Nicolas Cage Reveals His Picks for the Top 5 Movies in His Filmography

Thursday night gave us a delightful Nicolas Cage takeover of The Late Show, complete with an insightful moment during which the Oscar-winning actor was asked to name what he considers the top five Nic Cage films.

Unsurprisingly, Michael Samoski’s unanimously acclaimed 2021 film Pig came in at the top of Cage’s list.

“Pig, that’s my favorite movie that I’ve ever made,” Cage, who noted it’s been more than a decade since he’s been at the Ed Sullivan Theater, told Stephen Colbert.

From there, Cage revealed four more personal picks, in this order: Mandy (2018), Bringing Out the Dead (1999), Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009), and Joe (2013). All of these are excellent and should be viewed immediately. 

When Colbert brought up Face/Off, Cage explained to the host and the audience how another Cage entry—1988’s Vampire’s Kiss—ultimately inspired his performance in John Woo’s 1997 action hit.

“Vampire’s Kiss was a little movie I made where I was able to explore my more abstract dreams with film performance,” Cage said of Robert Bierman’s cult classic. “I was sadly playing a charcater who is losing his mind and was beginning to think that he was the vampire from the original Nosferatu movie. And when you’re playing a character who’s losing his mind, he can believe he’s Nosferatu. So I got to act like a German expressionistic silent movie star and that was cool, like these facial expressions and whatnot. But Face/Off was a big movie, a big studio movie that I made at Paramount, and I was able to use what I learned from this little Vampire’s Kiss movie and put it in this giant movie. And it worked. I was like, people really dig this. So I was very happy with those results.”