Nicolas Cage, meet the weatherman.
It was last winter that Cage huddled with WGN meteorologist Tom Skilling to soak up the nuances of being a weatherman.
“It was something to the effect of, ‘I want to ask you a couple of things,’ ” Skilling recalled. “Isn’t that funny–Nicolas Cage asking me for advice?”
It’s not so far-fetched. Cage may know a thing or two about acting, but Skilling happens to know a thing or two about the weather.
This is why director Gore Verbinski sent the script for “The Weather Man,” which opens Friday, to Skilling for perusal and huddled with Skilling at WGN’s Chicago studios in March 2004, where much of Cage’s forecasting scenes were filmed.
Skilling showed Cage the correct positioning of his hands in front of the blue screen, how to cock his head in the direction he is pointing and how to keep his eye on the monitor while moving in front of the blue screen.
“He would look over at me, occasionally to make sure he was doing things correctly,” Skilling said of Cage. “I was there in case he had a question. He’s so good, he didn’t have many questions.”
There have been other big-screen portrayals of weathermen, but the one that sticks out to Skilling is Bill Murray in the comedy “Groundhog Day.”
“It was an amusing portrayal,” Skilling said. “A lot of these movies portray stereotypes of weatherpeople–the weatherperson is kind of a lightweight, not real deep. I don’t think any movie has really addressed what a serious weather forecaster does. But, quite frankly, I don’t think that would be that interesting to people.”
But Skilling said he was pleasantly surprised with Cage’s work and said he’d give it four stars. “It’s a movie I’m surprised Hollywood made.”
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Edited by Curt Wagner (cwwagner@tribune.com) and Victoria Rodriguez (vrodriguez@tribune.com)
