It’s common practice for screenwriters to envision specific actors when creating characters in the hopes that they’ll play them. After all, what’s more flattering for an actor to hear than, “I wrote this role for you”? It’s rare, however, to write a script with a specific actor in mind and for that actor to play themselves. To make matters worse for “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” helmer Tom Gormican, he’d never even met the actor he was creating his feature film around: the one and only Nicolas Cage.
“There’s something about Nicolas Cage that transcends being an actor, right?” says Gormican, who co-wrote and directs the new action-comedy that sees Cage playing a version of himself. “He’s become this cultural icon that is more than the sum of the movies he’s done.”
“The first question people ask me: ‘Was he in on it?’ The answer is: Absolutely.”
That was the inspiration for the project, which is now playing in theaters. It was—and still is, Gormican admits—an outlandish concept for a film. But he and his co-writer Kevin Etten believed in the idea, and they adopted a startup mentality to make it happen.
Having come up in New York’s indie film scene, Gormican is used to hustling. “The basis of getting this movie made was absolutely the indie film approach,” he says. “We finished the script and people went, ‘We like this, but you can’t make it for a million reasons.’ ”
After an estimated eight months of “channeling every independent film company and producer I worked for growing up,” Gormican realized that, just like he did for 2014’s “That Awkward Moment,” he’d need to get a producer on board to legitimize the project—and to make the offer to Cage.
In the case of “Unbearable Weight,” which also stars Pedro Pascal and Tiffany Haddish, that legitimacy came in the form of a studio: the heavy-hitting Lionsgate. Gormican insists that even with a major studio muscling the project into existence, the entire process “was still ripe with this underlying indie film ethos where we were pushing and pushing and pushing. It wasn’t like this was written for the studio and everyone just started making offers.”
Even then, Gormican still needed to get Cage to sign on. When the script did finally make its way to the actor, he liked it. But understandably, he was wary of playing a drunk, narcissistic version of himself onscreen. “The big caveat for Nic was to make sure that we were not making fun of Nicolas Cage,” says Gormican, a self-professed superfan of the actor. “There’s this added sensitivity because he doesn’t look great [in the film], and I think that’s the brave part about him doing it. He’s willing to show he has some perspective on himself, which is the first question people ask me: ‘Was he in on it?’ The answer is: Absolutely.”
To seal the deal, Gormican wrote Cage a letter detailing his vision for the project and why he desperately wanted to make it. “He just said, ‘Let’s meet. I think I’m gonna do the movie.’ ”
Nicolas Cage’s Advice for Actors: ‘Go as Big as You Want, as Long as It’s Honest’The film is only Gormican’s second feature; he spent a number of years working in television, co-creating the Fox series “Ghosted” with Etten. So the filmmaker leaned heavily on his indie upbringing, even though the scale of the project was anything but. From the project’s conception through production and all the way to post, he deployed what he’d learned during his years at indie stalwarts GreeneStreet Films and Original Media.
“That was the most important part: actually seeing that developmental process at all stages,” he says. “You see someone developing the script, see a film budgeted, see look books that these directors are making, see their approach to breaking down a story. And then you follow it all the way through the editorial process, where you see what works and what doesn’t.”
The No. 1 lesson Gormican carries with him from his indie days is simple: “These guys never, ever gave up. Ever.”
This story originally appeared in the May 5 issue of Backstage Magazine.
