The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

Raising Arizona
207
man is himself. The guy on a motorcycle with a baby on the front handlebars,
picking off rabbits and lizards from miles away with his shotgun. I
don’t know, it had such a strong sense of place in Arizona. There was just a
dreaminess to it. It just appealed to this deep part of my subconscious that
had never really been accessed before by a piece of art. That’s why I feel like
a bumbling idiot, because I think that that’s what the movie has done to me.
It’s working on me at such deep subconscious levels. The way it went in there
was by making me laugh, by making me laugh as a dorky fourteen-year-old
boy, and still now. It makes me laugh so much it just opens me up and gets
within me.
How has it changed in your viewing experience from the first to the
most recent time?
Duplass: I do know this—Mark and I did go see this movie together
in Austin. The Austin Film Society had a 35mm print. We went to go
see it, and we were scared because we didn’t want it to not hold up.
That’s a big thing that we talk about, “Is this going to hold up? Do we
have unrealistic expectations?” But we went, and we both walked out
of the movie theater crying; we couldn’t even talk to each other. It was
just like, “I’ll just talk to you next week because I can’t even deal with
it right now.” In terms of how the experience affects me? The wild part
to me is when I first saw the movie, all these guys looked like old, old
men. When I watch it now the characters are younger than me, and
it blows my mind. I don’t know what that does to me, but it certainly
feeds the frenzy that I’ve always had. I’ve always felt like I should be
doing more, I should be accomplishing more. To think that these people
could pull this off. I know the Coens were pretty young when they
got it done.
Cage had tried to kick-start his career for years, and this is really kind
of the second film that had done it. He was in Rumble Fish and The
Cotton Club, which were both flops, and then he hit with Peggy Sue Got
Married. This film made him a star, and he admitted that he based the
character and the hairdo on Woody Woodpecker.
Duplass: Jesus, that’s awesome.