Nicolas Cage Laughs Watching His Own 'Ridiculous' Scenes From 'National Treasure'

Nicolas Case took a walk down memory lane with Vanity Fair to look back on some of his most iconic film roles, from Moonstruck and Leaving Las Vegas to, uh, some of his less critically acclaimed (but popular nonetheless) projects. And the actor couldn't help but laugh when revisiting one of the most notorious films of his career, 2004's National Treasure.

For those uninitiated, the movie stars Cage as a historian and treasure hunter named—wait for it—Benjamin Franklin Gates, who plans a heist to steal the Declaration of Independence because it contains a hidden map leading to lost treasure. That's really all you have to know about it.

In the scene he watches, his character announces to his computer expert friend, played by Justin Bartha, that he plans to steal the historic document.

"Well, how do you take something that is so profoundly ridiculous, and really try to sell it, okay?" Cage remarks. "What I like about that scene, just seeing it for the first time in I don't know how many years, is I like the positivity of the character. He really believes this, he really reveres it. And I think that that's charming."

"I can't even say it without laughing," he continues, when his character says the most memorable line of the film. "'I'm gonna steal the Declaration of Independence,' because it has been meme'd so many times. It has been SNL'ed. But you can't help but laugh."

"I think what really makes it work is how serious Justin and I are taking it," Cage explains. "If you played it for laughs, then it's screwball comedy and it's stupid and it's not my thing, it's not where I'm at. But the fact that we played it like dramatic actors makes it even more funny, than it might have been, if it was slapstick."

He added that he believed that director Jon Turteltaub shot the film "lovingly," and really made the characters look like they had "great reverence and regard" for something akin to a sacred or holy object. "And then to punch it with, 'I'm gonna steal it,'" he added with a laugh, "it's so ridiculous you just can't help but love it."

And love it, people do. Despite the inherent cheesiness of the nearly 20-year-old film, it boasts an audience score of 76 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

You can watch the clip below, with Cage talking about National Treasure around the six-minute mark.