London:

Nicolas Cage thanks his father for having gifted him a Pinocchio toy because it sparked his imagination as a child. Contactmusic.com quoted him as saying, “It was a little toy car being driven by Pinnocchio. For whatever the reason Pinocchio’s head fell off because I played with it a little too roughly and my father picked up the head and he went into the garden and he planted it. The next morning an enormous thing had grown in the garden and I ripped it open and it was a giant wooden Pinocchio. I was scratching my head trying to figure out how that grew. Then I started planting everything.” He added, “I planted all my Hot Wheels. I had a little GI Joe slipper and I thought if I planted that it would grow really big and I could put my sleeping bag in it. My father really got me thinking in an imaginative way at a young age. Hands down, that was the best Christmas present I ever got because it was a tool to stimulate my imagination.” Cage won an Oscar for his performance in Leaving Las Vegas and has starred in hits such as Con Air and Gone in Sixty Seconds.