The Big Picture

Nicolas Cage discusses his interest in blending family drama & sci-fi genres, influenced by his own family dynamics – a tribute to his upbringing.
Arcadian’s plot focuses on a family’s survival in a dystopian world, led by Paul (Cage), as they fight alien beings targeting humanity.
The cast discusses working with Cage, VFX processes, and favorite TV shows, highlighting the challenges and creative processes behind the movie.

From big studio blockbusters to independent films worthy of praise in the festival circuits, one thing is certain, Nicolas Cage has found his niche and acts on what truly moves him. He is an actor who is boundless when it comes to genres, and at this year’s South by Southwest, his latest is a dystopian horror titled Arcadian. The movie reunites Cage with The Trust (2016) director Benjamin Brewer and co-stars It’s (2017) Jaeden Martell and Maxwell Jenkins (Lost in Space).

This sci-fi feature takes place in the near future, when an alien species is determined to cleanse the earth of humans. It’s suspected that this eradication is the consequence of the damage we’ve caused to the planet, and it’s made every nightfall a fight for survival. In the end days, Paul (Cage) is raising his two sons, Thomas (Jenkins) and Joseph (Martell), to live vigilantly and resourcefully, cautious by day and ready to fight when the sun goes down. When Thomas is late from a visit with his crush (Sadie Soverall) at a nearby farm, Paul must venture out to track his son down, leaving his other son home alone to defend himself and the home.

After the world premiere at SXSW 2024, the Arcadian cast, director, and screenwriter Mike Nilon stopped by Collider’s media studio. Brewer, Cage, Martell, Soverall, and Jenkins sat down with Collider’s Steve Weintraub. During the interview, they talked about the challenges of making the film, what it was like for the cast to work with Cage, what they were excited to shoot, the democratization of VFX, and their favorite TV shows.

Nicolas Cage Speaks on Favorite Genres and His Interest in Making Arcadian
Image via Shudder

During the interview, Cage explained his keen interest in making the film since it would combine two of his favorite genres and also reflect the dynamics of his family during his formative years.

It’s very simple really. Two of my favorite genres, independently spirited family drama, you know, grew up watching East of Eden, Kazan, Ordinary People, Redford, and then science fiction horror in that category, in this case particularly specifically science fiction. If you mash those two and the…the dynamic of the family, which is a father and two boys, which is largely what my family dynamic was, because sadly my mother couldn’t be around as much as we would have liked her to have been around. So my father did all the heavy lifting, so I wanted to tell a story about that family dynamic and then mash it up with science fiction and see what we could come up with, and I’m happy with these results.

Check out what they had to say in the video above, or you can read the conversation below.

COLLIDER: Hey everyone, this is Steve Weintraub with Collider, and I’m here in our South by Southwest studio with the awesome folks behind Arcadian. How are you guys doing?

NICOLAS CAGE: Great. Good to be back with you, Steve.

Listen, sir, and I’ve said this to you off camera, and I’ll say it on camera, any time I’m sitting across from you is a great day.

NICOLAS CAGE: I appreciate that. I always think we have a good conversation.

No one watching this interview will have seen the movie yet, so how have you been describing the film to friends and family?

BENJAMIN BREWER: It is a movie about a family trying to survive after the end of the world in a remote farmhouse. Nic plays Paul, a man who’s raising two sons and trying to teach them about the world in a way that they could maybe rebuild it, but at night they are threatened by an evil that is trying to eradicate the rest of the people that have survived. So it’s a coming-of-age story, using that kind of as the metaphor for what it means to grow up.

The Cast Discuss Working with Nicolas Cage
Image via Shudder

For the two of you, I’m just curious, when you have the opportunity to work with Nic Cage, what does it actually cost you to pay to be in the movie and work with him? I would like to also know that number in case I could save the money to work with Nic. [Cast Laughs] Being serious what was it like collaborating and sharing the screen, and what did you take away from watching him work that maybe you’re going to apply to future projects?

MAXWELL JENKINS: Yeah, I mean I don’t have to tell you it seems like you know Nic is an incredible actor and to be able to go even before I got to set, to be able to go knowing that I’d be working with somebody who has that much level of…recognized skill and experience and I knew I was gonna be learning a lot. I didn’t… I didn’t know, and I’m eternally grateful for it, how collaborative Nic is in teaching us and being a scene partner. I learned a lot through the collaboration.

MAXWELL JENKINS: I think one of the most memorable moments of that shoot, and honestly of my last 10 years doing this, has been when we did the “Are We Not Men” scene. I think that was the first time I realized there are elements that you can bring from your real life into work. I’ve been fortunate enough to live this kind of super-normal life outside of the acting world. I went to my neighborhood public school. I ran cross country. I did model U. N. I did all that stuff and had a pretty normal upbringing, did a few acrobatic experiences in a traveling circus, but yeah, for the most part, it was really interesting to see how you were able to fuse that and real personal experiences, and I think it only deepened the work that we did there, and I think it all had an effect on all of us so that was my biggest thing.

NICOLAS CAGE: I learned from you. They teach me. You know they keep me interested.

I’m sure they also taught you about TikTok and Instagram.

NICOLAS CAGE: [Cast Laughs] I don’t think we did, that never came up, did it?

MAXWELL JENKINS: I think partly because we were filming in places with no cell phone reception. [Cast Laughs]

NICOLAS CAGE: I only have one day or two days with you, Sadie. I would have liked to have had more

SADIE SOVERALL: I was gonna say I only had a very short time working with Nic, but I think what you say, you’re a student of film, and you know seeing your work on set, that couldn’t be more true. I think that’s the type of actors you want to work with, is people who are just so talented, such auteurs in what they do, but also who are just up for making things, you know, learning and being open and collaborative, which is just such a wonderful thing to work with. So, you know, I wish I had more, and hopefully one day I will, but yeah.

MAXWELL JENKINS: There is kind of like an infectious passion every day on set that I picked up from the first scene. The first scene that we did together was, not to spoil anything, it’s pretty early on in the film, where we’re, I’m late, and I’m running over the hill and I read it as not how we did it. You came in with 110% energy, and it really changed the tone of it and really set the stakes for the world, like how costly being late can be.

NICOLAS CAGE: Yeah, and you know, I’m very much in support of Maxwell and Jayden in this movie. There’s a large part of the picture where I’m unconscious because of something that happens, but, my job, in this case, was really to try and find, almost like any father with brothers, locate what their strengths are and play on that. We had a minimal amount of time to make this movie. So, if I think Jaden has an interesting intellectual aura, let’s play with that. Let’s keep that going. And, if I think that Maxwell has a real movie star charisma that I want really want to find, where he’s looking at me, I’ll find the strength in that. Both the boys in the movie have similarities, but they have a distinction. And I wanted to augment that. As any father would, in this case, I’m playing Paul, who is a movie father. But even as an older actor, in support of younger actors, there was minimal time trying to enhance that.

Nilon and Brewer Speak on the Development and Writing Process of Arcadian
Image via Shudder

I’m curious in terms of the screenplay, how much are you thinking about in the writing process, what can we afford with this idea, and how much are you, sort of let’s write what we can write and, we’re gonna get there?

MIKE NILON: I probably should have given a little bit more consideration to the economics of the film when writing it. And I apologized to Ben a couple of times on the set. They’re like, wow, this one is really tricky. You’re really doing a great job pulling that off. But I did want to concentrate on it having just one location, a remote location, especially since it was during COVID, it was written, and there were very few characters. So that was kind of the thought process, but, you know, budgetarily keeping it at reasonable place.

So one of the things that people will not realize is just like Godzilla Minus One’s director, who just won an Oscar for doing it. He was part of the 35-man team that did the visual effects. So that saved a lot of money because he was in the trenches working with the other VFX artists. And people might not realize you have a real skill set with visual effects. You did work on the visual effects. So talk a little bit about doing them yourself and what you learned from everything everywhere, where you also did those amazing visual effects that you brought to this.

BENJAMIN BREWER: Thanks. Well, first of all, Godzilla Minus One, winning the Oscar, is extremely cool. That’s one of the coolest things that’s happened in a minute. I love that film. I highly recommend it. It’s the best Godzilla movie I’ve ever seen. It’s astounding, but I think it is like this project or anything I’ve had the luck of getting to be part of and do visual effects on it, really allows you to create a painterly approach to the image that might be constrained by budget, because If you only have so much time to shoot it physically, then what you have, on, either side, of, it, is for yourself to decide how much time you want to kind of shoot it before or shoot it after so by shooting it before your storyboarding, or I do like 3D pre-vising of sequences and then afterwar, I’m creating assets that expand shots to make the world bigger, so it ends up being completely holistic.

BENJAMIN BREWER: On this film, Arcadian, the first person who came in to work on it with me when I jumped on was Zach Stoltz, who’s the VFX supervisor on Everything Everywhere All At Once. Our idea was, what if the movie we make after Everything Everywhere All At Once is actually a similar kind of budget for visual effects, but we try this new type of world-building in a horror movie with a monster full CG creature and all that. I think that, like there are, when I show, when people have seen the movie, there are five shots in the film that every inch of it is CG, and I made it on my laptop. And I tell people… please, for my own sake, tell me, guess those shots at the end of the movie because I need to know. And so far, no one’s caught them. But

I don’t say that to kind of, I just say that to, I hope to inspire people because I’m making this stuff on free software on my computer, and it’s playing in movies that no one can tell. So again, to the Godzilla Minus One team, I think that there’s a beautiful future for these films because they all need visual effects. Like, they all have invisible stuff that enhances performances. And just because the economics start shrinking our opportunities in the real-time on set doesn’t mean that we can’t uplift everyone’s work later in post-and creative ways. So, yeah, that’s it, ask me about VFX. I just start rambling about how much… [Laughs]

NICOLAS CAGE: That’s a master’s class.

Well, the thing that I’m most excited about is, as you point out with this film, is allowing independent cinema that is an even lower budget and has almost no money to incorporate VFX, that just requires your time because the software is there. It’s just a question of how much you know, are you willing to put in months and months of sitting in your bedroom or, you know what? The world might see the democratization of VFX.

BENJAMIN BREWER: One brief anecdote. So the opening of this film, Nic had to run a mile on screen in an unbroken shot in the middle of Dublin with ice on the ground. And we did the take three or four times. And so Nic had to run a mile, and it was a long run. And because it’s Nic, he did it and was just totally tough about it, and it looks great. But when the shot was done, I had just written myself a check which was to take the environment that he was running through and make it the end of the world. [Crew Laughs]

Not currently a world, and so, while I had great sympathy for Nic having to run through the streets of Dublin for this one or opening shot, Sympathy was then paid back, because I sat for three months, and I destroyed Dublin in my computer. And so, when that shot opens the film, I think of it as the perfect confluence of what I’m talking about, because what Nic committed to on that day? I then got to honor for like three months of just being like, yeah, that’s like. That’s what this is about, it’s about how hard you’re willing to commit to this crowd.

NICOLAS CAGE: I love that opening. That I was originally in the project Mike started the movie in the script with Maxwell’s character running over the hill and Paul saying “you’re late”, and then they added this whole sequence of this running through Ireland and there was another little MacGuffin which I won’t go into, but they kept it, and it’s a great way to enter this world. Another example of when you have less money, you have to be more inventive in terms of how to create a spectacle that people are going to watch. And it really inspires the creative juices to think outside the box.

MAXWELL JENKINS: And if I could just add, not that I have any knowledge whatsoever of what it takes to do VFX, but I have noticed, and I think Ben is the person that really cemented this belief, is that some of the best directors I’ve ever worked with have VFX backgrounds, and I don’t know where it comes from, but hearing you talk about this kind of bridging of the camera and the acting, it could be coming from you guys are so dedicated to sitting and watching those scenes over and over again and perfecting it.

And I think, yeah, we definitely felt so supported by the VFX team on this. And I think it was in large part to you and to that mindset. So I think it really aided us in bringing this world to life in, the physical because we had the backing of these really prepared, really passionate, and really creative, artistically driven VFX computer guys. So it was totally a bridging of two worlds and Ben kind of acted as the avatar of those two worlds.

Cast Members Discuss Their Favorite TV Shows and Shooting Schedules
Image via SXSW

So this is the curveball of the interview. I’m doing a super cut of everyone who’s coming in and asking the same question. And the question is, if you could only watch one TV show for the rest of your life, what TV show would it be and why?

NICOLAS CAGE: Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone. Great actors, a great story structure. And I just love the way Rod Serling opens every segment with that wonderful voice and a stiff upper lip and a cigarette. He’s just the coolest guy ever on television and a genius writer.

MAXWELL JENKINS: I’m going to go. It’s not nearly as impressive as that answer. But I’m going to go with the original animated Avatar: The Last Airbender series. And I’m going to go with it, not because I watched it as a kid, and it’s nostalgic, because I just watched it again for the 10th time two weeks ago. And I’m going to go with it. It’s a story. It’s a story that I think a lot of people can relate to, and I think it’s timeless. It’s just a classic story of the hero’s journey, and I think it’s kind of a perfect representation of that, and you almost forget that it’s animated and feels like history almost watching it.

I know a lot of people that love that animated show.

SADIE SOVERALL: Yeah, mine if I’m being truthful, it changes all the time. So I could not say one by at the moment for some reason. I’m just really into The Simpsons. It’s really comforting. And I find Tree House of Horror really good, so I’m not going to go into it. You know I apologize for that.

I think it’s great. It’s, it’s also, it’s also been on for like forever. So you have an unlimited I’ve had people come in, and they start debating well how many like if it’s not that my whole life, I need to have a show that has like 20 seasons.

MIKE NILON: I would say Family Guy and a lot because I think it’s brilliant and also because there are so many episodes. So, you know, you have a, you know, a deep bench, and Seth MacFarlane is very funny.

Very funny, and a hundred percent can sing modern-day Frank Sinatra. It’s crazy. We have one left.

BENJAMIN BREWER: The Real Housewives of Atlanta, no, I don’t know. Wait I have to watch the show forever? I’ve never, I was just trying to be funny. I’ve never seen it, no what’s like. I want to say a show that makes me look like I would just watch, like The Simpsons was the best answer for me, that is probably true, but if I’m thinking about like the TV, like, forever, like you watch it over and over again, I would go with the whole Twin Peaks, like all of Twin Peaks, and the reason why is because, I mean David Lynch is like my hero.

I think he’s like the greatest cinema artist we have, but I think if I had to watch something forever, that that would just keep giving me things like I think it would just have. There would be days where it would make me laugh because it’s so funny, and then there would be days where it would have this like spiritual meaning to me, and also, like, it’s one of the incredible acts on television where he made this brilliant show, you know, 30 years ago, and then came back and did a new season, it’s just as amazing, it has so much more to offer, so yeah, I’d say Twin Peaks, the whole thing of it.

Image via Lynch/Frost Productions

Well, the other thing about Twin Peaks that people forget is, that when it came out in the ’90s, it was like a revolution on television. No one had done anything like that, Twin Peaks is in the DNA of everything after. So for the younger folks at the table, if you research when it was on and what TV was like back then, you know, it was crazy.

MAXWELL JENKINS: I was just gonna also throw in, because I’m terrible with decision-making, Friday Night Lights.

You already made your decision, sir. I regret, listen, I love Friday Night Lights, but you have made your decision, and we know it’s Avatar.

MAXWELL JENKINS: Avatar’s going in the cut. That’s fine, that’s fine.

So for all of you guys, you see the shooting schedule. What day do you have circled in terms of, I cannot wait to film this? What day do you have circled in terms of, how are we gonna film this?

NICOLAS CAGE: I don’t know how to answer that because it’s all like a blur to me now. I don’t have any circle days in red. I don’t.

Was there a day that you were particularly excited to film something?

NICOLAS CAGE: I was very cognizant that I had a minimal amount of time to form a family dynamic with Jaden and Maxwell, where you would have no doubt that we were family, that we were close, and that we were related. A lot of thought went into casting Jaden and Maxwell. So that took care of 50% of it, because I look at it and thought, yeah, ok, they could be my boys. But I knew I had to get up to speed very quickly. So I would say the dinner table scene with they “Are We Not Men?” I immediately thought my dad would do that, as ridiculous as it sounds.

We would have dinner, and we had wooden plates, and he would take the knife, and he’d go and stab it into the plate, and it would stick there and go, are we not mad? And I was okay, and we would do that. I said, let’s do that. Let’s do what dad did, and so we put that in, and, and that kind of had this family bond which then, interestingly enough, spoke volumes about where the movie is going. It’s like a little crystallized moment that extrudes out that suddenly, yeah, we’re actually going into battle with these creatures with knives. I mean the whole thing kind of extruded out from that one little improvised moment that we all got on board with, so I would say that day was, if you will, because I had again minimal time to get this family bond up and running.

MAXWELL JENKINS: It is kind of a blur. I don’t remember what scenes were filmed on the days together, but I remember there were some sequences where, just as a fan of the genre, how excited I was to see how we were gonna do that. I think one of those was the cave sequence when we were fighting in the cave. We filmed that both outside and in the studio, which was wild. I think just from a character standpoint, that was the first moment we see Thomas have to start to confront his guilt and just have to start to question his morality and his priorities to his family to his growing up.

MAXWELL JENKINS: I think it’s a key turning point for that, and it was just something I was excited to explore. I always loved doing scenes where you can bridge that deep familial connection with sci-fi horror. I think it almost makes it more real. It’s like folkloric in a way. You’re coming up with these stories to explain real life, so I was looking forward to that as well as the final scene with the driving. No spoilers, though. I think there are some cool sequences with fighting monsters and I come from a theatrical circus background, so the physical side of it, stunts, a lot of the time, have always been my way into finding this character, the physicality of a character.

We were lucky enough to be able to do it, it’s like a week and a half of solid rehearsals with the stunt team before we even started filming to get a sense of how these characters interact with the monsters. It made it almost second nature so that when we got on the day, we could feel really confident with the physicality of it and how we’re interacting with these creatures, which either was someone in a motion capture suit or no one at all.

NICOLAS CAGE: You could make a movie about a stuntman. You could remake the old Burt Reynolds movie, Hooper.

MAXWELL JENKINS: He would be great in that part. Love to, yeah, 100% or dig Grayson.

SADIE SOVERALL: There wasn’t really anything, I think, as both Nic and Max said, it was all a bit of a blur because we had so little time to do this, but I’d say for me, a lot of the fun stuff was just a lot of the physical stunts, we’re incorporating all these different things because you just, you don’t really get to do that every day or in every film. I think I found it very entertaining when we’d shoot with the dog, Rocco. Rocco? Yeah, because he would be the bane of your life. Or the cockroaches, you know, I have a real fear of those, so it was really fun getting to smash that fear, and luckily I didn’t have them thrown all over me, like you did.

MAXWELL JENKINS: Yeah, the cockroaches were gnarly. You’d go back to your trailer to change, and you’d just find one there.

No, everything about that is a no.

MAXWELL JENKINS: Well, because once they’re out, like their kind of out a little bit.

Image via Shudder

No. Sir, no. That is not for me. You guys?

BENJAMIN BREWER: I’m just laughing because I realized you wrote a script, and you were like, babies, dogs, action, chase scenes. And you just sent that to me. I was like, yeah, yeah, okay. And then I was like, wait a minute? That is all the stuff they say don’t do because it’s hard. But no, I love the challenge of it. It was great.

What day did you have circled in terms of whether you were really excited about filming something?

BENJAMIN BREWER: That would be day one. But it’s also the day you dread. You know day. I don’t know why, as it’s the first day of school. It really isn’t, so he shows up, and you’re like you’ve been doing all this prep. But then you get there, and you’re like, um, okay, can I have the, the, the camera? Yeah. Yeah, the camera and you are here. Yeah, these are so awkward at first, and, and the first day, on this one, for max. We had to film him shoot him run into the woods. And we had scouted this place a bunch of times. It is fine, normal beautiful Irish weather.

We show up, and it’s just a daily deluge lashing. I mean everyone’s like all, but he had to run through this whole thing, and it’s funny because at the moment I thought, oh, we have this really tough Irish Crew, and they’re just shooting all these elements because they’re Irish, and after, we shot this because I was like that you guys are must be used to that, like we don’t shoot in this, like, we go shoot something else. We don’t come out here.

So yeah our first day which is always my day that I both love and dread, was a quick baptism of like, okay, this is independent filmmaking right now. I will always come back to the nothing’s harder than the circus.

MAXWELL JENKINS: So yeah, it was when it was raining out there. It was like it was more like can can we prove it to ourselves that we can do this? Nothing’s what, nothing’s harder than the circus any time. It’s like a rough dance set or at school or whatever. That’s like my go-to last thing.

MIKE NILON: I don’t remember which day it was or where it was in the shoot, but there’s a there’s a scene between Nic and Jaden where Thomas is kind of messed up. And Paul the dad is gonna have to try to fix it and there’s a, there’s, just a scene between the two of them where he’s gonna go out. I don’t want to give too much away, but he’s leaving his son behind, and you don’t know at that moment, for how long, so it’s a scene that just has tons of subtext which I really just enjoyed watching that scene. The way it developed between the two of them and the way, in the way Ben handled it, it was really lovely every take. I got misty about it, just, it was a fun one for me.

I have to ask you an individual question, Nic. There’s been a lot of talk about a Spider-Man Noir live-action series that you could be a part of… I personally would love for this to happen. What can you say about this possible project?

NICOLAS CAGE: Well, I can say that we have been talking. It’s no secret that I love the character. I think the character provides another mashup of sorts. I can combine my favorite Golden Age performances, i.e., Robinson, Cagney, Bogart, with a character that is, I guess, widely considered Stanley’s masterpiece. I see it as a kind of foray into a pop art mash-up, sort of Jungian Lichtenstein mash-up by way of Bogart and Cagney, but nothing’s definitive yet. It’s just conversation.

On that note, I appreciate you answering. I really want to say, I hope you guys have a fantastic South By Southwest. I really cannot wait to see the movie, and good luck with the rest of your speed dating this morning.

NICOLAS CAGE: Thanks so much, Steve. Good to talk with you again.

Arcadian hits theaters on April 12, 2024. Stay tuned to Collider for more exclusive coverage coming in from SXSW 2024.

Arcadian (2024) A father and his twin teenage sons fight to survive in a remote farmhouse at the end of the end of the world.Release Date April 12, 2024 Director Benjamin Brewer Runtime 92 Minutes Writers Michael Nilon