The Big Picture

Dream Scenario stars Nicolas Cage as a college professor who suddenly and inexplicably starts appearing in people’s dreams. Director Kristoffer Borgli uses the concept to explore parasocial relationships and how these personas can take on lives of their own, and even outgrow us. While at Fantastic Fest for the film’s US Premiere, Borgli spoke to Collider’s Perri Nemiroff about developing the film’s core concept, why Cage was perfect for the lead role, and more.

Looking for a movie that’ll burrow its way into your brain, and perhaps even impact your dreams? Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario might rock one of the most intriguing core concepts of the year. It’s certainly stuck with me since seeing it at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival and then again at Fantastic Fest for its US Premiere.

The movie stars Nicolas Cage as Paul Matthews, a college professor who’s, well, pretty boring and basic. However, Paul becomes the most interesting person in the world overnight when, out of the blue, he starts appearing in people’s dreams. As the phenomenon spreads, so does Paul’s popularity.

With Dream Scenario making its way into theaters this weekend, it’s finally time to share my chat with Borgli recorded in Austin at Fantastic Fest. During the conversation he walked me through the evolution of the concept and how Paul Matthews changed when Cage took the role. Borgli also answered some burning questions about exactly how these shared dreams work, and discussed filming one of the most effective big screen fart scenes of all-time.

Hear all about that and more in the video interview at the top of this article, or you can read the conversation in transcript form below.

Image via A24 Dream Scenario Hapless family man Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage) finds his life turned upside down when millions of strangers suddenly start seeing him in their dreams. But when his nighttime appearances take a nightmarish turn, Paul is forced to navigate his newfound stardom, in this wickedly entertaining comedy from writer-director Kristoffer Borgli (Sick of Myself) and producer Ari Aster. – A24 Release Date November 10, 2023 Director Kristoffer Borgli Cast Nicolas Cage, Julianne Nicholson, Tim Meadows, Dylan Gelula, Michael Cera, Dylan Baker, Kate Berlant, Jessica Clement Rating R Runtime 100 minutes
PERRI NEMIROFF: There are a lot of cool concepts baked into your movie. Which specific idea would you call your break story idea, the thing that convinced you, “I have a cohesive vision and we should move on this?”

KRISTOFFER BORGLI: Oh, I don’t know. It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment where you start believing in an idea. I feel like there’s something undeniable about the ideas that get picked. They keep gnawing at you. It’s almost like what Carl Jung says – people don’t have ideas, but ideas have people. So it feels like this whole idea kind of picked me in a way. And there’s so many different aspects of the early inspiration. I think specifically what was going through my mind was how we live more in each other’s heads than physically present, and that we have these parasocial relationships with each other and that our personas can start taking on their own lives and outgrow us. Those were some early thoughts on this.

When you started filming this movie, was there any particular idea you were most looking forward to getting to explore with your team and your actors? But then, on the other hand, is there a particular element of this story that wound up being more creatively fulfilling for you to explore than you ever could have imagined at the beginning?

BORGLI: There’s an attempted sex scene in the middle of the movie. I think that was one of the very first ideas, and there’s something there about your perceived idea of someone versus the reality of someone that comes to an embarrassing manifestation in that scene.

It is one of the best fart jokes I’ve ever seen in a movie. How do you shoot a scene like that and have everybody not break and keep a straight face?

BORGLI: I just had to place my monitor in a different room. I couldn’t be in the room. I ruined the takes by laughing. The actors did their thing and managed to get through it. It was not only a cringe-inducing scene to write and direct, but even when I was editing that scene, I had to leave my editing desk multiple times. I couldn’t be in the same room as my computer. It was just so cringy to watch.

I’ve seen the movie twice now. I’ve seen it at TIFF and here so I knew that moment was coming – bad choice of words – I knew that fart joke was going to happen, but I still cackled uncontrollably in the screening.

BORGLI: It’s an unsubtle, very banal moment that I think has its place in an artistic movie. There’s a little history of movies that I remember having memorable fart jokes that kind of feel a little bit out of place. One is 35 Shots of Rum, the Claire Denis movie. There’s a really good one in there. And The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson.

Image via A24

You mentioned there was a point when you might have had Adam Sandler play the Nic Cage role in this film. Watching the finished film, that role feels so specific to Nic, so I’m wondering, when you were thinking about having Adam play that character, what did that film look like and how did the idea evolve when Nic took over the role?

BORGLI: I think that looking back, in retrospect, it’s impossible for me to unsee Nic in this part. He just made the character so watchable and interesting. He does so many choices that are kind of mesmerizing and strange in a good way. Not only is he such a good actor, but just the idea of Nicolas Cage in our culture, who has gone through the thing where your persona outgrows the person, and so he added an artistic layer to the movie that is also hugely interesting, and I think he channeled some of his own personal experiences through the character. There’s some truth in that. There’s some autobiographical elements of Nicolas Cage in this role.

I have a pitch for you. I think it would be a very interesting experiment. You should turn Dream Scenario into an anthology series and have the main role played by different actors at different stages of their careers just to see how the concept would evolve from person to person.

BORGLI: Okay, there’s some money to be made here, I think. [Laughs]

One other thing I was reading about is the choice to alter Nic Cage’s nose in the movie. How exactly do you alter it and what led you two to decide that that was best for the character of Paul?

BORGLI: We were gonna have one of the most recognizable and charismatic actors on the planet play a nobody, an uninteresting, kind of unremarkable person. We had to kind of hide Nicolas Cage in the role. I got help from Izzi Galindo, a prosthetics designer who did my previous movie, Sick of Myself, and we toyed with different ideas of how to slightly alter his face without it being noticeable. He is wearing a prosthetic nose in the film, and it makes him slightly more round and slightly more of a beta male.

Very effective. And like you said, it is not something that sticks out immediately, which makes it an especially effective prosthetic.

BORGLI: Yeah, there’s some strange uncanniness where it is Nicolas Cage, but he’s so different that, at least me, I forget that it’s him. I just see Paul Matthews, the character.

Image via A24

One other thing that he mentioned in our press notes is he described your collaboration as him giving you full control, so I am curious, what is that like and how does your collaboration with an actor who gives you full control compare to someone who doesn’t, or just approaches the collaboration process in a different way?

BORGLI: He’s almost exaggerating a little bit. There were a lot of choices that were not made by me. He made his own decisions, and he had a bunch of ideas of different scenes, of mannerisms, of the way he talks and walks. He was full of ideas. He was so well prepared. He was a great collaborator. I think we kind of sculpted this performance together.

I think one of the things that he was emphasizing via that point was how important it was to put his trust in the leader in order for this wild idea to come together, and I respect that quite a bit.

BORGLI: Yeah, and hats off to him. It’s still baffling to me that I’ve made a movie with Nicolas Cage. [Laughs]

Nic Cage and a slew of other incredible actors, too. You’ve got one heck of an ensemble here.

BORGLI: It is! I’m so grateful for the whole cast. There’s not a dull moment in this movie. They’re all so great.

Can confirm that.

I’ll preface these next questions by saying you do not need to explain everything away in terms of how the dreams work in this movie. But, I do tend to be a movie bible and rule nerd, so I did have a couple of questions. In your own personal opinion, why do you think this happened to Paul and nobody else on the planet?

BORGLI: [Laughs] When writing this, I was looking for the person who I thought would be comedically interesting to throw into this phenomenon. I thought of this kind of antiquated man who doesn’t fully understand our current culture, who feels cheated of academic recognition, who would respond to this in all the wrong ways, and that’s why it became him.

Do you think that Paul’s actions in the real world truly do influence how he is perceived in dreams?

BORGLI: That’s my understanding. There’s this union concept of the shadow self, the idea being that all of our negative traits that we do not confront start bundling up and manifest themselves, maybe in the subconscious, and that they could start showing up in your dreams. The idea here was that his negative qualities, or insecurities, were so strong that they started showing up in other people’s dreams.

In your world here, do you think that the individual having the dream can impact how they perceive Paul in it? In particular, I’m thinking of Molly – if she’s even telling the truth, which she might not be – if she is having a different dream because of things about her versus everybody else.

BORGLI: Maybe there’s something about the confidence level that Paul Matthews starts having when he gets recognized that inflates his ego, and maybe that’s the version of him that she meets in her dreams.

I can think about this concept all day long.

Image via TIFF

This is a bit of a personal question, but having thought about these ideas and doing some dream research, have you found the experience impacting your own dreams, or maybe how you process them?

BORGLI: Exactly. I keep a dream journal. It’s a fun read. It’s strange. I don’t think I fully believe in the union or the Freudian idea that they do reveal our deepest secrets. I think they’re more random than that, or at least I hope so because my dreams are strange and weird, and I hope they don’t hold a secret truth about who I really am. My own dreams became a point of research and a resource for writing these dreams, so there’s a bunch of my personal strange dreams, recurring dreams, that are depicted in this movie.

Can you give us an example?

BORGLI: Well, a specific thing that I think a lot of people have is the feeling of being in a fight and your arms are moving so slow that they have zero impact, and you see that in the film. And then being chased and never being able to escape whoever’s chasing you, that’s also something that you see in the movie. Those are my most recurring dreams.

Were there any dream scenarios you came up with in the script phase, or even shot, that did not make it into the final cut of the movie?

BORGLI: There’s one dream sequence that didn’t make it to the cut because it was too comedic for the moment in the film.

Are you able to share what that was?

BORGLI: It was a naked woman who was taped very high up on a wall, and there were also French baguettes taped to a wall, and it was one of the French dreams.

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