Dreams can be confusing, revealing, and even emotional; They can go through many movements, like a film of many genres. And all of that is in the surreal, hilarious, disturbing and moving “Dream Scenario,” the second feature film from writer-director Kristoffer Borgli. It stars Nicolas Cage in one of his sharpest and most moving performances (one he acknowledges as one of his favorites) as Paul Matthews, a man who discovers the dark complexity of fame, with the hard edges unexpected from him. And to do this, Cage relied on one of the surreal scenarios of his own life, the memeification of him.
“My first response was the title: two of my favorite words, ‘dream’ and ‘scenario.’ And then I read the script and felt the originality,” says the Oscar winner. “But then I felt, ‘I know how Paul feels,’ because my response to what happened to me virally was the same; My memeification It is similar to Pablo’s dreamification. I said, ‘Yes, now I can take these heavy feelings and do something constructive, take initiative and turn it into a little bit of gold.’ “
Cage memes, usually taken from his most extreme moments in film, are all over the cyberverse. Something like this is supposed to be inevitable when an actor has been around for over 40 years and 100 movies, especially when the goal of meme culture is to remove all context to create something of a Swiss army knife for web commenting.
“I later became friends with him, but the moment I discovered him, I was frustrated and confused, because it wasn’t what I signed up for,” Cage says of discovering “Nicolas Cage Losing His S—” Clip Variants and photographs. He says that when he became an actor in the early ’80s, he never dreamed of “a technology that would allow you to take combinations of different crescendo moments from movies without taking into account Act 1 or Act 2 and simply turn it into a meme .
“Now I’m happy about that, because it kept me in the [conversation], and some of my more maximalist performances provided indirect liberation for some people. In society we all want to behave. We all want to be good community members, but sometimes we want to scream. And I think that’s why he landed in that group.”
Nicolas Cage says the film’s story about a man who discovers the dark complexity of viral fame brought him face to face with his own memeification.
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
This miasma of mockery and admiration is once again relevant to the actor due to the unexpected viral notoriety of his character in “Dream Stage.” Paul Matthews is an underrated (in his opinion) academic who has a pretty good life. He has a loving wife, two daughters, and a good job doing what he loves: talking about the evolution of consciousness, especially in lower life forms (he coins the term “anteligence”). Then Paul discovers that he appears in other people’s dreams. Not just friends and family, but people who have never met him, seen him or even heard of him.
To make the film much more effective, much more interesting, Borgli approached it without respecting the boundaries of the genre. Is “Dream Scenario” a comedy? A tragedy (a man of principle gets the attention he craves, at a terrible price)? A horror film, a romance, a satire on modern fame and cancel culture? Yeah.
“I’m interested in experiencing a confusion with gender (in art, music, or anything else) that confuses me in a charming way, where I don’t have a box to put it in, so I’m forced to categorize it on my own. ” says Borgli, sitting next to his lead actor at a table in the Beverly Hills Hotel restaurant. “I’ve become kind of an active participant in cataloging the experience. And sometimes I can’t understand the tone.”
“I like that he has the guts to stay true to his vision,” Cage says. “They have given the ‘comedy’ label to ‘Dream’, but for me it is not just a comedy; It’s much more than that. There is some tragedy there. There is a scene where Paul is in nightmare mode. [having gone from benign dream visitor to threatening figure]. She is hitting a student with a hammer. When she was filming it she knew it would be shocking and I could see that some people might say, “Maybe that’s too much.” They want this to be a comedy. But he stayed true to that. And I admired him.”
The film is an impressive feat for such a newly minted auteur. Borgli (who also edits his films) cuts with tremendous confidence, creating fluidity, tension, and jagged edges wherever he wants. The use of his sound is even considered. In one scene, Paul goes to lunch with a former colleague of hers to confront her about what he perceives as plagiarism of her ideas. She surreptitiously records it on her phone. Halfway through the meeting, we cut to Paul in the car, listening to the audio of what just happened. Borgli uses phone playback over the vivid images of the scene, placing the audience simultaneously in the car with Paul remembering what happened and, in the immediacy of the moment, feeling how fresh and present his humiliation is.
Nicolas Cage transforms physically and vocally for his role in “Dream Scenario,” but says that, despite the surreal and absurd nature of the film’s situation, the character’s emotion “came pretty close to home.”
(A24)
Cage transformed himself for the role, the personification of clumsiness. Paul is paunchy, bald, glasses-wearing, and forgettable the second you meet him. He is an intelligent and principled person who speaks with a hint of a nasal whine.
Cage says, “Kristoffer showed me some pictures of evolutionary biologists: ‘Oh, I like that. He has that Benjamin Franklin horseshoe hairstyle. We build the look together. He changed the shape of my nose. I wanted to make my choices more personal. The filter is in the look and the way I speak as a character. But I felt the emotion hit pretty close to home.”
“Some of the behavior comes from a certain kind of ambitious, entitled person who doesn’t get what he thinks he deserves,” Kristoffer Borgli says of his film. “I can locate some of its negative traits in myself, one of them being the horrible feeling of confidently telling a bad joke.”
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
Borgli says, “Some of the behavior comes from a certain type of ambitious, entitled person who doesn’t yet have what they think they deserve. I can locate some of its negative traits in myself, one of them being the horrible feeling of confidently telling a bad joke. Furthermore, my father is a social anthropologist; My indirect shame from my father has been, during my adolescence, very strong.”
“Did he do the wine thing?” Cage asks, repeating the absurd gesture Paul makes when imitating him drinking wine at a lavish dinner.
“I could definitely see him do it,” Borgli says, acknowledging that his father saw the film (but without detailing his reaction).
One could be impressed by the film’s frank, almost deadpan depictions of dreams and continue to do so long after watching it; or one might be more affected by the powerful emotion of its melancholy ending. But one of the most indelible memories that viewers will take away is how present, alive and unbearable their key sex scene is. It’s a momentary indiscretion that ends up having lasting repercussions and makes viewers laugh and scream, sometimes simultaneously.
“I think the most important thing was to never let ourselves laugh, to play this as a drama and try to get into the real organic nature of what was happening and represent it authentically,” says the actor. “Dylan. [Gelula]How brilliant to choose this young woman. She is wonderful. She doesn’t make any effort. I don’t see the actor. She was magical to work with and easy to film. She just flowed. We knew where we had to go.
“I wanted you to hide under the table. I wanted that feeling to almost be with you. That Paul would go to bed at night and he couldn’t get that scene out of his head and had to throw an alarm clock.”
Borgli says, “We discuss that all the characters are hopelessly trapped within a drama, and that is the way the audience will experience the comedy.
“I had to move my monitor to a different room, because of course I was watching it as a comedy at the time while the characters were caught up in the drama. And I didn’t want to ruin that moment, so I was stuck in a different room, laughing and cringing, all of that. And also when I was editing that scene, something strange happened. I was sitting at my computer and suddenly I was in the kitchen and I thought, how did I get to the kitchen? And I go back to editing and then it happens again, and I don’t realize I’m walking away from the computer. It’s so embarrassing to see. I felt so embarrassed that I unconsciously pulled away and thought I needed to make coffee or something. It took me days to edit that scene. I had to get away from the monitor constantly.”
