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 In Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, it can be difficult to tell where Nicolas Cage ends and his character, Terence McDonagh, begins. This has always been one of the best characteristics of Cage as an actor. Whether in a popcorn blockbuster or an independent hit, Cage’s shining moments are often when he’s lost in his character.
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is director Werner Herzog’s latest film and slightly inspired by a 1992 film of the same name. It’s not a remake, which is a point Herzog could not emphasize enough. The only similarity between the two films is the main character, McDonagh, a bad cop with a nasty drug habit and a tendency to use his badge and his gun for his own benefit.
“I don’t judge him,” Cage said during a recent press conference held for the film at the Four Seasons hotel. “I don’t think of him as being bad or good, it’s more existential. It’s not part of a religious program, which I think separates it from the other film. He just is.”
Cage has played many eccentric characters in the past and his talent to create a character is displayed perfectly in this film. McDonagh is darkly funny, deeply flawed and, somehow, at the same time endearing in his weakness. His addiction to painkillers stems from his bad back, which, it turns out, was a creation of Cage’s, who walks with a limp throughout the entire film.
“I designed Terence, let’s be totally honest,” Cage said. “I came in with a vision and a bad back. I was thinking of things like Richard III. I like to get my body into it. My mother was a dancer, so I like to use the body as part of the instrument of acting, so I saw this back injury as an opportunity to transform myself.”
Just don’t call Cage’s acting “over the top.”
 “A lot of people like to say things like ‘over the top,’” Cage stated. “You can’t say that about other art forms. You can’t say ‘over the top’ with a Picasso or a Van Gogh, so why can’t it be the same with acting?”
It turns out that Cage got a lot of his inspiration for his character from a recent trip. When he got the script for Bad Lieutenant he was in Australia and suffering from a sinus infection.
“They sent me to the doctor and he put this cocaine solution in my nose,” Cage recalled. “Then I came out and just started taking notes, and I noticed that my mouth was getting really dry and I was feeling very invincible.”
“Then I started improvising the scenes and coming up with ideas--and swallowing a lot,” he continued. “Then I was graphing it in the script, finding scenes where [Terence] was doing coke, and figured out how to behave, to start swallowing a lot or do a lot of lip-smacking. Or scenes where he’d be doing heroin, I figured he’d be very itchy and there’s gonna be nodding and he’s gonna be much slower.”
The film, unlike its earlier version, is set in New Orleans, post Katrina. Cage, who owned two homes in the city, suggested the location to Herzog.
“New Orleans is a very potent city in my life, for various reasons,” explained Cage. “It’s a combination of different energies--African, French, English, Spanish--and there’s a lot of magic there. I knew I would channel that energy and it could either be a disaster or something beautiful, so I was up for the challenge.”
 Cage, who won an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role for Leaving Las Vegas, has appeared in more than 60 films in his career, including Face/Off, Ghost Rider and National Treasure. He described his role in Bad Lieutenant as “impressionistic” compared to his role in Leaving Las Vegas, which Cage said was more photo-realistic.
“In Leaving Las Vegas I had a couple of drinks,” admitted Cage. “I wanted to. I had prescribed scenes where I decided I would get drunk and anything goes, and I’m glad I did it. But with Bad Lieutenant, I say this is impressionistic because I was totally sober and I was looking at a landscape from over 20 years ago, and I wasn’t sure I could do it. It was a challenge. But I believe that the filter of my instrument would give you something more exciting because it was impressionistic.”
The film costars Eva Mendes who plays Frankie, a prostitute with a drug habit. She seems to be one of the few people that Cage’s character genuinely cares about in the film. This is the second time Cage and Mendes have worked together, the first being Ghost Rider.
“I just feel that Eva has evolved,” said Cage of his costar. “There’s a new liquid, soft Eva Mendes that’s very fluid and spontaneous in Bad Lieutenant.”
Werner Herzog said that many of the scenes in the film were improvised. Cage felt that Herzog’s directing style meshed perfectly with his acting style.
 “He moves very quickly and my best takes are my first two takes,” explained Cage. “He has confidence in what I’m going to do and I have confidence in what he’s going to do, that he’ll get it.”
With so many movies under his belt, Cage has reached a point in his career where he can choose the types of films he works in. He chooses, Cage said, to make movies for his roots, which is a little bit of everything.
“For the people who like to go see Bad Lieutenant at midnight, or Vampire’s Kiss or Bringing Out the Dead or Wild at Heart, I’m gonna keep doing a little bit of everything,” he said.
And if he can choose to star in a little bit of everything, how does Cage know when he’s made the right choice?
“If you can imagine there’s a solid piece of wax in the center of your heart, and there’s a little needle that’s pressing through the wax and it gets out to the other side, then you know you’ve hit it,” said Cage. “That’s what it feels like.”
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans opens in theaters Fri., Nov. 20.
For more information, visit the film’s official Web site.
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