John Woo On Pitting Travolta And Cage Against One Another For Face/Off
You might think it's an action extravaganza, but as far as the director's concerned, Face/Off's an opera!
"I really didn't want to do Face/Off when it was first offered to me," said Nic Cage in 2011. "I'd just had my fill of playing those big over-the-top characters. I thought, 'Do I really want to play an ostentatious villain?' Then John Woo had me read the script and I realised things weren't as they seemed."
The high concept at the heart of Woo's film is that criminal Castor Troy and cop Shawn Archer literally trade faces. So it is that, while he starts off playing the flamboyant Troy, Cage soon finds himself essaying Archer, albeit an Archer cursed with the looks of his arch rival. Trust us; it works a helluva lot better than it sounds.
As he's frequently remarked throughout his career, Woo is adamant that Face/Off isn't just an exercise in blowing things up and beating people down. "Face/Off is like an opera to me. The scale is so great, the energy so powerful, the theatricality so... 'theatrical' – if this was a stage show, it would be on a par with a Carnegie Hall spectacular. With Face/Off, everything got that much bigger for me. It mightn’t have been my first Hollywood movie but it was the first time I appreciated the canvas Hollywood could grant me, the size and the scale of it.”
A picture that turns everything up to 11 and then cranks it up ever further, Face/Off is so breathlessly exciting that you’d swear there must have been a mad man at the helm. Nic Cage, however, can’t say enough good things about Hong Kong’s most famous filmmaker.
“John Woo is a gentleman in an industry that is rarely gentlemanly. He never raises his voice, he is never less than courteous, he listens – which, again, is something that’s not that common in the movies; it was the greatest imaginable work environment. It was so good that, when the press asked me what I wanted to do after Face/Off came out, I said ‘I just want to make more movies with John Woo’.”
Cage was, of course, good to his word, playing the hero in the 2002 war movie Windtalkers. For the most part, though, Woo’s American projects have had a hard time living up to Face/Off, a picture that raised the bar to such a level, you’d need a pole to clear it. Anyone foolish enough to think Wood a one-hit wonder should be sent to the nearest DVD shop to stock up on pre- and post-Hollywood classics such as Hard Boiled, The Killer and Red Cliff
Oh, and if you're one of those people who’s ever wondered why there's a '/' in the title, here's John Woo with the simple explanation - 'I didn't want people to think that this was an ice hockey movie. So we went for 'Face/Off' rather than 'Face Off'."