Read more on telegraph.co.uk

In Nicolas Cage’s latest film, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, there is a scene in which Cage – playing a parodic version of himself as a washed-up actor who accepts a million dollars to attend the birthday party of his most committed fan – is confronted by an unusual spectacle. Amidst a collection of memorabilia and artefacts, he sees a life-size wax model of him, in character as the archvillain Castor Troy from his 1997 film Face/Off, holding aloft a pair of golden guns. Cage-as-Cage is baffled and stunned in equal measure. “Is this supposed to be me?” he asks. “It’s grotesque… I’ll give you 20,000 for it.”

Anyone familiar with Chekhov’s adage, that if a gun appears in the first act it must be fired in the third, will be unsurprised that the golden guns reappear later in the film. Yet the homage to one of Cage’s most beloved and successful films, a quarter-century since its initial release, is no mere piece of chicanery. 

The actor recently disclosed in an interview at Unbearable Weight’s SXSW premiere that he had rewatched Face/Off in order to prepare both for the film and the subsequent publicity. “I was really wowed by [the movie]… I think it’s aged beautifully,” Cage said. He has never changed his views; shortly after its 1997 release, he said in an interview that “without wishing to blow my own horn, I think it’s a masterpiece.” 

Cage is not wrong. In a generally poor summer for blockbuster films, with the likes of Batman and Robin and Speed 2 desecrating cinemas worldwide, Face/Off was a witty and thrilling treat, which worked simultaneously as a high-octane action extravaganza and a meta-exploration of the very idea of performance and acting. With Mexican stand-offs and explosions, naturally. 

It was a massive box office hit, confirmed Cage and his co-star John Travolta as two of the leading actors of the day and established its director John Woo as an A-list auteur, thanks to his wholescale importation of the tropes and visual ideas that had initially made his name in Hong Kong cinema. But its success belied a production process that saw its star and director pursuing their own esoteric interests to the limits, and confounding the studio in the process. 

The origin of the film came in a spec script written in 1990 by the screenwriting duo Mike Werb and Michael Colleary. Impressed by the way that the likes of Shane Black could conjure up million-dollar deals with pitches for high-concept action films, they decided that they would come up with a spin on the then-popular vogue for body swap films, as seen in Vice Versa and Big.

However, rather than a family-oriented comedy, Werb and Colleary believed that they could transpose the idea into the sci-fi action genre. They came up with a script set a hundred years in the future, filled with the usual iconography of such settings; the Golden Gate Bridge was derelict and occupied by the homeless, and flying cars were now de rigueur. But the central idea – that a cop and a master criminal should exchange identities, and that each would find adopting their nemesis’s life surprisingly exciting – remained intact throughout development. 

Perhaps inevitably, the script came to the attention of uber-producer Joel Silver, who optioned the rights, but nothing happened for years. Directors came and went, including Fast and the Furious filmmaker Rob Cohen, none of whom seemed as convinced by the premise as its screenwriters. Various suggestions were mooted – such as Troy and his nemesis Sean Archer eventually uniting in the final act to defuse a nuclear bomb that had always been intended as a McGuffin – but nothing came of it. 

It seemed as if Face/Off would remain one of the innumerable unmade projects that litter Hollywood. As Colleary said in a 2019 interview with Shortlist: “It was not a very productive, creative environment for those two years and it was very discouraging… a lot of things had to go wrong to help this movie along.”

There was even the suggestion that Archer and Troy both be rewritten as young men, and at one point Johnny Depp showed interest in starring in the film; he backed out when he realised that the title did not refer to hockey. 

The actor took his performance in the obscure black comedy Vampire’s Kiss – a personal favourite of his –  as his template, and proudly described how he “cherry-picked” the most absurd moments from that film for his dual performance. It was a risky strategy that he later suggested “resulted in some phone calls” from the studio, who were concerned that their $80 million summer blockbuster was going to be derailed by its lead actor going what Cage has subsequently called full “nouveau shamanic”. 

Subsequently, he said of his work: “There was the scene in the jail cell where Sean Archer is pretending he’s Castor Troy and so it was so… cubist. And I remember I was like, ‘I’m Castor Troy!’ And it went on and on, almost like a riot…God, it’s such a trippy movie.”

Yet his director was delighted with his star’s boldness. Woo encouraged Cage to watch his Hong Kong pictures to understand what he was looking for, and the actor took pleasure in bringing in obscure allusions to Woo’s earlier work. In the opening scene, in which Troy attempts to assassinate Archer and accidentally kills his son instead, leading to a lifelong enmity between the two, Cage’s character wears a fake moustache. True Woo aficionados would immediately understand that this was a reference to a similar scene in The Killer, in which Woo’s regular star Chow-Yun Fat wore the same disguise to attempt a hit; Cage was only too delighted to continue the tradition. 

A pivotal gun battle choreographed to Over The Rainbow may even be Woo’s single greatest achievement in film, combining balletic grace and violence to awe-inspiring effect. The film’s only real flaws are some dubious sexist moments, over-obvious use of stunt doubles and an inevitable sense that, despite Travolta’s highly entertaining performance, it is Cage who dominates the screen throughout in what may be his signature role. 

As the actor prepares for a long overdue comeback, returning to mainstream cinema after dozens of undistinguished straight-to-streaming pictures made to settle his considerable debts, he has been extolling the virtues of Face/Off, not least because of the explicit allusions to it in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.

Although he has been dismissive about rumours of a sequel in which he would star (as, spoiler alert, Troy ends the film dead and presumably faceless, this would be a tricky undertaking), calling them “conjecture without any base or foundation to it”), there may be another, more basic reason why he would not wish to return to the character: simple self-preservation. As he commented to Variety: “There was a moment in there where I think I actually left my body. I got scared, am I acting or is this real? I can see it if I look at the movie, that one moment, it’s in my eyes.” 

As Cage finally regains his mojo, derailing his equilibrium and perhaps his sanity might be a step too far, even for the nouveau shaman who famously ate a cockroach as part of his Method approach. Perhaps he should be allowed to remain in his body, after all.