Nicolas Cage has a fan in Quentin Tarantino.
Speaking on the Video Archives Podcast, Tarantino spent a segment showering Cage with praise — and spotlighting one specific movie as his most recent favorite.
“In watching some of the Nic Cage stuff, the one that blew me away was that movie he did, Pig,” Tarantino said. “That’s one of the best of the last five years. That’s one of the best movies I’ve seen in the last five years.”
Directed by Michael Sarnoski, Pig stars Cage as Robin “Rob” Feld, an Oregon truffle hunter who returns to Portland to search for the person who kidnapped his pig. Pig garnered significant critical acclaim, and Cage received several acting nominations from critics organizations. Tarantino appreciates Pig’s creative direction and how it diverged from Cage’s previous work.
“He deserves to be proud of it … that guy who directed it did a killer job. He did a really, really terrific job,” Tarantino added. “One of the things that’s great about it, especially after watching all the ‘revenge-o-matics’ we’ve seen, the movie sets it up like all the revenge-o-matics Nic Cage seems to have done in the last five years … this sets itself up to be that, only to decidedly not go down that road in the most creative way possible.”
While Tarantino’s assessment of Pig is a common belief held by many cinephiles, the Pulp Fiction director’s positive comments about Joker: Folie à Deux were very polarizing.
“I really, really liked it, really. A lot. Like, tremendously, and I went to see it expecting to be impressed by the filmmaking,” Tarantino said about Joker 2 in a recent interview on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast. “I’m just nihilistic enough to kind of enjoy a movie that doesn’t quite work as a movie or that’s like a big, giant mess to some degree. And I didn’t find it an intellectual exercise. I really got caught up into it. I really liked the musical sequences.”
