THAILAND: Nicholas Cage talks about his role in World Trade Centre movie

In Thailand to film his latest movie, American actor Nicholas Cage on Tuesday (September 12) met with Thai press in Bangkok to talk about his recently released movie, World Trade Center. The 42-year-old actor who won an Oscar for his performance as a suicidal alcoholic in Leaving Las Vegas, takes on the lead role of real-life World Trade Center survivor, Port Authority Police Department sergeant John McLoughlin. McLoughlin was only one of 20 people pulled alive from the rubble of the Twin Towers after it fell on September 11 five years ago. Directed by acclaimed director Oliver Stone, World Trade Center is one in a slew of recent film releases coinciding with the 5th anniversary of the disaster. Cage told Thai reporters he took on the role of McLoughlin as he wanted to use his abilities as an actor to heal. "I thought it was another opportunity for me like Leaving Las Vegas to portray hardship in such a way that others might have encouragement from it, positive encouragement to overcome and to survive incredible hardships," he said. The film tells the story of McLoughlin and Port Authority Police Department office Will Jimeno, who were among the first responders to the Twin Towers collapse. They were in a team of five men who went into the buildings and were trapped when the towers collapsed. McLoughlin and Jimeno survived but were trapped for the next 12 hours, pinned beneath concrete and twisted metal 20 feet below rubble. To prepare for his role, Cage was said to have spent time in darkness floating in a sense deprivation tank to get a feel of what his character might have gone through. "He was at the epicentre of the tragedy and I never met anyone who has been tested like that before. There's nothing personally in my own life which corresponds with that. So I had to cultivate imagination and rely on my interviews with John to get his behaviour, the way he talked, the way he thought," said Cage. Cage, who told reporters he was awakened by a phone call by his friend alerting him to the September 11 disaster in 2001, said he hoped the movie would bring across the importance of "staying hopeful and being positive". "It's important to look at tragedy and to learn from it and even Shakespeare wrote a lot of plays that were very unhappy. But this is part of the human condition and we're all born into it, and if you don't look at it, maybe we're not going to do something about it," he said.

ITN Source | September 14, 2006

Tags:. .pulled. .metal. .gone. .vegas. .feet