Nicolas Cage's current tax troubles were still ahead of him in September, when he was at the Toronto International Film Festival promoting Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans.

But from the quasi-mystical way he talked about the Big Easy, you know last week's IRS foreclosure of the two N'Awlins houses he owned cut deep.

In fact, he says convincing director Werner Herzog to shoot in the city was the dealmaker in his decision to deliver the most psychotic performance of his career. The movie opens today in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver and rolls out across the country during the next few weeks.

"New Orleans is a place I'm strongly connected to," Cage said in an interview. "I directed Sonny there (his 2002 directorial debut about a returning Army vet, starring James Franco). And I had a strange experience that was in the lines of an epiphany."

Cage talks about this experience "only in the abstract. It was an awakening that changed my belief system. It terrified and compelled me. I knew if I ever made a movie there again, I was going to be facing a catharsis and a lot of fears. It was either going to be a disaster, or it was going to be beautiful."

Or maybe a beautiful disaster, given the over-the-top Herzog's tale of a painkiller-addicted cop who shakes down club kids, drug dealers and old ladies, and has hallucinations of singing iguanas.

"I asked Werner to film the movie there because I felt that in terms of the performance, the city itself was going to influence the way I performed. If you know jazz, you can go off the page and improvise, and that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to really go for it and open myself up to that spirit."

He begs to differ when it's suggested that he's more of an action star these days than someone from whom you'd expect a mordant art film (the same public observation by Sean Penn ended their friendship).

But Cage does admit that his early film Vampire's Kiss (in which he famously ate a cockroach) is the film most analogous to Port Of Call New Orleans, and Herzog's admonition for Cage to "release the pig."

"Vampire's Kiss was another example of trying to consider film acting no differently than you would a bit of music or painting, where it's simply imagination," Cage said. "I was working with a filmmaker who had a tolerance for a very extreme kind of physicality and vocalization."

But whereas in his Oscar-winning turn in Leaving Las Vegas he actually took "drinking lessons," Cage tapped memories of getting high -- or the experiences of ill-fated friends -- for Port Of Call New Orleans.

"I was totally sober when I was making Bad Lieutenant, a completely impressionistic landscape filtered through my imagination. In a strange way, the drugs give (my character) an ability to speak the language of the street. Having said that, I wanted to show the hideousness of drugs such that nobody would want to do it -- his expressions, his pain."

Cage makes no apologies for the action-star era, which began with the popcorn films The Rock and Con Air. "Every choice I've made has been made because the material appealed to my taste. I have eclectic taste. I want to make movies that will entertain the whole family. I believe in family rituals, and I like making movies like National Treasure that give children something to share with their parents, and vice versa.

"Those movies enable me to green-light movies with Werner Herzog, movies that have flawed characters, injured characters in dramas that can also be funny, like Bad Lieutenant. Drama is why I got into filmmaking. The world is full of sorrow, so when I play characters that are injured, I feel they're more relevant on some level. I feel lucky that I can be eclectic."

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