Renfield shmenfield: Nicolas Cage would like his own Dracula movie, please

Wow, a whole movie about Dracula? Let’s pump the breaks a little bit. Maybe after we get a couple of other movies under our belts. Dracula can come after Harker, Westenra, and Van Helsing Abraham. Once we’ve established the four protagonists, they can team up for Dracula. Though, we can’t blame Cage for wanting his own movie because the character, as he says, “is a challenge.”

“It’s been done so many times already,” he said. It’s been done very well and it’s also been done not very well. I certainly admire Christopher Lee and Frank Langella and Bela Lugosi and Gary [Oldman]. But I wanted to see if I could bring something fresh to the character. And I also kind of always knew I had to do it at some point.”

In the end, he based his version on Christopher Lee, whom he met on the set of Season Of The Witch and liked “very much.” Cage said that Lee reminded him of his father, so in the end, he based his Dracula on his dear dad, August, even though his father wasn’t a blood addict—he was an English professor. But not even a Dracula based on dad and Lee was enough. It’s all about the blood.

“More importantly than borrowing from my father, or from Christopher Lee, it’s really about the psyche of the character,” he continued. “An addiction to blood is not unlike an addiction to alcohol or heroin or sex, so I thought about how that lust can drive someone into darker dimensions.”

The trailer does set up a group therapy scene, so maybe blood addicts anonymous plays a more significant role in Renfield than we expect. We’ll find out on April 14, when Nic Cage’s daddy Dracula hits theaters.