Chris has picked this week, and he has gone for Face/Off, John Woo’s 1997 action thriller in which John Travolta and Nicolas Cage spend most of the running time playing each other. Mike Werb and Michael Colleary wrote it in the summer of 1990, hoping to sell the next Die Hard, and it then sat at Warner Bros. on a $125,000 option until Paramount picked it up. It went through three directors and more than thirty drafts before Woo signed on, and moving the story from the future to the present day trimmed about $20 million, leaving a final budget of $80 million.
Face/Off opened in the US on 27 June 1997 at number one, ahead of Disney’s Hercules, and went on to take $245.7 million worldwide. It holds 93% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes, earned an Oscar nomination for its sound effects editing, and lost that to Titanic like everybody else that year. A sequel has been in development since 2021, presumably waiting for the right faces.
TRAILER GUY PLOT SYNOPSIS
In a world... where plastic surgery has gone far too far... one FBI agent will do anything to stop the man who destroyed his family. Even if it means looking at him in the mirror every morning.
Sean Archer has a new face, a new voice and a cell in the most secure prison on Earth. Castor Troy has a coma. It should have been simple. But somebody is about to wake up in a very bad mood, with a very good idea.
This summer... to catch him, he must become him. And he has left his own face lying around. Face/Off.
FUN FACTS
- The first draft of Face/Off was set a hundred years in the future, with flying cars and chimpanzees doing all the manual labour. John Woo turned that version down.
- Face/Off was written with Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger in mind. Michael Douglas and Harrison Ford, and Alec Baldwin and Bruce Willis, were also considered before John Travolta and Nicolas Cage.
- John Woo’s famous birds nearly got cut. Producer Barrie Osborne told him, “John, you can’t have pigeons in the scene,” then gave in on condition that Woo didn’t wait around for them to perform.
- The Face/Off shootout set to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” was not in the script. John Woo added the child in headphones during filming and promised the producers he would still finish on time.
- John Travolta added the jokes about his own “ridiculous chin”, reasoning that Castor Troy would hate being stuck with John Travolta’s face.
- John Woo, director of Face/Off and Broken Arrow, has staged some of cinema’s biggest gunfights, yet said in 1997 that he had never fired a real gun.
- Face/Off screenwriter Mike Werb traced the idea to an acquaintance whose face was removed and rebuilt after a hang-gliding accident, and to an aunt who used to say she had to “take her face off”.
- The Face/Off speedboat chase took four weeks to film, and the crew sank a boat in the first couple of days.
- Castor and Pollux Troy are named after the twins of Greek myth who became the constellation Gemini.
- Face/Off was composer John Powell’s first film score. Hans Zimmer was too busy, recommended Powell, and promised to fix it himself if it went wrong. It didn’t.
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