On Friday, March 20, Summit Entertainment’s Knowing will be the latest attempt by filmmakers to show what the end of the world might look like. In this case, it comes in the form of a series of numbers found in a time capsule that documents every major disaster that has occurred in the past 50 years. These numbers are discovered by Nicolas Cage’s Professor John Koestler and his son Caleb (Chandler Canterbury), whose lives are thrown into turmoil when they realize the implications of these numbers, and have to discover why they mysteriously come to a sudden halt with no explanation.
ComingSoon.net had a chance to speak to director Alex Proyas (Dark City, I, Robot) a few months back (read that interview here), and then at the recent New York junket, we sat down with Nicolas Cage and actress Rose Byrne to get their take on the movie’s thought-provoking concepts, and had a few more minutes with Proyas to talk about the big set pieces and other aspects of making the movie.
And here’s a few more questions and answers with Cage and Proyas about general things other than the movie.
We asked Nicolas Cage about all the projects he’s attached to, because unlike other actors who get attached to a lot of movies, he seems to make all of them.
“Not everything you read about me is true, to be perfectly honest,” Cage denied. “There’s a lot of movies you might see come up on the IMDb that I’m not making at this time. That’s probably as a result of me as a producer having movies that were in development at Saturn Films but haven’t really been greenlit or haven’t come together, but for some reason, they seem to attach me to all these things, starring in them and actually filming them.”
And as far as whether doing independently-financed movies are more satisfying than the studio films: “It’s not necessarily more satisfying, it just is what it is, although I will say though that the independent movies that I’ve made have been pretty gutsy. They’re not afraid, they won’t pull their punches. When they’re going to show a certain tragic element, they show it, they don’t sugar coat it.”
As we wrapped up with Proyas, we asked him about the time that he take in between making movies, since it’s generally four or five years in between each one. “I don’t start out with that intention but usually that happens,” he told us. “Once I turned around a movie in two years but that was an anomaly. I think I’m one of those guys who takes a few years to get things done. But who knows? I might surprise everyone and come up with another one in a year or two.”
Knowing opens nationwide on Friday, March 20.