Johnny Depp rejected ‘Face/Off’ because it wasn’t about hockey: “We were totally against it”
In the early 1990s, everybody and their grandma was trying to write a spec script that would sell for millions to a Hollywood studio. The era was a gold rush for screenwriters, kicked off by Shane Black when Warner Bros bought Lethal Weapon for $250,000. Among those chasing the dream were Michael Colleary and Mike Werb, who managed to sell their script—a sci-fi action movie with a concept so bizarre it took seven years to make it to the screen. During that time, a host of actors passed on the project, including a young Johnny Depp, whose reason for turning it down was legendarily boneheaded.
The story of this action classic dates back to 1990—or, more precisely, five days after Colleary and Werb watched Die Hard 2 at their local cinema. Inspired by the guns-blazing Bruce Willis blockbuster, they set out to write their own action movie. It certainly helped that every studio in Hollywood was scrambling to find the next Die Hard. However, the script they ended up with bore little resemblance to the relatively grounded, present-day exploits of John McClane.
Colleary and Werb’s opus was set in a futuristic world where the homeless lived on a crumbling Golden Gate Bridge, flying cars zipped through the skies, and chimpanzees handled manual labour. Amid this chaotic setting, they envisioned a hero surviving a brutal prison riot and, more importantly, swapping faces with his nemesis. As their drafts evolved, they realised the heart of the story wasn’t in the sci-fi spectacle but in the psychological tension of two men—Sean Archer and Castor Troy—switching lives, only to find themselves paradoxically more at home in their enemy’s existence than their own.
By January 1991, they had finished a draft of the script they were happy with. Their agent then sent Face/Off around Hollywood, and a minion of Joel Silver – the same producer who made Lethal Weapon – convinced him to option it for 18 months. However, to Colleary and Werb’s disappointment, the movie struggled to gain any traction, with Colleary declaring that period ” not a very productive, creative environment”.
Over the next several years, Face/Off was pulled in different directions by the varying visions of two directors who boarded the project and later left. Rob Cohen (The Fast and the Furious) was the first to take a swing, but the writers hated his idea of Troy and Archer teaming up to disarm a sentient bomb in the film’s climax. Meanwhile, studio executives grew nervous about the makeup effects required to convincingly transform the lead actors into each other. This frustrated the writers, who had always envisioned the fun of their concept being that no makeup or prosthetics were needed at all—the actors would simply swap roles.
The next director to take a crack at Face/Off was Demolition Man’s Mario Brambilla, whose main brainwave was to cast the film much more youthfully than Colleary and Werb imagined. To that end, Paramount courted a 27-year-old Johnny Depp to play Archer, a move which caused Colleary to gripe, “That made no sense, and we were totally against it on every level.” At this point, Nicolas Cage had already expressed interest in playing Troy, but the studio refused to cast him unless Depp agreed to star opposite him.
To the worried writers’ relief, though, when Depp finally read their script, he wasn’t best pleased. Amusingly, though, it wasn’t because he thought it was bad. Instead, Depp supposedly believed Face/Off was a movie about hockey – thanks to the title – and was gutted when he realised it was actually an action film. A dismayed Depp said “sayonara” to Face/Off, and with him went Brambilla. Colleary, who wasn’t exactly broken up by this version of the movie falling apart, grinned, “A lot of things had to go wrong to help this movie along.”
The next director who became attached to the project, though, was the one who would mould it into the gloriously over-the-top masterpiece that it became. John Woo read the script and loved it, although he wanted to play down the sci-fi elements. Best of all, though, he was shooting Broken Arrow at the time with John Travolta, who had always wanted to make a movie about good and evil twins. When those two heavy hitters both signed up, Cage was able to come back into the fold. The rest, as they say, is history – and there was no hockey in sight.
