“Face/Off” turns 25: How was the strangest 90s action blockbuster made?

The early 1990s were a golden age for action movies, with the box office success of “Hard to Kill” / “Die Hard” reviving the well-known genre, resulting in excellent blockbusters like “Total Recall” (1990), “ Terminator 2″ (1991), “Demolition Man” (1993), “Speed” (1994), “The Rock” (1996) and many, many more where the quality of the action was only surpassed by its curious premises. But no other film is as strange and unique as “Face/Off” (1997), a magnum opera from the Hong Kong director john woo that this June 25 turned 25 years since its premiere.

For those who haven’t seen it, “Face/off” – “Contra/cara” in Latin America – revolves around FBI agent Sean Archer (John Travolta), who undergoes a face transplant operation to infiltrate the gang. terrorist from his nemesis Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage) and find a powerful bomb hidden in the city of Los Angeles. And while everything seems to be going well with the maneuver at first, it spirals out of his control when Troy manages to escape with Archer’s face, setting them both on course for an inevitable and final collision.

With such an eye-catching premise, it’s inevitable to think that the face swap was the seed from which the entire movie was born, but one would be wrong. As Michael Colleary and Mike Werb, the film’s writers and producers, revealed to Shortlist.com, the first version of “Face/Off” – written in the mid-1990s – lacked some of the film’s most recognizable elements, instead drawing inspiration from in the classic film “White Heat” (1949) to tell the story of a man who had to survive a prison riot and infiltrate a criminal gang.

“We were working with the idea that our hero is undercover as someone else.”, Colleary tells the Independent. “Then it turned into someone from the outside taking over her life. But how does that work? We really stumbled upon the idea of ​​a face swap”.

“Once we came up with the idea, we couldn’t stop writing,” Werb said.

With such a fantastic element as the ability to perfectly transplant faces, the initial script for the film was set 100 years in the future. From this version of the script, the use of magnetic boots by the inmates – taken from the set of “Super Mario Bros.” – remained in the final version of the film. – which we see during the prison scene.

a delicate operation

The script was initially purchased by famed producer Joel Silver for Warner Bros., but creative differences caused the project to languish for nearly two years before the rights to the story fell to David Permut and Paramount Pictures. It was under this studio that work actually began on the film, with Hollywood veteran Steven Reuther and actor Michael Douglas serving as executive producers.

The first director hired was Rob Cohen. Although this filmmaker is now remembered for starting franchises like “The Fast and the Furious” and “XXX”, back then he only had a couple of movies on his CV like the comedy “Scandalous” (1984) and the biopic “ Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story” (1993). In the case of “Face/Off,” Cohen wanted to put his own spin on the story, introducing several ideas that “Face/Off” fans should be thankful were left out of the film, such as the fact that the bomb at the center from the film she gains consciousness at some point in the story, forcing Archer and Troy to work together to disarm her. In the end Cohen left the project to work on “Dragonheart” and the tape had to find a new director.

Next on the list was artist and filmmaker Marco Brambilla, who had just finished shooting “Demolition Man.” The era of this director was marked by the decision of Paramount Pictures to include Johnny Depp in “Face/Off” in their attempt to make him a movie star. Depp, who was initially enthusiastic about the project upon hearing the title, eventually refused to accept it when he found out it wasn’t a hockey movie, taking Brambilla with him.

They say that third time’s a charm and in the case of “Face/Off” the conventional wisdom proved true with the hiring of John Woo. At that time, the Hong Kong director had already left his mark on his country’s cinema with films like “The Killer” (1989), but he was just entering Hollywood with films like “Hard Target” (1993) and “Broken Arrow” ( nineteen ninety six).

Woo gives it many of the elements that make “Face/Off” so iconic, such as its elaborate and almost theatrical shootout scenes – with the inevitable use of double pistols -, long shots of fabric flapping in the wind, and, of course, its required shots of pigeons fluttering. The director also focused the story, concentrating his attention not only on the action but also on the character development, taking his time to show the effects that putting himself in each other’s lives has on both Troy and Archer, giving the film a depth beyond the typical ‘blockbuster’ of the time.

Face to face

It’s hard to think of “Face/Off” without the iconic duo of Nicolas Cage and John Travolta, but had the circumstances been different, we might have seen a completely different version of the film. So when Michael Colleary and Mike Werb initially conceived the film’s script, they wrote it with two of today’s biggest action stars in mind: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. Other pairs discussed for lead roles included Bruce Willis and Alec Baldwin, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, Michael Douglas and Harrison Ford, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal, as well as Denzel Washington and Wesley Snipes.

Casting Nicolas Cage was a particularly fortuitous decision, as the actor not only raised the film’s profile with his presence thanks to his recent Oscar win for starring in “Leaving Las Vegas” in 1995, but also provided his best – and most memeable – moments of the tape with his usual energy.

For his part, Travolta came to “Face/Off” alongside director John Woo, with whom he had just filmed “Broken Arrow,” providing a welcome contrast to Cage’s energy in the film and continuing his career renaissance. which began when he starred in “Pulp Fiction” in 1994.

The real pleasure of the performances of both is when it happens after the change of face, when the actors have to ‘inhabit’ the life of the other, imitating their mannerisms, gestures and ways of speaking, a process that was achieved after long weeks observing each other. they.

“We had the luxury of seeing each other on a daily basis: I would see what John (Travolta) was doing and then he would see what I was doing on lip-sync, so we could find ways to mirror each other. Coincide”, Cage stated in an interview with GQ magazine.

The scene that he put set the pattern for how the acting would be in the rest of the film, curiously one of the first in the film, where Nicolas Cage – as Castor Troy – appears dressed as a priest and, under the rhythm of “The Messiah” from Georg Friedrich Händel, performs a strange dance and proceeds to inappropriately touch a young chorus girl. “I know when John (Travolta) saw that he was like ‘so let’s go with that kind of performance,'” Cage recalled.

“It was more important that we could be believable like the other”, said John Travolta in dialogue with Yahoo Entertainment. “There was more emphasis on that than being physically identical, because I was heavier than Nick, I don’t look like him or behave like him. He is so specific. He talks and walks like this and it was very easy for me to understand”.

Travolta recalled that the process of adapting to the other was much more complicated for his colleague: “It was much harder for Nick to find me. He told me ‘who are you? I’ve been watching all your movies but you’re always a different character. I do not know who you are.’”

“‘Mainly, Nick, I play characters’”, The actor replied at the time. “‘I’m not in the business of being myself on screen and I don’t want to be. It’s not that he doesn’t find me interesting, I just don’t have a catchy demeanor.’”

The work paid off, and “Face/Off” was one of the most successful films of 1997, with a global box office of $245 million. Its success is even more laudable if you take into account that other big-screen titans also came out that same year, such as “Jurassic Park”, “Titanic”, “Men in Black” and “The Fifth Element”, among many others.

Which is why perhaps the most surprising thing about recent sequel talk is how long it’s taken to suggest the project. For now the possibility of “Face/Off 2” is in charge of Adam Wingard (“Godzilla vs. Kong”) and has the tentative support of Nicolas Cage himself, with the fact that his character died at the end of the first installment does not it’s a big hurdle in Hollywood. Less certain is the possible return of John Travolta, a presence equally crucial to the success of any sequel to this film classic. Fortunately, it is not necessary to pin our hopes on this still nebulous project to enjoy the original, currently available on the Star+ streaming platform.