In a recent interview sweeping his career, Nicolas Cage returned to the dismal failure of the film “An Open Tomb”, which he had shot with Martin Scorsese. A profoundly unfair failure for a work which is one of the actor’s favorites.
New York, early 90s… Every night, Frank Pierce drives his ambulance through the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, the most unsanitary area of Manhattan, where he spent his entire childhood. Helped by his teammates, he comes to the aid of neglected people that no one dares to approach anymore. It was during one of these descents into hell that he met Mary Burke, the daughter of a dying man whom he tried to save…
Two years after Kundun, Martin Scorsese launched a formidable Nicolas Cage (who was recommended to him by Brian de Palma) and his ambulance into the streets of an underworld New York with A Tomb Open.
Released in the United States in the fall of 1999, the film was a very painful financial failure. Budgeted at approximately $55 million, the film grossed less than $17 million at the worldwide Box Office. It also remains the only film by the filmmaker made in the 1990s not to have obtained any Oscar nomination.
“It will stand the test of time”
Nicolas Cage, most recently seen in the astonishing Dream Scenario, recently returned to this bitter, deeply unfair failure, in a long interview sweeping his career, published on the site Deadline.
“I love this film and I think it will stand the test of time” he comments. “It was perhaps the most abstract thing Martin Scorsese did with his style, also for me. But I think it was misunderstood. The way the film was marketed – probably because I I’ve done action adventure films before – made people think it was going to be an action film with an ambulance.
But he wasn’t. It was a very painful analysis of an exhausted paramedic, based on a very good book by Joe Connelly. It’s been misunderstood and I think when it’s finally released in high definition it will be able to find a new life.”
The film is so close to his heart that he even explains wanting to do an interview with Martin Scorsese about the film, which would be presented alongside the work available on Paramount + in the United States.
Paramount Pictures
“It’s the kind of environment where I’m like a fish in water”
Cage rightly sees his character in the film as the opposite of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. “It’s no secret that Marty called on Paul Schrader to adapt the book [NDR : de Joe Connelly] like a sort of reverse Taxi Driver.
While Taxi Driver ends with violence, An Open Tomb ends with a sort of mercy killing. It’s a different approach, but it’s a similar theme to the lonely man and the two different trajectories of Travis Bickle and Frank Pierce.”
This story of Christ in modern times, in search of a redemption that never comes, was written by Paul Schrader in record time: three weeks. “As soon as I started reading the book, I understood why it [Scorsese] had thought of me. It’s the kind of environment where I’m like a fish in water.” said Schrader, who reunited with his accomplice after a ten-year hiatus, probably due to an ego quarrel between the two men.
Cart full of dead
After accepting the offer and before writing the screenplay, Schrader immersed himself in his subject by accompanying paramedics in their interventions, to get an idea of what they experience every night. On his first evening with them, he had to endure the sight of a homeless man being cut in two by a train…
Its screenplay is based on the novel written by Joe Connelly, aged 34 at the time of the film, who serves as a technical advisor, frequently consulted by Scorsese. It must be said that Connelly knows what he is talking about, he who was an ambulance driver for nine years in the district of Hell’s Kitchenat a time when the latter lived up to its name.
Paramount Pictures
From his painful experience his book will be born, Bringing Out The Dead; a title he borrowed from a line from John Cleese heard at the start of Monty Python’s Sacred Grail, when the viewer sees a cart full of dead people, victims of the plague.
“Bring Out Your Dead!” (Bring out your dead!”) was in fact a phrase used during the terrible epidemic of the Black Death which ravaged the European continent, killing 75 million people in the 14th century.
A meaning, at least in the original version, ultimately very far from its French translation, not necessarily bad given the content of the film, which prefers to emphasize the idea of riding “at an open grave”; or a speed such that there is a risk of a fatal accident.