Nicolas Cage Protests the Release of His Next Movie

He may have survived his Lindsay Lohan experience on The Canyons, but writer/director Paul Schrader has publicly acknowledged that he’s on the losing side in the fight over his latest film, Dying of the Light. In a typically frank Facebook confessional, Schrader says that the Nicolas Cage-starring drama has been “taken away from me, [and] reedited, scored and mixed without my input” by its owners at Grindstone, a Lionsgate-owned production company. In response to the recent release of an "official" trailer and poster, Schrader has created his own poster that shows him, Cage, co-star Anton Yelchin and executive producer Nicolas Winding Refn wearing T-shirts that print the “non-disparagement” clause they were all obligated to sign before production began. “I have no comment on the film or others connected with the picture,” Schrader wrote on Facebook, but that image alone speaks volumes.

News of behind-the-scenes struggles over Light — in which Cage plays a CIA agent who defies his superiors’ order of mandatory retirement — first emerged via a Variety story in early September, when a “Save Paul Schrader’s Dying of the Light” page went up on Facebook, attracting 155 likes (the page has since been removed.) After spending eight years trying to get the movie before cameras, Schrader had secured the funds independently, and later sold the finished film to Grindstone. At the time, the company endorsed the director’s cut in a press release announcing the pick-up, but very quickly went silent about the movie’s future: According to the Variety piece, when the New York Film Festival head approached the studio about adding Light to its most recent slate, Lionsgate declined the invitation.

Later that month, the various sides in the Light dispute went on the record, revealing that Grindstone and the producers had requested changes to Schrader’s original cut, prompting the director to do a second pass. After that, their version of events went in different directions, with the producers saying that the director only made a few alterations before walking away from the movie, while Schrader insisted he was frozen out of the process. “I was never asked back,” he said. “They finally showed me their cut only as they were entering final post-production. It was a fait accompli.” For their part, the producers have said that the changes to the new cut consist mostly of fixing some pacing issues and stripping away voiceover narration.

Mindful of that non-disparagement clause, Schrader has avoided going into any more detail about the experience, declining to expand on his Facebook statement in a recent conversation with Indiewire's Ann Thompson. Instead, he’s left it up to other people to draw connections between the battle over Dying of the Light, and his famous war over the ill-fated Exorcist prequel that he directed a decade ago only to see it re-shot and re-edited by Renny Harlin (Schrader’s cut, Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, did eventually see the light of day in 2005). But Schrader’s upcoming plans suggest that he’s done with making content for other people, instead focusing on overseeing his own web series. “That’s the future,” he told Thompson. “It’s a new form of storytelling. I enjoyed writing it a lot.”