A movie star gets more than he bargained when he befriends a fan in Director Tom Gormican’s comedic action feature, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.
Gormican’s film takes the unusual approach of having Nicolas Cage playing a fictionalized version of himself and accepting a $1 million offer to attend the birthday of superfan Javi Gutierrez (Pedro Pascal), who is actually a dangerous drug cartel kingpin. But when Cage is recruited by a CIA operative (Tiffany Haddish) to help bring him down, he’s forced to channel some of his most iconic on-screen characters in order to save himself and his loved ones.
Following the DGA membership screening in Los Angeles on April 30, Gormican sat down with Director Scott Z. Burns (The Report) to discuss the making of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.
During the conversation, Gormican spoke about the unique challenges of directing an actor to portray a version of himself.
“It's Nick Cage right so he's very specifically interested in expressionism as an actor in these giant hyperbolic performances and I'm very specifically interested in naturalism. So we would get into these arguments about what the best Cage was. I would say to him ‘I think about you more than you think about you.’ And he would say, ‘That's weird for both of us.’ So we had to decide on the Cage first of all and when we came to the right Cage it allowed him to play the bigger more expressionist performance. We had to find like those levels for example, like that wall scene. Right before he did the scene he said, ‘Do you want me to go full Cage?’ ‘Well yeah you know it's that's what they came here for.’ It was a strange process, managing both performance but story wise how much could it could it bear.”
In addition to The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Gormican’s credits include the feature film That Awkward Moment. Gormican has been a DGA member since 2020.
You can listen to Gormican's Q&A by clicking the podcast episode embedded below. You can find more DGA podcast episodes here.