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.
