Nicolas Cage is once again playing a hard drinker in his latest film, Joe, premiering in competition at the Venice Film Festival, but his approach to the role has evolved since his Oscar-winning performance in Leaving Las Vegas. For the 1995 role of suicidal alcoholic Ben Sanderson, Cage said he was “exploring all ways of finding the honesty of the performance. And if that meant drinking, and videotaping myself drinking, and get ideas about that, I was going to do that.” But that was another time. “I was completely not doing anything and hadn’t done anything for a while” when he played a painkiller-addicted detective in Werner Herzog’s 2009 The Bad Lieutenant, which premiered in Venice. “It was more a sensory recall of the past,” he said, “and trying to find what those feelings might have been like. And I was happy with those results.” For the title role in Joe, the 49-year-old actor said he focused on finding the truth in the performance. “Even though we weren’t drinking, it was all about finding our way to the truth of Joe. If I was going to spin myself in circles, that is what I was going to do,” he said. In the film, Cage plays a hard-drinking ex-con whose struggle to maintain control of his life is undermined by his instincts to protect a teen, portrayed by Tye Sheridan, from his alcoholic father.

Lindsay Lohan was a no-show at the Venice Film Festival, where she was expected to promote the erotic thriller The Canyons. Director Paul Schrader declared himself “a free man” at a news conference Friday presenting the film. “For the last 16 months I’ve been hostage, by own choosing, to a very talented but unpredictable actress. She was supposed to be here today; she said she would be, but she is not,” Schrader said.Neither Schrader nor Lohan’s publicist gave a reason for the last-minute cancellation. Lohan plays the girlfriend of a Los Angeles movie producer, portrayed by adult movie actor James Deen, who together engage in erotic encounters with couples found on the Internet. The movie was being shown out of competition, and Lohan’s presence was highly anticipated. Schrader said Lohan “stepped up very hard” for the role but that the process was “exhausting” for her. “One of her problems as an actor is she has a very hard time faking things,” Schrader said. Lohan, 27, has been plagued by legal and substance-abuse problems. She completed her latest court-ordered stay in rehab in July.

Front Section, Pages 2 on 08/31/2013