Actor Nicolas Cage said his brief cameo in the Warner Bros. film "The Flash" was nothing like the scene that he filmed.
The movie portrays a younger version of Cage as a Superman from a different universe, which was inspired by "Superman Lives" — the well-known 1998 Tim Burton project "Man of Steel" that was aborted.
In an interview with Yahoo! Entertainment, Cage said that what was actually filmed, and what he was told the scene would be, was different from how it turned out in the movie. Cage, 59, opened up about the film while weighing in on the debate over the use of AI in movies.
"AI is a nightmare to me," Cage said. "It's inhumane. You can't get more inhumane than artificial intelligence … I would be very unhappy if people were taking my art … and appropriating [it]."
Yet it was not AI but rather CGI, Cage said, that was responsible for his cameo in last summer's "The Flash."
"When I went to the picture, it was me fighting a giant spider," Cage said. "I did not do that. That was not what I did. I don't think it was [created by] AI. I know Tim [Burton] is upset about AI, as I am. It was CGI, OK, so that they could de-age me, and I'm fighting a spider. I didn't do any of that, so I don't know what happened there."
Cage went on to explain how the scene was initially meant to unfold.
"What I was supposed to do was literally just be standing in an alternate dimension, if you will, and witnessing the destruction of the universe," he said. "Kal-El was bearing witness [to] the end of a universe, and you can imagine with that short amount of time that I had, what that would mean in terms of what I can convey. I had no dialogue [so I had to] convey with my eyes the emotion. So that's what I did. I was on set for maybe three hours."
Despite his critical words, Cage added that he likes director Andy Muschietti.
"[Andy] is a terrific director, he is a great guy and a great director," Cage said.