Nicolas Cage On Horror Comedy ‘Mom And Dad’: “Nobody Wanted To Make This Movie”: Toronto Studio

The premise of Brian Taylor’s Mom & Dad sounds like a great spin-off to Blumhouse’s The Purge: There’s a 24 hour period where parents turn violently against their kids. And we’re brought into the fold of the lives of Brent (Nicolas Cage), a great dad on the brink of a cataclysmic mid-life crisis, and Kendall (Selma Blair), the mom who has sacrificed everything and gets no respect.

“Nobody wanted to make this movie,” Nicolas Cage told us at Deadline’s TIFF studio. Voltage passed over the Brian Taylor-directed film, but Cage gave props to XYZ and Armory Films for sticking their necks out.

“I saw this as my right to exercise my belief in freedom of speech. This was Sex Pistols from start to finish, this is punk rock,” said Cage about his second collaboration with Taylor after their work on 2011’s Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. 

“That’s why I got in the movie business, I want to rock you, I want to shock you,” said Cage who says that Mom and Dad is the best film he made in the last 10 years after Drive Angry and Joe. Cage won a best actor Oscar 21 years ago for Leaving Las Vegas and was nominated again in 2003 for his work in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation. Cage told Deadline he holds Taylor’s cinematic talents in the same esteem as uncle Francis Ford Coppola, David Lynch, and the Coen Brothers.

“He knows how serious I am about the work. I know how serious he is about his vision. I fit in very easily with Brian. He doesn’t have to direct me much, he just lets me go. It’s like Kurosawa and Mifune.”

Says Blair about Mom and Dad, “You don’t just think ‘These parents are not you’. This could happen to me. We are you. We are you, watching it. We are failing. We are failing at doing well at the thing we thought we should.”

XYZ and CAA are handling U.S. sales for Mom and Dad, with XYZ selling foreign.