In Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Nicolas Cage plays a cop who isn't so much "on the edge" as "has built a tasteful cottage about a mile over the edge where he lives full time." Drug-addled, trigger-happy, and morally questionable, he patrols the flooded streets of the Big Easy when he isn't snuggling up to Eva Mendes—a prostitute who represents the closest thing this guy has to a "love interest." Directed by the notoriously "out there" Werner Herzog, Bad Lieutenant is dark and batshit insane.
But , hey, it gives us the chance to do some snuggling of our own with Eva, and we're not about to pass that up.
MAXIM: Werner Herzog and Nicolas Cage - that's a lot of, um, "eccentricity" in one place, huh?
EVA MENDES: That's a dream combination for me.
Really?
It is. Because Werner Herzog has been on my hit list for a while. I think he's a cinematic god and I think he's unparalleled. I think he's so prolific and he's such an iconoclast—you know, he's it. Working with him was a dream come true. I know that Nic felt similarly. Obviously, I worked with Nic on Ghost Rider—a big popcorn movie—which is nothing like this. But I got to know Nic and the way he works and I really just like him as a person so I knew his personality and I thought, "Oh gosh, him and Werner Herzog together? They're going to kill it." I read the script, and I really didn't pay attention to it that much because I knew that Werner was going to take it and do something really crazy with it. And I was thankful that the character they wanted me for was a flawed character. She's not just an accessory. She has her own little journey. She's flawed and she's dark and she's edgy and she's immoral. So here I am.
Is it just more fun to be bad?
It's not that it's more fun to be bad, at all, it's just fun to have something to do. To have colors and layers to a character. To have conflict. We're all flawed. I don't think that means "bad," none of us are perfect, thank god. So when I get to play someone who's totally imperfect, that's exciting to me.
Did Werner have a lot of ideas for your character, or did he let you run with it?
I usually work on a script and break down the character—give her history, do a character analysis, the whole thing. I really enjoy that process. But Werner's not into all that stuff. He's very much more of a "just do it" kind of guy. That was very interesting for me, because I like to keep doing takes over and over and over again and he's very much, "We got it." We would be wrapped by lunch every day, which is unheard of. Every day. It was definitely a new style of filmmaking for me. And it was good for me, because I wasn't in my head as much.
Did you get a chance to see much of New Orleans? I tend to stay holed up in my hotel room, when I'm doing a character like that that's pretty dark. I didn't get to know the city much. I love the architecture and the history, obviously, It's an amazing city. But I sit in my room when I work and I watch films that inspire me.
What did you watch for this movie? The first film I saw when I got there was
Burden of Dreams, which is the documentary on Werner Herzog while he was making
Fitzcarraldo.
That's the one where he's constantly battling Klaus Kinski, right? Exactly. Battling a lot. The weather…the rainforest…it's a very inspiring film. But I watched it to get more of a sense of him in front of the camera at work.
Did you find him at all different now? That movie was shot several years ago… He was always very calm [in
Burden of Dreams]. I mean, he gets excited, but he does have a calmness about him. And that's what I saw. He's very mild-mannered. I'm sure he gets crazy—I mean, look, he ate a shoe for god's sake!
[laughs] But he was very mild-mannered, very soft spoken. And just like a kid, doing the thing he loves to do.
Where there any scenes you guys shot that didn't make the final cut? That's a great question. There was a scene where you see Nic's character and I doing heroin in the car and you see our trip together. We start off being very together, and then end up at opposite ends of the car looking up into the sky and just completely high. And Werner thought it was too much drug intake and didn't want the movie to be about that, so it didn't make it in. I thought it was important to have because my character does end up getting her life together…and I think you needed to see her go a little darker towards the end there before she made that turn for the better. But, it happens. Hey, DVD deleted scenes, baby!
[laughs]
You mentioned Ghost Rider—did that kind of indirectly, or maybe even directly, lead to you and Nic teaming up again on this? Or was it a coincidence? Ah…if you believe in coincidences, I don't.
[laughs] It's so weird, I was thinking about this the other day. I worked with Nic, this is my second time. Usually, the men I work with, I work with twice. Denzel Washington. Sam Jackson. Will Smith—well, I worked on a video with him when he was just starting out. There's all these people I'm tied to, and worked with twice. So bizarre.
Is there some kind of deeper meaning behind it? There has to be! That's not just coincidence.
Will the world implode if you work with Will Smith a third time? [Laughs] Let's see what happens.
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans opens today.
Can't get enough of Eva? Check her out in our Maxim Gallery.
