#Face ioff cast movie#
“The movie was originally very futuristic, and it was significantly more of a rollercoaster ride,” Werb later admitted. Initial drafts set events 100 years in the future and featured flying cars, and chimpanzee slaves while the Golden Gate Bridge served as a kind of fortress for an army of homeless people. “When we were pitching it in 1990 it just seemed insane,” Colleary explained. That idea quickly spun out into a concept that would see the protagonist and antagonist swap lives, with Werb hitting upon the genius twist that the two characters would ultimately come to enjoy their new lives more than the old ones.ĭespite the fact the concept riffed on a real-life, modern day medical procedure, both agreed that the face swapping premise called for the movie’s setting to be shifted to the future. We thought that if that can happen, then why not switch with someone?” “A friend of a friend of mine had been in a hang-gliding accident and they had to remove his entire face, reconstruct all his bones and tissue, and then put it back on. Hitting upon the idea of setting the story in a high tech prison of the future, Werb said the idea of face swapping was actually borrowed from real life. “We thought, ‘Why can’t there be a movie where the bad guy is every bit as interesting as the good guy.’ From there, we spun off into, ‘What if they become each other,’ and from there we wondered how we could do that?” Real Life Inspiration “We were sick of all the action films that depicted the bad guy as a giggling psycho bent on taking over the world,” Werb told Spec Screenplay Sales Directory. But how does that work? We really backed into the idea of a facial swap.” “Then it became, somebody on the outside takes over his life. “We were working under the idea that our hero goes undercover as somebody else,” Colleary said. So over Independence Day weekend in 1990, they got together to try and come up with a fresh spin on the tried-and-tested formula.įinding inspiration in the real-life 1971 Attica Prison riot, the pair also took their cues from the 1949 James Cagney classic White Heat, which saw a federal agent tasked with posing as the cellmate of a psychotic criminal mastermind and teaming up for a daring escape that would ultimately lead to the latter’s downfall. Colleary and Werb, who had met at UCLA Film School in the 1980s, wanted a piece of the pie.
Shane Black made headlines after pocketing a cool $1.75 million for The Last Boy Scout.
More importantly, every studio was willing to pay top dollar for anything that had even a whiff of John McClane, terrorists, or white vests. “Every studio in Hollywood was looking for the next Die Hard,” Colleary explained in an interview with Shortlist. Like all great action movies in the 1990s, the idea for Face/Off was born, in part, out of the success of Die Hard. Thankfully, as Werb recalled in a recent interview with The Independent, from the moment they all met during an introductory dinner, it was love at first sight for the pair. Even after Cage and Travolta were cast, there were concerns over whether the two stars would gel. Yet there was a time when the film’s writers Mike Werb and Michael Colleary feared the movie might never get made at all. It’s the closest the Hong Kong director ever got to replicating the magic of his earlier work on films like The Killer in American cinema. Though Woo went on to helm Mission: Impossible II, Face/Off remains his English-language magnum opus, a heady mix of dazzling gunplay, slo-mo, stand-offs, and his signature white doves. He had worked with director John Woo on the helmer’s previous English language actioner, Broken Arrow, but the pair would hit new heights here. John Travolta, meanwhile, was enjoying a career renaissance, buoyed by films like Pulp Fiction and Get Shorty. Nicolas Cage had just won an Oscar in 1995 for his breakout performance in Leaving Las Vegas, following that up with two star-making turns in The Rock and Con Air, making the idiosyncratic actor an unlikely action movie star. Built around an absurd yet ingenious premise involving a cop switching faces with a comatosed master criminal in order to find and defuse a bomb, only for said bad guy to then awaken and return the favor, it featured a director and pair of A-list stars at the peak of their career powers.
#Face ioff cast full#
The 1990s was a decade packed full of brilliant action movies but few, if any, reached the delirious heights of 1997’s Face/Off.
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