We’re living in incredible times.
A new report from Deadline indicates that Nicolas Cage has assumed the director’s chair on Vengeance: A Love Story, a revenge thriller adapted from Joyce Carol Oates’ novella Rape: A Love Story that he had agreed to star in last month. Deadline offered dueling perspectives on why initial director Harold Becker stepped aside, citing one source claiming that budget squabbles between the helmer and studio proved irreconcilable, and another that described Becker as “not up for the job.”
Considering that Becker, best known for Taps and The Onion Field is currently 87, that second eventuality doesn’t seem like such a remote possibility. Either way, star Nicolas Cage has assumed the director’s chair, which could be what literally happened, because there’s a part of me that believes Cage simply sat down in Becker’s chair and declared himself the director.
This will not be the Cage’s first foray into the world of directing. His only former credit comes from the 2002 film Sonny, which stars James Franco as a male prostitute getting pimped out by his mother and making plan to escape from it all with fellow prostitute Mena Suvari. It is, incredibly, a real movie.
From the sound of the plot synopsis, Vengeance will be a decidedly different sort of film: Cage stars as a cop on the edge who doesn’t play by the rules, most specifically the rule dictating “No taking brutal revenge on the gang rapists responsible victimizing a local single mother,” because that’s what he does. This will also mark Cage’s first real time directing himself, as he took only a cameo in Sonny, so it’ll be interesting to see how he solves the riddle of working on both sides of the camera at once. I like to imagine Nicolas Cage mounting a camcorder on a tripod, hitting record, running over to his mark, performing a take, and then running back to the camcorder to hit the record button again. In my imagination, he insists on doing it this way and is too proud to accept help from anyone else.
This movie will be a masterpiece.
