Nicolas Cage and director Osgood Perkins have both talked about the personal histories they mined for Longlegs, one of 2024’s most acclaimed horror films.
You won’t have seen much of Nicolas Cage in the terrific marketing for Longlegs, but you may have heard his character’s breathy, eerie voice: “I know you’re not afraid of a little bit of dark,” he intoned in a trailer released in June. “Because you are the dark.”
In a new – and terrific – interview with The New Yorker, Cage talks about his career to date, and touches on the title character in Longlegs, who he says is “nothing like anyone I’ve played before.”
The conversation is all the more fascinating given that it’s with Susan Orlean, the author and journalist who wrote the book on which Charlie Kaufman’s 2002 comedy Adaptation was (very) loosely based. Midway through the interview, Cage talks about Longlegs, Osgood Perkins’ mesmerising horror thriller, out in UK cinemas on Friday.
Cage plays the titular serial killer – a reclusive, Devil-worshipping Marc Bolan obsessive who terrorises families in 1970s, 80s and 90s America. It’s another singularly outlandish performance from Cage – spooky and out-there even by his own standards.
Fascinatingly, Cage told Orlean that he based the character’s high-pitched voice and odd mannerisms on his own mother.
“She would talk, like, [mimics her voice] ‘Oooh, Nicky, you looked just like a little bird when you were born,’ Cage said. “And that was just scary. [Laughs.] I think my mom did as well as she could with the situation in which she was contending with, but it was still scary. So I thought, O.K., I want to make this character as a sort of homage to my mother. Not that she was satanic, but her vocalizations, the way she would move. So that’s why this is so different. It’s [my mother] Joy Vogelsang.”
Cage said that as soon as he started reading Perkins’ script, he began hearing his mother’s voice in his head.
“And then I met with Perkins at the Polo Lounge [in Beverly Hills],” Cage said. “And the first thing he said to me was, ‘Nic, this is a movie about my mother.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s very interesting, Oz, because I was just thinking that I want to make this character about my mom.'”
Read more: Longlegs review | Brace yourself for an outlandish, atmospheric serial killer thriller
As Perkins explained in an interview with Indiewire, Longlegs is a particularly personal film. One of its themes, he says, is “A mother can lie, and she can lie out of love.”
Perkins’ father, the actor Anthony Perkins, died from AIDs-related complications in 1992. His wife, the model and actor Berry Berenson, was careful not to tell their children about Perkins’ illness, or his sexuality – Perkins had largely kept his homosexuality out of the public eye since his career began in the 1950s. (Berenson tragically died on the 11th September 2001; she was aboard American Airlines Flight 11 when it was hijacked and crashed into the World Trade Center.)
For Osgood, Anthony Perkins and Berenson’s eldest son, Longlegs was an opportunity to tell a story that he couldn’t in his earlier film, 2020’s Gretel & Hansel.
“I felt like I missed an opportunity to make a movie about the fact that a mother can lie to their children,” Perkins said. “The mother can create a cover story, but a mother can submerge a truth in what she feels is the service of the family, and how that creates what it creates. In the case of my family, I was dealing with public-figure parents. My father was a gay man who was closeted, and in the world that we lived in, it wasn’t acceptable. And it still isn’t, as insane as that is.
“My mother made this decision that that wasn’t going to be true for our family. I wanted Gretel & Hansel to be more about that, and I didn’t get there with it because it wasn’t my script and for a hundred other reasons. [When] I set into Longlegs, that was the core truth: a mother can lie, and she can lie out of love.”
Cage had his own reasons for mining his difficult childhood for the movie. His father, the literary professor and film executive August Coppola, divorced his mother, dancer and choreographer Joy Vogelsang, in 1976. Vogelsang suffered from mental health issues for much of her life, and Cage has said in previous interviews that she was in and out of institutions while he was a boy.
“She was institutionalised for years and went through shock treatments,” Cage told the journalist David Sheff in 1996. “She would go into these states that lasted for years. She went through these episodes of poetry – I don’t know what else to call it. She would say the most amazing things, beautiful but scary. I’m sure they had an impact on me.”
These personal stories help explain the dark energy that hums away in Longlegs. In many respects, it’s a typical serial killer horror that has already been compared to Silence Of The Lambs and Seven – it’s even set in the early 1990s, a period in which the genre’s popularity was at its height. But Perkins loads his film with such an air of dread, and so much primal imagery, that it floats off into its own nightmarish arena.
Perkins and Cage, it seems, have reached deep into their own subconscious to mine Longlegs' story and characters. The deeper FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) delves into the case, the more surreal the film gets. It’s as though the trauma that lies at the story’s heart is so intense that it has the power to distort reality itself.
Almost universally praised so far, Longlegs is an example of how difficult histories can be mined to create something powerful. It’s a notion Cage himself has built an entire career on; as he told The Guardian in 2007, “For me, acting was a way of taking destructive energy and doing something productive with it, and in that way it was quite a life saver. Instead of turning it on myself or on somebody else, I put it on film and created characters to express anger or express sadness.”
Longlegs is out in UK cinemas on the 12th July.
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