DREAM SCENARIO
Section: Platform
Director-screenwriter: Kristoffer Borgli
Logline: Nicolas Cage plays Paul Matthews, an inconspicuous academic who is thrust into the limelight after he starts inexplicably appearing in people’s dreams in this satirical swipe at celebrity and groupthink from writer-director Kristoffer Borgli and co-producer Ari Aster. The film also stars Julianne Nicholson (Mare of Easttown) and Michael Cera (Barbie).
Distributor: A24
Premiere Date: September 9, 2023
Panelists: Kristoffer Borgli and Nicolas Cage
Key Quotes: “I felt like in the name of Thespis I had the life experience to play Paul Matthews. What happened to me as Nic Cage with the internet, nothing could have prepared me, there was no reference point to experience this minification that occurred with one person’s compiling of a montage of sequences, cherry-picking different episodes of meltdowns that I had in various movies — calling it ‘Nicolas Cage loses his sh*t’ and then it went viral around the world overnight. I think I might have been the first actor who experienced anything like that. It was confusing, it was irritating, it was stimulating, it was confounding. I didn’t what to do with it.” – Nicholas Cage
“I remember thinking about how my father would navigate viral and how he’d fumble it and not be able to understand the dynamics, and there was so much comedy coming from imagining my father trying to navigate this very modern way of getting famous.” – Kristoffer Borgli
“We never went for laughs for laughs’ sake — it was all situation-relevant, it was all organic to the scene. If there is laughter, it was designed very carefully to not be playing for laughs. It is a satire that emerges on its own.” – Nicholas Cage
