The VFX team on The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is no stranger to the intense process of aging in a well-known personality like Nicolas Cage. For the film, the team was tasked with making Cage, who is 58 years old, appear around 20 to 25 years younger for the character of Nicky Cage. Nicky, Cage’s imaginary younger self in the film, aims to keep the character of Nick Cage (with a K) on his way to becoming a hugely popular celebrity. The film’s visual effects team, led by VFX supervisor Christopher Lance for the scenes shot in America, teamed up with CoSA VFX to bring Nicky to the big screen.
“Tom [Gormican] and Nic got the idea of Nicky from a certain person that Nic created for an interview he did on the Wogan show,” Lance told Variety. “But we actually wanted to see his face, maybe five years or so after that. Because I think that was the most iconic role for Nick, from about 1995 to 2000.”
The interview shows Cage at his wildest; the star cycles onto the stage, showers the crowd with money, does karate kicks and finally takes off his shirt. Nicky aims to capture this crazy nature of Cage and allow the actor to increase his power to 11.
“All you see is acting by Nic Cage,” Lance said. “And we respected all the artistic expression that he brought to the role. Really, all we did was de-age. There were no dots, no special lighting or anything like that. It was only Nic Cage performing. And no matter what the light conditions were, we could just take that and run with it.”
To achieve the effect, Lance’s team and Erik Bruhweiler, Head of Digital Makeup at CoSA VFX, used artificial intelligence to create a “template” of the actor’s face when he was younger, based on footage from the period.
“We set up a template system that allows us to solve it once and then change the details as needed. That way you don’t have to rethink every time,” says Bruhweiler. He added: “The biggest challenge in aging someone like that is you target what he actually looked like when he was younger. That had to be an accurate age rating of the actual person, Nicolas Cage, because everyone knows his face.”
As expected, this process is extremely detailed, even with the help of AI. It takes hours to think about every single detail of the actor’s face, changing every little discrepancy that can cause the viewer to notice the CGI.
“It’s like picking a safe,” Bruhweiler said. “You’re sitting there listening and trying to pick out that little subtle detail that finally clicks it together.”
Courtesy of Cosa VFX
And of course there’s the kiss. The kiss between Nicky and Nick required double play from Nicky but brought its own set of problems.
“Well it was filmed during COVID,” Lance explained. “So they had to get them close without actually touching. We had to lock them together to make it look like their lips were actually locked.”
He added: “That kiss was just improvised on set. That was Nic Cage’s idea. So we didn’t know that was going to happen until we actually had the footage back in the mail. And then we were like, ‘Okay, let’s do this new record!’”