Sailor and Honey Bunny are heading to Oldenburg.
Box-office champ and cinematic cult favorite Nicolas Cage and indie darling Amanda Plummer will both be honored with lifetime achievement awards at this year’s Oldenburg Film Festival, Germany’s leading indie film fest.
Both Cage and Plummer will attend the 23rd Oldenburg festival, which runs Sept. 14-18. They will receive their awards — Oldenburg’s German Independence Honorary Awards — on Sept. 16.
Cage, whose films have grossed upwards of $4.7 billion worldwide, is, at first glance, an odd choice for Oldenburg, which prides itself on its indie roots. But festival director Torsten Neumann insists the star of Mike Figgis‘ Leaving Las Vegas, David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, Spike Jonze’s Adaptation and David Gordon Green’s Joe has more than earned his place as an icon of indie cinema.
Related Stories
“He’s more than just a star. Somehow he’s managed to move between studio projects and his roots in indie cinema,” says Neumann. “He’s still a Coppola, after all,” he continues, referring to Cage’s given name, Nicolas Kim Coppola and his familial links to indie cinema royalty in the form of uncle Francis Ford and cousin Sofia.
For Cage, Oldenburg plans to pay tribute to both the indie and blockbuster sides of the actor’s career, with gala screenings of Leaving Las Vegas (which won him the best actor Oscar in 1996) and Lynch’s Wild at Heart, as well as John Woo’s action thriller Face/Off — “the best of his big movies,” as Neumann puts it.
For Plummer, Oldenburg will screen Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King in which she starred alongside the late Robin Williams; Butterfly Kiss, Michael Winterbottom’s cult lesbian road-movie romance from 1995; and, of course, Pulp Fiction, the film that made Plummer famous for her brief, unforgettable role as the sweet yet crazily homicidal would-be diner robber Honey Bunny.
For the Pulp Fiction screening, Oldenburg has picked the ultimate location: JVA Oldenburg, the city’s maximum security prison, where the festival traditionally holds a gala for both attendees and inmates. All the inmates know Pulp Fiction, says Neumann, adding that showing the movie there for the convicts, “with the real-life Honey Bunny” will make for a “pretty special” experience.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the worldwide gross of Nicolas Cage’s films. The Hollywood Reporter regrets the error.
