about the experience, saying: “The whole lead-up to that was crazy. They had been filming with Cage for five days at that point, and it was his last day, probably three weeks into filming.
“The director chose to not have me see anything, not meet him, not see what his face looked like. He created this character, this thing, so I was so nervous.”
She went on to talk about actually shooting the scene: “The PAs bring me up to this door that enters into the room where he is. The cameras start rolling on me and the director calls ‘action.’ I opened the door and what you see is all very real, and it was incredible.
“He’s unrecognizable, and so I didn’t feel like I was in a room with Nic Cage. I was in a room with Longlegs. After we finished that scene, he was done.
“He’s in this method world, but he was able to let go of it. We’re sitting across from each other and he leans over, in his full look and everything, and says, ‘Oh, I’m such a big fan of you.’”
Cage then shared his thoughts on Monroe as an actress, saying: “I wanted to follow her after ‘It Follows.’ Especially the first opening scenes when she’s tied into that wheelchair, getting pushed around. I felt terrible for her, and she just kept it through the whole movie.
“It’s a different energy than other actors have. It’s what makes it uniquely her, and her own thing is that Maika has a personality and energy that separates her from everybody else. She’s not like anybody else, and that’s a big compliment.”
Cage went on to talk about the intensity of the scene they shot together, saying: “It was important to us, me and the director, that Maika and I not spend a lot of time together socially.’ He wanted the scene to be a surprise for both of us, which I thought was stage direction.
“I came into it a fan, and I told her as much because I had been following her work and she was very nice. We only had maybe two or three lines to one another that weren’t dialogue, just conversing briefly.”
He continued: “My feeling about Maika is that she’s effortless. I think there is an ease to her performance style where I don’t see any acting.
“I find it to have a childlike charm, which is compelling, especially when you consider that she’s playing Lee Harker, who is a young lady who essentially had her childhood robbed from her, but she has this inherent kind of childlike grace, vulnerability and charm.
“You care about her immediately, about the character she’s playing, and I think you care about Maika. I don’t know her well at all, I don’t know her history, I don’t know her background. I just know her as a fan of watching her movies, and she’s able to do the most difficult kind of acting, which is that you don’t see any acting.”
The director also talked about letting Cage approach the role in any way he saw fit, saying: “You get Nic Cage in your movie, and it’s like all of a sudden you have a tiger. You’re not like, ‘Hey, Tiger, I think you should do this this way’ or ‘Hey, Tiger, I think you should move like this’ or ‘Hey, Tiger, I think this should be what you want to eat.’
“There’s such a power that comes with someone who’s such a titan of the industry and one of the greatest all-time movie stars ever. When you have an entity like him, you want to let him do what he’s going to do. You want to talk to him about it and help him and answer questions and say something if you see something.
“But he made it clear early on, in a very friendly way, that he wasn’t hanging out, he wasn’t going to meet people. It wasn’t that he was method — I mean, he spoke to me between cuts, between takes.
“He was himself, I was talking to Nick. That said, his focus is extremely good. He’s not socializing, he’s not meeting people for dinner, he’s not hanging out, he’s not chitchatting, he’s not shaking hands.
“I had plenty of access to Nick — it’s just that I was the only one who had that access. And it worked to my advantage in the sense that I could keep him away from Maika and then have them only be together in the one scene they had.”
In the story, “As the case takes complex turns, unearthing evidence of the occult, Harker discovers a personal connection to the merciless killer and must race against time to stop him before he claims the lives of another innocent family.”
If you’ve seen the film, what did you think about the scene where the two characters meet for the first time?
Source: Variety
Joey Paur
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