If Werner Herzog had not found a brother in weirdness in Nicolas Cage -- his star in the movie Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans -- it's possible the filmmaker would now be in retirement.

And all over a singing iguana.

Said reptile is a coked-up hallucination that sings Release Me (actually the voice of bluesman Johnny Adams), for the benefit of drug-addicted New Orleans police detective Terence McDonagh (played by Cage). Not originally in the script, it was one of those weird flourishes that makes Herzog Herzog.

"Werner was very devoted to his iguanas," Cage said dryly at a TIFF news conference yesterday.

"We had a midway wrap party and Werner was at the bar, very unsettled, because he might not get the three minutes of iguana time he needed, and he said he might never make another movie again. I thought that would really be a shame."

Added Herzog: "I was grateful for Nicolas' support because I felt the producers weren't accustomed to things like that. They'd made lots of action movies, Rambo and other things. And they would not tolerate more than five seconds of an iguana. And I felt if it was cut out, I really should stop making films. But I always knew after that, Nicolas would be a strong supporter."

Cage's McDonagh is a bad lieutenant indeed (the movie actually has no connection to the 1992 Abel Ferrara movie Bad Lieutenant, other than the name -- which Herzog was against, but the producers had thoughts of a franchise).

In the course of the movie McDonagh robs nightclubbers, steals drugs from the evidence room, makes deals with mobsters to pay off gambling debts, and even holds an old lady at gunpoint.

"It was quite clear to us that we were going to go as far as we wanted to go," Herzog said. "Nicolas was going to be taken some place he had never been before. I knew that he would be in an intensity we hadn't seen yet."

"We would do scenes in the so-called normal version, and I had the feeling there was something wilder. And I would turn to Nicolas and I would say, 'We'll do it once more, but this time you should turn the pig loose.' "

Added Cage: "I never agreed with that. I thought of him more a shark. But Werner has a fascination with pigs."

At the beginning, Herzog says he was so taken by Cage's portrayal of a crazed cokehead, he was convinced the actor actually was on drugs.

"It was an awful day," Cage said.

"It was one of our first scenes in the movie, and, method actors, we try to live in the imagination to make it real.

"So I would have this little vial of saccharine or something and I would take it and try to psyche up and totally create this imaginary world where I was high on coke. And Werner would say, 'Now Nicolas, what was in that vial?'

"And I said, 'Oh, man. Please don't pull me out of my imaginary... then I said, 'It's coke!' And then he understood."

"I was kind of appalled," Herzog said of the brief belief that his leading man was a drug addict.

"It was just a fantastic performance."

Not that Cage didn't know his stuff. Asked to compare his performance to his Oscar-winning alcoholic turn in Leaving Las Vegas, he said "the process was quite different. In Leaving Las Vegas, I had a drinking coach, literally.

"This one the process was a sober one. I looked at an impressionistic landscape from my past 25 years to give me some sense of where I wanted to go."

He drew from one such well in a scene where McDonagh divvies up a heroin haul with a drug kingpin, played by the rapper Xzibit, and hallucinates that a football player on TV has grown antlers.

"That came from an actual experience," Cage said. "A few friends of mine years ago told me they were watching a football game and they were all doing some drugs and they all had the exact same hallucination at the same time.

"They all saw the football player grow antlers and score a touchdown.

"That story stayed with me for 20 years."

AS THE WERNER TURNS

Werner Herzog does know how to liven up a press kit. Usually they're full of happy BS about the movie. But the press kit for Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans includes an angry tirade from the director.

"It does not bespeak great wisdom to call the film The Bad Lieutenant, and I only agreed to make the film after the screenwriter ... had given me a solem oath that this was not a remake at all (of the 1993 Abel Ferrara film).

"But the film industry has its own rationale, which in this case was the speculation of starting some sort of a franchise. I have no problem with this.

"Nevertheless, the pedantic branch of academia, the so-called 'film studies,' in its attempt to do damage to cinema, will be ecstatic to find a small reference to that earlier film here and there, though it will fail to do the same damage that academia -- in the name of literary theory -- has done to poetry, which it has pushed to the brink of extinction.

"Cinema, so far, is more robust. I call upon the theoreticians of cinema to go after this one. Go for it, losers."