Nicolas Cage’s Face/Off freak-out: how a deranged action film sent him over the edge

In Nicolas Cage’s latest film, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, there is a scene in which Cage – playing a parodic version of himself as a washed-up actor who accepts a million dollars to attend the birthday party of his most committed fan – is confronted by an unusual spectacle. Amidst a collection of memorabilia and artefacts, he sees a life-size wax model of him, in character as the archvillain Castor Troy from his 1997 film Face/Off, holding aloft a pair of golden guns. Cage-as-Cage is baffled and stunned in equal measure. “Is this supposed to be me?” he asks. “It’s grotesque... I’ll give you 20,000 for it.”

Anyone familiar with Chekhov’s adage, that if a gun appears in the first act it must be fired in the third, will be unsurprised that the golden guns reappear later in the film. Yet the homage to one of Cage’s most beloved and successful films, a quarter-century since its initial release, is no mere piece of chicanery. 

The actor recently disclosed in an interview at Unbearable Weight’s SXSW premiere that he had rewatched Face/Off in order to prepare both for the film and the subsequent publicity. “I was really wowed by [the movie]... I think it’s aged beautifully,” Cage said. He has never changed his views; shortly after its 1997 release, he said in an interview that “without wishing to blow my own horn, I think it’s a masterpiece.” 

Cage is not wrong. In a generally poor summer for blockbuster films, with the likes of Batman and Robin and Speed 2 desecrating cinemas worldwide, Face/Off was a witty and thrilling treat, which worked simultaneously as a high-octane action extravaganza and a meta-exploration of the very idea of performance and acting. With Mexican stand-offs and explosions, naturally. 

It was a massive box office hit, confirmed Cage and his co-star John Travolta as two of the leading actors of the day and established its director John Woo as an A-list auteur, thanks to his wholescale importation of the tropes and visual ideas that had initially made his name in Hong Kong cinema. But its success belied a production process that saw its star and director pursuing their own esoteric interests to the limits, and confounding the studio in the process. 

The origin of the film came in a spec script written in 1990 by the screenwriting duo Mike Werb and Michael Colleary. Impressed by the way that the likes of Shane Black could conjure up million-dollar deals with pitches for high-concept action films, they decided that they would come up with a spin on the then-popular vogue for body swap films, as seen in Vice Versa and Big.

However, rather than a family-oriented comedy, Werb and Colleary believed that they could transpose the idea into the sci-fi action genre. They came up with a script set a hundred years in the future, filled with the usual iconography of such settings; the Golden Gate Bridge was derelict and occupied by the homeless, and flying cars were now de rigueur. But the central idea – that a cop and a master criminal should exchange identities, and that each would find adopting their nemesis’s life surprisingly exciting – remained intact throughout development. 

Perhaps inevitably, the script came to the attention of uber-producer Joel Silver, who optioned the rights, but nothing happened for years. Directors came and went, including Fast and the Furious filmmaker Rob Cohen, none of whom seemed as convinced by the premise as its screenwriters. Various suggestions were mooted – such as Troy and his nemesis Sean Archer eventually uniting in the final act to defuse a nuclear bomb that had always been intended as a McGuffin – but nothing came of it. 

It seemed as if Face/Off would remain one of the innumerable unmade projects that litter Hollywood. As Colleary said in a 2019 interview with Shortlist: “It was not a very productive, creative environment for those two years and it was very discouraging... a lot of things had to go wrong to help this movie along.”

There was even the suggestion that Archer and Troy both be rewritten as young men, and at one point Johnny Depp showed interest in starring in the film; he backed out when he realised that the title did not refer to hockey. 

A piece of serendipity eventually came in 1995, when Werb and Colleary watched John Woo’s 1989 classic Hong Kong action thriller The Killer. Its themes of duality, honour and love – interspersed with staggering set-pieces and operatic intensity – seemed to dovetail with the script that they had written. Both men exclaimed: “Face/Off is a John Woo movie!” It happened that Woo, coming off a pair of unsatisfying Hollywood projects, Hard Target and Broken Arrow, was actively looking for a project that he could stage in the same grand fashion that he had brought to his earlier work. 

Although Broken Arrow had not been a particular hit, it had made a profit and had introduced Woo to Travolta, then hot again thanks to his career-resurrecting role in Pulp Fiction, and the two were keen to work together once more. The actor had always wanted to appear in a film about duality – a project that he was to have starred in, The Double, directed by Roman Polanski, had recently collapsed amidst  “creative difficulties” – and if it could star Cage, an Oscar-winner for Leaving Las Vegas who had established his action hero bona fides in Michael Bay’s The Rock, so much the better. 

Combine the two men with Woo, Webb and Colleary’s script, and a raft of heavyweight producers that included Michael Douglas, and the film was fast-tracked into production by Touchstone Pictures, with a substantial $80 million budget; a bold decision given that the film’s ultra-violent content would guarantee it an R-rating in the US and an 18 certificate in the United Kingdom. 

All the same, when production began, those involved in it were worried that they had embarked upon something absurd. When the basic storyline was summarised – a cop and a criminal swap faces – it sounded ridiculous, the sort of thing that would forever become a punchline on late-night television shows. Werb was so fearful of its prospects that he pulled out of buying a house, believing that the film’s failure would ruin his career, and many of his colleagues believed that the script would be impossible to translate coherently onto the screen.

Travolta – an actor never known for his lack of personal vanity – had his own thoughts, too. He disliked a scene in which, playing Troy-as-Archer, he was required to denigrate his new face, especially “this ridiculous chin”. Colleary had to reassure him that “the joke is that you’re such a famously handsome person that saying that anyone would complain about looking like you... that’s the joke: that Nicolas Cage doesn’t understand how good-looking he now is.” The actor was mollified. 

Although the screenwriters subsequently described filming as a joy, with a blessed lack of studio interference – Colleary commented that this was because “people recognised they couldn’t rewrite this script without potentially really f______ it up”. Cage, working with Woo for the first time, saw that the studio had doubts about his performance. For both his manic villain and stoic, wronged hero, he amped up the drama and the comedy to a point that was unusual in this kind of film. 

The broad hints of sexual perversity that he brought to Troy (“If I were to send you flowers, where would I... no, wait, let me rephrase that. If I were to let you suck my tongue, would you be grateful?” he leers to an undercover agent in an early scene) were matched by the unrestrained mania that he later lent to Archer: the film’s supposed protagonist. 

The actor took his performance in the obscure black comedy Vampire’s Kiss – a personal favourite of his –  as his template, and proudly described how he “cherry-picked” the most absurd moments from that film for his dual performance. It was a risky strategy that he later suggested “resulted in some phone calls” from the studio, who were concerned that their $80 million summer blockbuster was going to be derailed by its lead actor going what Cage has subsequently called full “nouveau shamanic”. 

Subsequently, he said of his work: “There was the scene in the jail cell where Sean Archer is pretending he’s Castor Troy and so it was so... cubist. And I remember I was like, ‘I’m Castor Troy!’ And it went on and on, almost like a riot…God, it’s such a trippy movie.”

Yet his director was delighted with his star’s boldness. Woo encouraged Cage to watch his Hong Kong pictures to understand what he was looking for, and the actor took pleasure in bringing in obscure allusions to Woo’s earlier work. In the opening scene, in which Troy attempts to assassinate Archer and accidentally kills his son instead, leading to a lifelong enmity between the two, Cage’s character wears a fake moustache. True Woo aficionados would immediately understand that this was a reference to a similar scene in The Killer, in which Woo’s regular star Chow-Yun Fat wore the same disguise to attempt a hit; Cage was only too delighted to continue the tradition. 

Face/Off took six months to shoot, which was a remarkably long time for this kind of picture. This was mainly because Woo insisted on staging the complex action scenes – a mixture of balletic gunfights and vehicle-heavy clashes – for real, without CGI or models, ending with a spectacular speedboat chase that alone took four weeks to film. An already nervous studio began to think that the title would put audiences off. After all, who wants to see a John Woo film about ice hockey? 

So it fell to Cage, once again, to ad-lib the line “I’d like to take his face... off” in a key scene, which he did, “18 or 20 times”, gradually building to a point of utter hysteria. It’s possible to see his co-star, the actor and director Nick Cassavetes, struggle to conceal his amusement, as Cage-as-Archer declares: “I’d like to take his face off... eyes, nose, skin... it’s coming off.” An iconic moment therefore ensured that the moment, and the title, remained in the film. 

It opened in the US in June 1997, to ecstatic reviews from critics delighted that Woo had finally been allowed to retain both the thematic and visual hallmarks of his Hong Kong style. Audiences, meanwhile, revelled in both the extraordinary action scenes and the black comedy of its lead actors attempting to imitate one another’s mannerisms and performance styles. (Before shooting, Travolta suggested that Cage watch his family comedy Phenomenon to get an idea of his acting techniques; his co-star gave him Vampire’s Kiss and Leaving Las Vegas.) 

Empire magazine called it “the greatest action film ever made”, and 25 years later, when R-rated one-off blockbusters of this kind are far rarer than they were, Face/Off remains an eccentric and untameable masterpiece, full of witty dialogue, exceptional pyrotechnics and a brilliant supporting cast that includes Joan Allen as Archer’s understandably baffled wife and the great Colm Feore in a cameo as the doctor who performs the titular operation. 

A pivotal gun battle choreographed to Over The Rainbow may even be Woo’s single greatest achievement in film, combining balletic grace and violence to awe-inspiring effect. The film’s only real flaws are some dubious sexist moments, over-obvious use of stunt doubles and an inevitable sense that, despite Travolta’s highly entertaining performance, it is Cage who dominates the screen throughout in what may be his signature role. 

As the actor prepares for a long overdue comeback, returning to mainstream cinema after dozens of undistinguished straight-to-streaming pictures made to settle his considerable debts, he has been extolling the virtues of Face/Off, not least because of the explicit allusions to it in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.

Although he has been dismissive about rumours of a sequel in which he would star (as, spoiler alert, Troy ends the film dead and presumably faceless, this would be a tricky undertaking), calling them “conjecture without any base or foundation to it”), there may be another, more basic reason why he would not wish to return to the character: simple self-preservation. As he commented to Variety: “There was a moment in there where I think I actually left my body. I got scared, am I acting or is this real? I can see it if I look at the movie, that one moment, it's in my eyes.” 

As Cage finally regains his mojo, derailing his equilibrium and perhaps his sanity might be a step too far, even for the nouveau shaman who famously ate a cockroach as part of his Method approach. Perhaps he should be allowed to remain in his body, after all.