I can’t think of another actor, certainly not a bankable star with an Oscar on his mantel, so able and willing to make an audience uncomfortable as Nicolas Cage. He may have toned down his onscreen persona over the years since films like Wild at Heart, Peggy Sue Got Married, and the almost unbearably painful Leaving Las Vegas, but there’s always something potentially mad lurking in those puppy-dog eyes onscreen, even in relatively mainstream films like the megahit National Treasure movies.

Nicolas Cage in Knowing

So it’s hardly surprising that a hush falls over the room of journalists assembled at a Manhattan hotel when the 44-year-old actor arrives at a press conference for his new film, Knowing, which opens in theaters this week.

Directed in something of a return to form by Alex Proyas, who started strong in the 1990s with The Crow and Dark City only to be sidetracked by studio problems and unrealized projects for most of the past decade, Knowing casts Cage as Dr. John Koestler, MIT professor and single father. A 50-year-old time capsule dug up at his son’s elementary school contains a sheet filled with numbers that falls into Koestler’s hands. Analyzing them, he finds a guide predicting the dates and locations of every major disasters to have hit the world in the years since it was buried—with a few more to come.

With some disturbing special effects sequences, including a plane crash that I wouldn’t advise be viewed by residents of Clarence, Knowing culminates in a finale which, for better or worse, is the kind of thing the phrase “WTF?” was coined to cover. Neither Cage nor Proyas is willing to offer an interpretation of the film, preferring that be left to the eye of the beholder. Cage did offer, however, a somewhat surprising answer to what appealed him about the role: because Koestler’s relationship to his son reminded the actor of his own experiences raising his first son.

“This script came to me at the right time,” he explains. “I had the life experiences and the emotional resources to play John Koestler, and indeed some of the lines in the scenes came from direct memories of my times with Weston. I had been looking for a way to express those feelings for a long time. Having been a single father in California, I know that there is a gender bias depending on which lawyer or which psychologist or family therapist that you talk to. It’s like there’s a full moon out if a father wants to see his son. That’s just not true; just because you’re a man doesn’t mean that you can’t raise your kid. I think that families should stay together, but if you are a single father, don’t give up no matter what they say. So I wanted to have a chance to express that, to show that archetype in a movie, that you can have a devoted, positive relationship between that family, a father and a son as well.”

As far as the implications of the story itself (about which professional ethics compel me to remain mum), Cage refuses to be drawn into the spirituality-versus-religion, randomness-versus-fate debate that Koestler faces. Faced with the question, he says only, “Without impinging on your own personal choice, there are going to be those that wear the hat of religion and those that wear the hat of science, and I still don’t really understand why they can’t wear both hats, because personally I think that they go beautifully together.”

(And, somewhat more mysteriously, when asked about his own feelings on Knowing and his recent feature Next, which has some similar aspects with its story of a man who can see two minutes into the future, “At the risk of impinging on your own personal opinions, your own relationship to the movie, I would just offer that I’m not a chaos theorist.” Glad we cleared that up!)

I considered asking Cage whether there were any second thoughts about releasing a movie that contains a horrendous plane crash sequence, including Koestler trying to save burning victims of the accident, so near to the tragedy of Flight 3407, but decided that it was pointless: What could he possibly say? Still, he did address the filming of the sequence, planned as a single shot.

“Those were real people, and I was genuinely scared for them. So I didn’t have to act that. Those are people who are on fire—they’re stunt people, but they’re still people, and I took it personally that none of them get hurt. So I had to really rehearse it all day and get to the end of the shot without any mistakes, because I didn’t want to go back to the beginning and have them light those people on fire again. I don’t care if they get paid again. I was worried about them. That was the difficult part of it.”

One of the busiest leading men in Hollywood—he has averaged two films per year for the last two decades, and that’s not counting cameos and voice-only performances—Cage first connected with audiences in comedies like Moonstruck and Raising Arizona. Don’t be expecting him to return to that genre anytime soon, though. He admits that “I don’t find the same things funny that many other people seem to find funny. I don’t really respond to sex jokes and stuff like that. I’d have to find something that was really about weird human behavior for me to laugh.”

What does appeal to him more these days is science fiction. “Good science fiction is intelligent,” he says. “It asks big questions that are on people’s minds. It’s not impossible. It has some sort of root in the abstract. So automatically you’re getting closer to potentially divine sources of interest, because it is abstract. It’s one of the only ways that a film actor can express himself in the abstract and have audiences still go along for the ride. They accept it that they’re going to go places that are a bit more out there, and that’s more and more where I like to dance.

“The other thing is that I got a little tired of movies where I had to shoot people. I got to thinking about the power of film and what that power is, which really can change people’s minds. I had that experience with The China Syndrome. It made me aware. So I thought perhaps I should just be a little more responsible with that power. At this point in my life I would rather entertain you with spectacle and imagination as opposed to servicing your bloodlust appetites.”

That said, Cage admits that his next film scheduled for release is Kick-Ass, adapted from the uber-violent comic book series by Mark Millar (Wanted). “There are ways of [depicting violence], even by showing it where it can be ironic, and there can be awareness in that as well. Just not gratuitous in the sense that I want you to get off by watching someone’s head explode.

“That movie is quite a satire, in my opinion. That’s about the irony of the obsession of violence in the US and all over. I think it’s an ironic take on that, so there will be some violent images, but it’s going to be done in a way that shows you the absurdity of it.”

With Kick-Ass in post-production and his next film, a live action adaptation of the Disney animated film The Sorcerer’s Apprentice about to begin filming (directed by National Treasure’s Jon Turteltaub), Cage shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon. Longtime fans who lament his turn to the mainstream can look forward to his following in the shoes of Harvey Keitel in the upcoming remake of Bad Lieutenant, directed by Werner Herzog, who told the British newspaper the Guardian that “I took [Cage] where he has not been before.”

Crediting (but not disowning) his youthful films like Vampire’s Kiss and Wild at Heart to “an almost punk rock need to express a lot of anger, wherever that may have come from,” Cage is now happy to be in the right job at the right time. In this uncertain economic times, he feels, “More than ever, movies reveal themselves as helpful, as healing, as encouraging. Anything that makes people get through the day in these times is the best form of entertainment. And it’s still arguably the most inexpensive form of entertainment. I always say if I can do a movie that makes a kid smile or gives them hope or something to be excited about, I’m applying myself in the best way I can. I don’t think that just goes for kids, it goes for adults as well.

“There is a need to go to the movies and shut your mind off from the problems that are happening in our daily lives. At the same time, I think movies can help guide us through those experiences. You can be entertained but also stimulated to think about things.”