You may remember yesterday’s award-winning headline, “Nic Cage Has Dementia And A Weird Ear In ‘Dying Of The Light,'” offering the new trailer for a film starring Cage as a CIA agent, directed by Paul Schrader, produced by Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn, and co-starring Anton Yelchin. Well now, Cage, Schrader, Refn, and Yelchin all seem to be campaigning against anyone seeing the film (not that there was a huge danger of that, speaking for myself personally).
Last month, there was a he said/she said story going around, with Schrader saying the producers had locked him out of the editing room, and Dying of the Light‘s producers saying Schrader’s cut was much different than the script and he wouldn’t take any of their notes (a criticism similar to what Bret Easton Ellis said about Schrader’s work on The Canyons, incidentally).
This time around, however, it seems his leads and Refn at least have Schrader’s back, as he left this update on Facebook:
“We lost the battle. “Dying of the Light,” a film I wrote and directed, was taken away from me, reedited, scored and mixed without my input. Yesterday Grindstone (a division of Lionsgate) released the poster and the trailer. They are available on line. Here we are, Nick Cage, Anton Yelchin, Nic Refn and myself, wearing our “non-disparagement” T shirts. The non-disparagement clause in an artist’s contract gives the owners of the film the right to sue the artist should the owner deem anything the artist has said about the film to be “derogatory.” I have no comment on the film or others connected with the picture.”
At first I thought the t-shirt thing was a metaphor, but then I clicked over and, no, they really are wearing non-disparagement t-shirts.
So, if you do end up seeing Dying of the Light after it opens December 5th and it ends up sucking, there’s a chance that it wasn’t Paul Schrader’s fault.
(*puts on “Cool Story, Bro” t-shirt*)