The awful movie William Friedkin and Nicolas Cage refused to make: “The script was horrible”
While people will know William Friedkin as the twisted mind behind The Exorcist, there’s a lot more in his arsenal than just rotating heads and projectile vomit. As well as The French Connection, which landed him a ‘Best Director’ award at the Oscars, the auteur also gave the world the grippingly tense Sorcerer, the sleazy neo-noir To Live and Die in LA, and The Boys in the Band, an early example of mainstream queer cinema.
As with all great directors, Friedkin missed out on as many projects as he actually completed. He turned down Oliver Stone’s request to direct Born on the Fourth of July, a version that would have seen Al Pacino in the lead role, and was one of the contenders to take over the troubled production of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They, eventually losing out to Sydney Pollack. There are some movies that he was almost certainly thrilled to have dodged, including a movie called I Am Wrath.
When speaking with The Playlist, he shot down rumours that he agreed to make the picture but did admit that he was considered. “I was given that script by Nicolas Cage; I never agreed to do it, absolutely never,” he asserted. “The script was horrible! One of the worst scripts I’ve ever read! But I like Nic Cage, and he came to me, and I sat with it to see if there was anything I could do with this, and I came to the conclusion – why bother?”
The screenplay for I Am Wrath, which Yvan Gauthier and Paul Sloan wrote, follows a man who witnesses the death of his wife at the hands of a mugger. When the city’s corrupt police let the killer walk free, it’s up to him to track her down and deliver his own brand of justice. If that sounds like every other generic revenge movie in the history of cinema, then that’s because it is!
“This is Death Wish!” Friedkin exclaimed, referring to the contents of the script, not what taking the job would have meant for his career. “It’s already been done and done well with Charles Bronson, and the guys who wrote I Am Wrath – which is a horrible title – were basically recycling Death Wish.” Incidentally, the title is taken from a verse in the Bible, so Friedkin should have taken issues with the Almighty rather than those poor writers.
It turns out that Friedkin was absolutely correct in passing on this film because it was eventually made in 2016, and it was a travesty. Directing duties eventually fell to Chuck Russell, who had a decent track record with things like The Mask and Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, but also contributed to The Scorpion King, an unforgivable act. Even Cage had moved on from the project by this point, forfeiting the lead role to John Travolta. Before you ask, this wasn’t Cage in a Travolta mask à la Face/Off.
He might have brought him a stinker of a script, but this didn’t put Friedkin off the possibility of working with Cage in the future, calling him “a very interesting actor”. Sadly, the heralded filmmaker wouldn’t get this opportunity before his death in 2023. Still, it’s much better that we never got a Friedkin/Cage collaboration rather than one that would have darkened both men’s legacies.
