The most famous story from the set of Vampire’s Kiss involves a cockroach. A real one. The script had called for Cage’s character—in the throes of madness—to suck a raw egg. Bierman and Cage thought this was too tame.
Cage “said to me, ‘The thing I hate most in the world are cockroaches. They are my Room 101. … So let me eat a cockroach,’” Bierman recalls. “He wanted to eat the most frightening thing for him. I thought, ‘This is terrific!’ I sent my prop people down into the boiler room. … They brought me a box, divided up into little sections with tissue paper. The cockroaches were there lined up for me to cast. I think they’re actually called water bugs—they’re bigger than cockroaches.”
What you see on film is all nauseatingly real: Cage snatching a live roach, lifting it tentatively, chewing it like a madman. “I really [wanted] to do something that would shock the audience, something you would never forget,” Cage explained. It’s the only change he made to Minion’s script, which never underwent a single rewrite.
[Zach Schonfeld takes us inside Vampire's Kiss, the bizarre cult classic that became the blueprint for Nicolas Cage’s career of wild and absurd performances.]
|