Behind the Scenes: Face/Off (Woo, 1997) with John Travolta and Nicolas Cage

Face-Off started as a spec script with Mike and I. This was the summer of 1990. And at the time, everyone in Hollywood was looking for the next Die Hard. We never got a sense in most action movies of the 90s that the antagonist had any life at all. And we decided that we were going to do something in which the bad guy was every bit as interesting and complex as the hero. We had both been fans of the movie White Heat. One of my favorite movies of all time. It's a great story in which this cop goes undercover into prison to infiltrate James Cagney's gang. We went to see it together and started getting some ideas. And initially, the notion was, let's do Birdman of Alcatraz set in the future. And suddenly, we both felt somewhat inspired by that because we could see, well, you could still have this very gritty action movie, but it could be very imaginative and it could be something you've never seen before. And as naive as we were, expense be damned. From that idea, why can't the bad guy be as interesting as the good guy? That spilled over into, why can't the bad guy be the good guy? For the first time in Hollywood, really, in my opinion, a lot of people at the studio saw that action movies could be clever. Another thing, a friend of a friend had been in a hang gliding accident and they literally had to remove most of the skin off his face, reconstruct his bone matter, and put it back on. When I saw him post-surgery, like two years after the surgery, you couldn't tell he had had surgery at all. We really felt we had something that the studios really would respond to considering what was being made at the time. Well, we did get Joel Silver's interest and he brought it to Warner Brothers. We had heard that Woo had been approached. We encountered a project when we first came over here. It was at Silver Pictures. I really loved the concept. I loved the character, all the characters in the whole story. And then that he passed. The problem was, I just feel I hadn't learned enough to make a great sci-fi movie. Because originally, it was a huge sci-fi film. It had a lot of great imagination, a lot of great CG shots. As I remember, at that time, we were talking about cars floating in mid-air and a secretary would be a hologram to the likeness of Marilyn Monroe. And the prison is a sphere, and it's suspended in the middle of the ocean. It's a lot of great, great stuff. John said, this is sci-fi, I can't do it. And so we didn't do anything with it. Warner Brothers put it into Turnaround. We resold it to Paramount through David Permit. I became involved with Face Off when I got a call from Steve Ruther. Michael Douglas and Steve Ruther had a company together. And they were putting the film together and we had some meetings and they asked me to do it. And I love John's work, I like them quite a bit. I knew Michael from other pictures. And I like the project, I like the script. So it had all the things that attract me, a good script and a good group of people behind it. When it went to Paramount, Rob Cohen was attached as the director. Rob really made it okay with them to say, yeah, there's something here that can attract A-list talent. Rob came to us also just in the development process and said, look, the futuristic stuff is great, it's all very exciting, it's very expensive. He never said take it out, but he said, actors, good actors aren't gonna care about that stuff. We had kind of come to the conclusion that we could be more confident in frankly what we had lucked into, which is a very unusual action movie in which the stakes are entirely personal. It was still more science fiction. And Rob went on to make Dragonheart. That's what Douglas Ruther went after John Woo again. Often I think the key to getting the right cast is a good script once again, but also signing a good director. After we made our first movie, when we were about to do Broken Arrow, Michael Douglas came to us and offered John the project. And John said, it's the same project, the script is maybe a little slightly different, but it's sci-fi. And then I told him honestly, because I really love the concept, I love the story, but I only like to make a human story. Besides, he's committed to do Broken Arrow, so he passed on it. We're having a conceit in the script that the film has to be set into the future because the face operation, you want to cut $15 million out of the movie, cut the future and just accept that perhaps this operation can be done, that there is some technology that's not available. And in fact, it has been done. At that time we thought, okay, maybe changing faces is not possible, but now it is not science fiction anymore. I'm on the internet and I look, and they're doing the first full face transplant now, they're doing. So it was a visionary picture in that way. You know, if we as the filmmakers believe it, the audience is going to believe it. They said, what do you want to do with it? And we said, we want to continue to strip away the extraneous parts. We want to make it more real and stay on the people. And they said, great, that's what we want to do too. The emotions become more real if the story and the surrounding becomes more real. And meanwhile, you know, FaceUp has gone to other directors and come back to us. Three years later, when I was working on the Broken Arrow, all of a sudden I've got a call from Michael Douglas and Steve Woofer, and they offered that to me again. At that point, we were rewriting the script for Michael and Steve and David, and we were stripping away both the expense and the distraction of the science fiction of it all. I never knew how to make a great sci-fi film, you know? So, because I don't even know how to use a computer. You know, that was a problem. Mike and I spent a lot of our time fighting off attempts to strip out the emotion. And I think that too often in Hollywood at large, there's, you know, kind of a bias or even a fear against making those films emotional. The structure of the story never changed. I mean, it was always about these two people who were taking over each other's lives and no one else knew about it and the ramifications of that from an emotional perspective. John said the heart of a film is not the high-tech stuff. It's really the people, the characters. I think John was absolutely right to, you know, sort of shuffle away from the sci-fi aspect and take it into the human aspect of it. There is an underlying theme about dealing with this tragic loss and still trying to maintain a relationship and a balance between revenge and work and family. And it's part of what I like about John Woo as a director is he's drawn to those kinds of conflicts. That it became, you know, a morality tale, I think was really fascinating and interesting and made it, I think, a much more human story than it was. And the final pieces of the puzzle were the casting of the two leads. Initially, when it was very sci-fi heavy, even before we wrote the script, we were like, wouldn't it be cool if Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger were in a movie together? Why we first envisioned those two guys, other than the fact they were the biggest movie stars in the world at the time, you know, the movie doesn't work unless the actors have a well-established persona to play against and that the audience is in on the joke of the fact that they're playing each other. And there were other pairings that were suggested to us over the years. It's not gonna work because that actor may be a fine actor, but the audience doesn't have any sense of who they are. We felt it was crucial that it would be a lifelong obsession to cause someone like Sean Archer to undergo such a radical surgery. Consequently, you have Nicolas Cage and John Travolta who are able to mimic each other, who are natural mimics, and who enjoyed mimicking each other. John Travolta actually signed up pretty quickly to the film. Thanks to Quentin Tarantino, he was the one who told Travolta, you should work with this guy, John Woo, and then he showed him films and so forth. And John, in turn, talked to Nick, and, you know, so everything happened. The biggest attraction was John Woo because I had worked with him before. And then the icing on the cake was Nic Cage. Another choice was Nicolas Cage. I have greatly admired him. You know, I loved to work with him, you know, since when I got to Hollywood, you know, both of them were a great choice for the two characters. Nick and I had to collectively choose what each part was going to be about because we didn't want to get stuck playing things that didn't make sense to each other. And what that does is give both Travolta and myself a chance to do something that I feel really hasn't been done before, which is to capture each other's essences and then try to run with it and make these different characters seem real. So it was really a kind of a collective acting experience. And it was great to see them have so much fun together because I watched them sort of like talking about mannerisms that they might, you know, mimic off of each other and tones of voice and things like that. And so as an actor, it was fun to watch them sort of piece together how they were going to pull off, you know, doing this switch. That doesn't really resonate unless, you know, you know, you've seen John Travolta in Greece and all these other movies and where he's this very handsome, you know, glamorous guy. And it's only fun if, you know, he's sort of making fun of him, of himself and his image. Travolta really wanted to start working immediately. He was looking at the walk and finding ways of kind of modeling my walk. And I thought, well, the bad guy should have a distinct walk that's different from the good guy. And I watched Nick's natural walk and I went, oh my goodness, that it's a walk I haven't seen on screen yet. And I was trying to find certain mannerisms in his face immediately that I could borrow. It was a lot of fun. I think if you watch the film, you see a little bit of Nick Cage and John Travolta and vice versa, and they did a great job. Ha ha ha ha, nuts. You all right? Yeah. Too hard? Oh, no. The great thing about working with people of that caliber is they come to work prepared, but they bring something to the role, which John's loves. Because John's an actor's director, because he'd come in, you rehearse a scene, you talk about it. And if the actors have what he thinks is a great idea, I mean, you're incorporating that into it. So, you know, he really works well in a collaborative effort with them. I always like to give a lot of creative freedom for the actors. I like them to put their own experience into the scene. He's so busy thinking about the technicalities of an incredibly difficult shoot, so he trusts the actors to show him stuff, and he likes it or he doesn't. While we're shooting all those sequences, I usually ask the writers, please step away for a few minutes. Ha ha ha ha. No, no, no. Let them change the dialogue, let them change. Honestly, I would get to the set and look at certain things, and then just make stuff up, and either John would go like, like, ah, or he'd be like. When I first time came to Hollywood, I've been told there's so many rules for making a Hollywood film. First, you can never let a hero cry. The second is that you cannot let the actor change anything on a script. Everything's got to be based on a script. You cannot let them change the lines. Ooh. In Hong Kong, I get used to work with the actors so closely. I try many ways to bring out a true experience, a true feeling into the character. That's what I did. John works out for himself where the character arcs are going to go for the characters, and where the turning points and the barriers and things like that are going to be. But when an actor can take that character off the page and what your vision of what that character was, and then they take it like 150% over that, that's what each one of those actors brought to this role. The last few days, the actors were really tired because they have never worked such a horrible, long hour before. So, suppose the last line is, okay, good night, see you tomorrow. So, since they were so tired, because I didn't say cut, you know, so they continued to act, you know, whatever they came up with. So, after they say goodbye, and they turn their face off, right? That's what John brought to the movie every day was to make sure those moments were never lost. The electricity between the people never got lost under this enormous production. I'm always more impressed with someone who has less to do and fills the screen. And each of these small characters are just full on screen, you know? When you see them, you'll remember each of them. And then, so, when I worked with John and Nick Chase, they were very, very happy. So, and by the other hand, I always like one take. I have never liked to take more than three. The other time was when the first day when we were shooting with John and Joan, there was a very emotional scene. They were talking about their son. And then, while we are rehearsing, I play some music for building up the emotion. After the first take, I say, good, let's move on. John, he wasn't so sure. I said, John, are you sure this shot is okay? He said, yeah, I think it's fantastic. And John said, the studio paid me a lot of money. And I don't mind to do 30 times or 50 times. And I said to him, I don't care how much the studio pay you, all I need, just one take. He'll pick the one with you that's the best, and that's not always the case, you know? What I was really impressed with John, particularly on this, is that, yes, there is this enormous story of these two characters going through this kind of scientific experience where their faces literally are able to change. And there are a lot of action sequences. But John really felt that the film wouldn't work as a whole if the audience didn't care about what was going on within the family. And we presented in a way that the audience really did care what happened to this family. The casting of the wife, Eve Archer, was a huge issue for us. Joan Allen is so great. She's the anchor of the movie. I was cast as Eve Archer just because John Woo had wanted me to play the part. And it's my understanding that Nicholas Cage and John Travolta were supportive of me doing it as well, so I didn't audition for it. And I just, you know, read the script and decided that it was a project I wanted to be part of. She's got such gravity as an actress and such weight that she balances out Nick and I very well. She's almost the reality check in the whole movie. At first, we ran into some resistance because somebody said, you know, oh, you know, she's not young. Maybe the mother should be a stepmother. But that's not the point. That's the point is she is the mother of the child and the wife of, you know, John Travolta. What makes her role so important? Because we feel Joan Allen is a great actress and she is so convincing as a doctor and as a good wife. You know, and she looks so innocent, pure, and elegant. That kind of woman is great for the wife role. So we have fought very hard to get her. When I pick the weapon for the actors, I like to, you know, pick a weapon to match his character and also, you know, see how they use it, you know, and how to make him look great while he's holding that kind of gun. The gold gun is one of the big ones. We needed something flashy. Nick went on and on about wanting flash, wanted flash. Mr. Wu likes the idea. Nicolas Cage wants him. So what do I do? I built it. I built five with the prearrangement that one of those weapons was pre-sold to play in Hollywood. Certain parts I wanted to be black so that it wasn't just completely gold and looked gaudy. I want it to be tasteful. I wanted a tasteful looking weapon. Nick thought he was born in the year of a dragon and he liked to see his gun with the dragon sculpture on the gun. I brought him to John Wu first and I opened up the case and I showed him. There were two sitting there. And he went, oh, big eyes, big smile. Hef's one picks it up and goes, oh, nice, nice. Nick Cage came unglued. Nick just went, these are so cool. Oh my God, check these out. Dig it, man. And you're going to tie it too soon. Here came to Hollywood, extremely talented, gifted, cinematic visionary who most people in Hollywood, including us, had never really heard of. The fact that the good guy takes on the identity of the bad guy and vice versa is really a John Wu trademark. He's definitely plugged into sort of the masculine mythos, the image of strong, confident, audacious, testosterone driven guy, which is funny because John himself is so kind of shy and retiring. When I first met him, I expected him to be sort of like John Houston, chomping on a cigar and doing shots and telling stories about shark fishing or something like that. And he was just, you know, he's this very quiet, shy guy who likes to cook. He's a, first of all, a visual stylist. His command of cinema is immediately apparent when you see his movies because the way he manipulates the shots, the way he moves the camera, it's obvious that it's John Wu. So he's a signature director. He's just so poetic, the way he designs action scenes. He's just incredible. Very funny. He has a great sense of humor. Open the door. Bottom line, John is extraordinarily talented. He's an actor as well as a director. I really need their help on the sets because it's some kind of cultural thing. Even though I have learned so much from this country, you know, there is a lot of jokes and a lot of great humor in the film. I need them to explain to me what's the line mean and where's the punch. So I think it's very helpful. Like, for example, the scene when John's father talking with his daughter. I mean, what a bad John's father. One of the shootouts where we were using mirrors and they were actually did end up with one of the classic John Wu moments where they both got their guns at each other head to head. It was pretty complicated probably to edit and pretty complicated to choreograph. With John, I thought right away that if I said we couldn't do something, we didn't do it. And I had to change tactics so that I had to be really sure that if I asked for something to be cut, I really meant it. I remember, for example, we were gonna film the shootout in the church, which is a crucial scene in the movie, also a great scene. And the day before we were gonna shoot it, Arthur Anderson, the first AD, came to me and said, John wants to have pigeons in that scene. I'm thinking, geez, why didn't he tell me this before? And I'm also thinking, if you have pigeons in the scene, you're never ever gonna get that scene on time when we're also, by that time, a little bit behind schedule. So I went over to John and said, John, you can't have pigeons. And John just looked down at his shoes and he walked away from me. And effectively, I cut the pigeons out of the scene. That night, I went home and I couldn't sleep. The pigeons are like a John Wu trademark. And I thought about it and I came in the next morning and I went over to John and said, look, John, you know, when I said we have to cut the pigeons what I really meant to say was, I'm concerned that the pigeons are gonna hold us up. But if you promise me that they'll never hold us up, then you can have the pigeons. And his face lit up. The great thing about John that I learned was, if he made that commitment, I could rely on that commitment. He works with a camera like it's clay or a puzzle or a sculpture. He orchestrates a movie as well. He's a real artist in that way. And unusual, more unusual than any other action director. He's very, very demanding. I mean, he's no less demanding on me because, you know, we are friends. But because I respect his artistry, so I would do anything I can to help him, you know, make his movies. John's family to me. John's like an uncle. I love him like family. I'd do anything in the world for John. John and Nate, whatever they came to the set, they keep saying, they just feel like they're on vacation, you know, they were so relaxed at the time. Cut! That's a cut. Good luck. The thing really made me happy was that all the actors, writers, directors, and producers, and even the crew, we all really work like a family. Everybody care about each other, you know, so that was great. Anderson, Montgomery, Alabama. Chicago, Illinois. We had a weapons guy on the film, Rock Allotti. Rock, I think, was an ex-SWAT team member or something like that. He's a real fanatic gun guy. He's very, very good, very safety conscious, and took time to train our actors both in how to hold a weapon and how to fire a weapon. You go to work with John Woo, you have Arthur Anderson as first AD, who's like family. You know, Brian Smurs, who's like family. These are all people that John uses all the time and over the course of years, working with these people, you get very close. I think that everyone who worked with me, they're all very talented. I think I have a duty to show all their talents on the screen. By face-off, John, pretty much Mr. Woo, allowed me to have a heavy say in the weapons. At that point, he's trusting me and he lets me pretty much do what I think should be done. I give them a lot of creative freedom and I respect them. Sometimes they came up with some good, some bad idea, and I will use it. Our stunt coordinator was Brian Smurs, and Brian was a very innovative stunt guy. He was one of the first American stunt guys to really perfect working with wires. Of course, John Woo, coming from Hong Kong, used the form of wire work ages before the Americans did. Fire in the hole! Cueing the actor, you're cueing the effects guy, you're cueing picture vehicles. There is a lot of information that has to be coordinated. I mean, time to the second, or it's not gonna be in the movie and it's gonna take you six hours to reset it. So that's one of the challenges of work, but that's what makes it so exciting because you know, every day when you go to work and you sit down and you block the master out, you better come with your 110% game because you don't want to let John down and you know he's gonna deliver. The idea behind the prison was that it was to appear as if it was under an oil derrick in the middle of the ocean. Although you don't know that until the very last second when they, you know, come up. So the idea that it was a concrete box that was sunk into the bottom of the ocean and held these most vicious of prisoners. Hey! Excuse me, buddy. I hate to show all of that. Are you all right? You're a favorite, man. Yes. I remember when we were staging the first gunfight and what we did is we had two Steadicams side by side and we had this intricate plan working out with Brian for all the stunt guys coming through the ceiling, coming down, cameras going around. Took us about eight hours to stage it. And then the effects guys were gonna set it and rig it and, you know, we're gonna shoot it, you know, on Monday. So we come back Monday night. Well, what we didn't realize is that the effects guys had put the hits in and then the art department had come in and you could see the hits. And so what they did is they put another layer of plaster over the hits. And so we get ready to go and I'm with both Steadicam guys because I'm cuing guys coming through windows and when they're supposed to pan. Actually, the bullet hits in the wall start going off and there's so much plaster over the hits now. It's a whiteout. I can't see anything. Just keep shooting. There's a guy coming over here. I don't care if you can see him. Because, you know, a lot of times film will cut through dust. You know, it was total chaos. And there's 14 effects guys on these risers behind us setting, you know, 3,000 hits off. Who would have thought to get a perspective on that scene through the vision of a child's eyes to get the childlike view on this chaos and a child not understanding what was going on around him because I always feel everyone, they're all born innocent. You know, some people, they're just ruined by the violence. But I really loved that moment. So I said, I got to make it. You know, if there's overtime or over budget, I'll pay for the scene. That made my lawyer and my agents in a great panic. They're like, John, you couldn't say that. But at the last moment in the studio, you know, they let me do it. The whole movie is all about a family. I don't really care about the good guy or the bad guy, you know, the bomb everywhere, you know, that kind of thing. And then when we come to the ending scene, the scene was John Travolta bring the kid home, you know. So, and some people in the studio, they have a little problem with that. They said, you know, maybe just let John Travolta came home alone and then meet his family and hug his wife and kid and happy ending. Because I've been told, the audience will never like to see the hero bring the enemy's child home. I said, no, no. I said, and they explained to me, they said, it may be, we came from a different culture. You know, for the, some of the American audience, they maybe have a problem with that kind of ending. I said, it's not about a culture. It's all about a human thing. I think that let the hero bring the enemy's child home is a very human. We did a screen test, you know. About 60% of the audience, they were asking, where's the child? John didn't bring the child home. Why nobody care about the child? And then the studio, wow, John, you're right. You're right. And then asked me to reshoot the ending. Tar Target, maybe because he's tried to emphasize too much on his style. He think, oh, people like my films because they like slow motion, because they like this camera movement and so forth. He emphasized too much on that. Broken Arrow, he went the other way. He would not admit it, but I think he wanted to prove to people that this is an American film. This is not a Hong Kong film in English. And so based on the experiences of those two films, he really know how to handle the craft of making a film here. And that's the result of Face Off. And to the credit of Paramount, they were very hands-off. Basically, he got to make the film that he wants to make. I really love the script, and I think it's a fantastic idea. And the two writers are very nice to me. And then I also feel a great honor to working with Michael Douglas. You know, there are a few standout films that you treasure, and Face Off is one of those. I really treasure the experience of working with John Woo and a great collaborative group of people to work with.