“Knowing is a sci-fi film where you’re going to get the spectacle and the entertainment in the grand science fiction tradition.” So says Nicolas Cage, of his thriller which opens today. Cage plays a professor who stumbles on terrifying predictions about the future and sets out to prevent them from coming true.

Cage discusses the film, fatherhood, acting as anger management, and what the future may hold for himself and his family, after the jump.

Hanging out in a basement-level meeting room of a ritzy Central Park area hotel, Nicolas Cage slowly sips on a glass of bottled water as he admits one of the reasons he wanted to star in Knowing—director Alex Proyas’ (Dark City, I, Robot), eerie, nail-biting tale of a father’s desperate battle to save his child and the world—was because of his own relationship with his oldest son, Weston. “I wanted to make and dedicate Knowing to my first son,” the 46-year-old Oscar-winning actor (Leaving Las Vegas) reveals. “I wanted to do it because of those experiences that I had with him as a single father.”

How did your relationship with your own older son, Weston, inform the relationship your Knowing character, John Koestler, has to his son, Caleb?

“It’s dedicated to Weston because of what our relationship really was—it was just me and him. I just have so many memories of him and I together, and this script came to me at the right time. I don’t think that I would’ve been able to play the part 20 years ago. I had the life experiences and the emotional resources to play him, and indeed, some of the actual lines in a few of 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.”

Have either of your sons [Weston and Kal-El] ever expressed an interest in acting? How would you feel about it if either of them wanted to become actors?

“Right now, Weston, my oldest son, is very immersed in his music, but there might be a time when chooses to go into the cinema. And that would be fine with me. Now, my youngest son is just three-and-a-half, and he hasn’t really discussed his career plans.”

Do you think we have a predetermined future?

“I would just offer that I’m not a chaos theorist.”

Have any particularly good things happened in your life that you feel were meant
to happen?

“I’m sure there’s a lot of them, but I can’t think of them, they’re not coming to my attention right now. Probably, because I’m not meant to talk about them.” [Laughs]

Where does your energy and passion for acting come from?

“It has changed. In the beginning, it came from an almost punk rock need to express a lot of anger—wherever that may have come from.”

“As I get older, it is coming more from a place of wanting to use the craft to help others in some way, to hold a mirror up to the situations that we’re going through, to actually be more cautious about the way that I use the power of film. And to see if there’s anything that I can do in the performances that will resonate in the public.”

Now that Francis Ford Coppola is making movies again, will you work together?

“The last time I worked with Uncle Francis was on Peggy Sue Got Married, and I was really happy with that.”

But that was about two decades ago.

“Yeah. It’s been a long time. If he called, I would certainly like to work with him. And, I’m happy to see that he’s behind the camera again. I wrote him an email recently, saying ‘The world needs more of your movies.’ So, I’m excited to see what he does.”

Is there any particular genre of film that stretches your acting muscles more than another? And is there a genre you’d like to do that you haven’t done?

“I feel that I want to keep going in this science fiction and also perhaps fantasy direction for a little while longer because I think there’s some room for growth there in my own abilities—in that I’ll be a little more liberated working on that landscape. So I’m happy to be here now.”

“But I like dramas as you know. Comedies, not so much, only because I don’t find the same things funny that many other people seem to find funny. I don’t really respond to sex jokes or things like that. So I’d have to find something that was really about weird human behavior for me to laugh.”

Which of your earlier films—with that punk attitude you mentioned—still resonate for you on a second viewing?

“I don’t really watch my movies again, but I can speak by the echo of it. I would say that Wild at Heart and Vampire’s Kiss had more of that kind of energy to it. That’s not to say that I can’t still get kind of punk rock or angry, but I just think that I’m doing it for different reasons now.”