The Untold Truth Of Face/Off

In order to disarm the dirty bomb Castor Troy has left in an undisclosed location, Archer has to take his place in prison so he can pump Castor's brother Pollux for information. As if the mythological reference wasn't literary enough, the prison itself is named after Samuel Butler's anagrammatic utopian satire "Erewhon." It's a fitting name since, as Archer discovers the hard way, it really is in the middle of nowhere, on a repurposed oil rig in the open ocean.

There's so much wackiness going on in "Face/Off" that the prison break, forced on Archer when he discovers Castor has stolen his face and destroyed all evidence that he was undercover in prison, seems almost tame. But without that sequence, the rest of the movie might not exist. First-time screenwriters Mike Werb and Michael Colleary told Inverse that the 1971 Attica Riot and the Jimmy Cagney classic "White Heat" inspired them to start their careers with a prison movie. From there, they came up with the idea of a futuristic prison where guards could put down a riot by flipping a switch to lock down the inmates' magnetic boots. 

Then they came up with the idea of a hero taking the villain's place in prison, but they wanted to avoid things that had already been done, like identical twins, swapping personalities, or even magic. Whatever else you can say about the face-trading story they came up with, it certainly hadn't been done before.

Other than Erewhon and the face-swapping technology, "Face/Off" goes light on the sci-fi elements. It works — we all suspect the secretive upper echelons of the government have access to technology we civilians can only dream of, or else where would James Bond and all his gadgets be? Besides, all the physics-defying stunts and stylized acting make it clear we're nowhere near the real world to begin with.

Despite all that, Werb and Colleary's original vision for "Face/Off" would have applied the surgery's level of futuristic fantasy to the whole movie. ShortList's "deep dive" into the movie's production reveals that the first script took place 100 years in the future and included a workforce of trained chimps, the Golden Gate Bridge turning into a homeless encampment, and, of course, flying cars. The prison would have been even more outlandish, with the home video audio commentary revealing an early script had the prisoners magnetically chained to the ceiling instead of the floor.

But all that world-of-tomorrow business costs money, and the producers talked Werb and Colleary out of it. One of them, Barrie Osborne, told Inverse, "That allowed me to cut $20 million out of the budget right away." A little nip and tuck to the script to make the face/off operation a cutting-edge experimental procedure, and it was ready to go, with the added benefit of upping the tension of Archer having to convince people of his unbelievable, now unprecedented story.

All kinds of surreal things happen in "Face/Off," but we can't let that distract us from some of its more understatedly bizarre elements. For instance, there's beloved stand-up comedian and "Fire Island" star Margaret Cho in a joke-free bit part as an FBI agent.

How does anyone reach a casting decision like that? Well, John Woo was just listening to what the youth of the nation wanted — or at least one youth. The director explains in his commentary that Cho had been lobbying for the role, but that what finally won him over was his daughter Kimberly, a huge Cho fan. In the end, Woo acquiesced, because in his words, "I have to try to make my daughter happy." But since it was such a small part, Woo unfortunately didn't get to spend much time with his daughter's idol. Hopefully Kimberly was able to forgive him.

As for Cho, she remembers filming "Face/Off" as a thrilling but unnerving experience. How do you transition from telling jokes onstage to playing a hard-nosed FBI agent? She told Collider that the answer involved "a lot of going to training camps where you would learn how to properly shoot a gun, properly look like you were in the FBI ... You also had a stunt double that was pretty much the physical perfection version of yourself, which is really strange."

Long before he came to Hollywood, John Woo was already a legend in his native Hong Kong. His graceful, heavily stylized approach to action became its own subgenre, variously known as "blood opera," "bullet ballet," "gun fu," or "heroic bloodshed." Star Chow Yun-fat was right there beside him for most of his biggest hits, bringing Woo's repressed but deeply emotional heroes to life in classics like "The Killer" and "A Better Tomorrow" before reaching even greater levels of fame in the international blockbuster "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."

Working with Woo was a dream come true for Werb and Colleary, and they say on the home video commentary that writing a perfect John Woo movie without realizing it was a highlight of their careers. Their enthusiasm for working with their hero lasted all through the shoot, and they gush about how exciting it was to collaborate with Woo on one of his trademark church shootouts, doves flying and all. They also remind Woo how hard they pushed to make the movie even Woo-ier: "Your fans might also be interested to know how many times we tried to talk you into finding a part for Chow Yun-fat." Unfortunately, they never did — Yun-fat would have to wait until the year after "Face/Off" premiered for his first Hollywood role in "The Replacement Killers."

Since John Woo and crew couldn't actually flay the faces off two of Hollywood's biggest stars, the surgery scene required dummy stand-ins instead. The effects team went all-out: Art director Steve Arnold told Inverse that he found the complex animatronics both "amazing" and "scary": "You could see the blood veins, you could see it pulsating, you could see those little hairs. It was so impeccably done that Travolta was kind of freaked out."

In a promotional video, effects artist Kevin Yagher describes how painstakingly he approached the process, matching the fake Cage and Travolta to the genuine models "perfectly in every way, down to the pore," while the narrator adds that "hundreds of thousands of individual hairs were applied to the skin, one at a time." Cage was just as freaked out as his costar: "You could trip out on it," he says. "It breathes, and it twitches its face, it's amazing."

Mike Werb handled seeing the figure much more evenly, mostly because it took him a long time to realize it wasn't really Nicolas Cage lying there. Walking onto the set in the dark, he assumed the dummy was the real Cage, either sleeping or meditating: "Little did I know Kevin Yagher and his guys were using the air bladders and [screwing] with me."

If there's one word to describe the basic theme of "Face/Off" — other than "bat****" — it's "duality." Sean Archer and Castor Troy are perfect mirror images: the uptight lawman who refuses a celebratory bottle of champagne until he can use it as a tribute to his fallen comrades, and the horrifically uninhibited criminal who shrugs after he snaps a woman's neck and is greeted everywhere he goes by a lackey with a briefcase full of contraband.

It was important for Woo and his collaborators to visually emphasize that duality, and Colleary and Werb remember in the commentary how the script originally included a shootout in a mirror factory. That eventually evolved into what Werb calls "the grandest dressing room of all time," but even that was too expensive for the studio, which was concerned that the film was running over budget. So John Woo says he told the studio, "I'm willing to pay with my own money to shoot the scene. Just give me two days ... I've got to shoot it. I've got to have it." The studio may have objected to the scene at first, but they obviously came around, since that scene ended up all over the marketing.