Tom Gormican still remembers the first time he saw Nicolas Cage in a film.
“It was Raising Arizona! I was really affected by how on the surface it looked like a cartoony performance, but it was all grounded in a reality that made it unexpectedly moving.
“I didn’t realise until I started writing this film many years later just how formative a viewing experience that was.”
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Today Gormican is best known as the director and co-writer of The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent, the Cage-starring meta movie that made a splash earlier this year.
The trajectory from being a Cage super-fan to creating an action-comedy centred on a fictional version of the actor was an unexpected journey – and one that almost didn’t happen. Cage initially turned down the project three times, leaving Gormican worried as to how this film could be made without him.
“Nobody else but Nicolas Cage could have played this role”, Gormican explained to Zavvi. “We couldn’t just port the script over to another actor: they wouldn’t meet the specific characteristics or have the same groundswell of goodwill beneath them.
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“We joked at one point that we’d approach Christian Bale or Daniel Day-Lewis with full Cage prosthetics, as they’d be the only people who could pull it off, also creating a bizarre additional layer of meta. The scene where Cage has to go undercover in prosthetics in that version of the film would be the one scene where they’d take theirs off – you’d have Christian Bale, playing Nicolas Cage, playing an Italian mobster!”
The director knew it couldn’t work without the actor, especially as the character is so rooted in the public perception of Cage. After briefly considering replacing Cage with a fictitious protagonist (“it just became way less interesting”), Gormican decided to write directly to his idol to persuade him to change his mind. Thankfully, it worked.
“We needed to clarify our intentions. There’s a version of this project that’s just making fun of the guy – but we were big fans and this was always designed as a celebration, which was something we needed to clear up.
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“As a celebrity, he’s used to having his identity litigated constantly in public, and this would give him the chance to take the reins of that public perception and twist it in any way he wants. It’s essentially performance art, and if you say ‘performance art’ to a guy like Nicolas Cage, he starts listening.”
With Cage signed up, Gormican started working with the actor to craft a believably ridiculous version of his star persona. But there were certain things that had to be changed from the earlier drafts of the screenplay.
“The one thing that he really didn’t want to present as was a bad father. He would always explain that, as an actor, it can be tough, but he’d always make the effort to fly home and see his kids every weekend – he’s worked really hard to never become an absentee father.
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“It forced us to come up with a new angle on that father/daughter relationship, this feeling that he’s trying to shape her into a little version of him, forcing her to have his movie taste and share the things he finds interesting.
“The rest of the script remained basically intact, but it was elevated by him bringing his own personality to scenes. The thing that actually transformed the most was Nicky, the younger version of himself that he keeps seeing as a vision – that was originally going to be his character from Con Air, we were going to shoot it in slow motion with his hair flowing wildly.
“But he didn’t like that: it was a character he played, he wanted something that represented the real him. So, he showed me this clip from when he was on Terry Wogan’s BBC chat show in 1990, promoting Wild At Heart.
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“He comes out, does a somersault, a karate kick, and then starts throwing money at the audience – it’s ultimate cocaine energy. Cage showed it to me and said, ‘look at this guy, how obnoxious is he’ and we shaped the character around it.”
Gormican went deep down the Cage rabbit hole through the process of making the film, extensively referencing movies and interviews, even frequently lapsing into a pitch-perfect Cage impression during our chat (“when you spend that much time watching him in the editing suite, it becomes an instinct”).
Another way the film went meta was in an early scene, in which the actor is shown meeting with a director about a potential part – that filmmaker being David Gordon Green, who previously directed Cage in 2013’s Joe. However, Gormican reveals that Gordon Green was a last minute replacement for two more recognisable faces.
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“We wanted a director that had worked with Cage, but they had to be somebody the audience would immediately recognise, so we reached out to Martin Scorsese and David Lynch. Both said yes, but we shot the film at peak, pre-vaccine Covid, meaning it was harder to get older people to set.
“David Gordon Green happened to be in town shooting a commercial and he knows Nic very well, so it made sense to have him step in.”
Shooting the movie at the height of the pandemic was also the unlikely inspiration for one of the film’s funniest gags, where Cage watches Paddington 2 for the first time. “This project is a celebration of Cage’s career, but as we shot it in the time we did, we also wanted it to be a general celebration of making movies and the films that inspired us.
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“We kept talking about Paddington 2 – it’s just a perfect film. The only discernible flaw with it is that Nicolas Cage isn’t in it! So, when it came to thinking of a great film Cage wouldn’t have seen for that gag, it became our first and only choice.”
Outside of the meta jokes about Cage and the film industry at large, the biggest challenge for Gormican was finding the right tone. As the story progresses, it goes from being a self-referential comedy into something far closer to a sincere action romp – something you might not initially expect.
“Finding the tone was the hardest part: you want to push boundaries, but never lose the humanity of Cage’s character in the process. And that’s why, no matter whether it was a scene where he was dragging himself or a more dramatic moment where he betrays his friend, it had to be played as seriously as possible. But getting to that stage was a challenge.”
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So, despite many nods to Cage’s filmography, were there any favourites of Gormican’s that didn’t get a mention in the final cut?
“Well, we didn’t mention Leaving Las Vegas by name, even though it gets a visual nod when he goes into the pool. Matchstick Men and Adaptation are two of my favourite Cage performances and those films weren’t mentioned – and Valley Girl! So many movies I love that didn’t quite make it.”
The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent is a testament to the versatility of Cage as an actor, whose career is so stacked many of his iconic movies don’t get referenced in the final cut. Gormican is right – there’s no other actor on his level and this film couldn’t exist without him.
The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent releases on home entertainment on 11th July.
