Watching Dream Scenario evokes the best of Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze. Nicolas Cage stars in the dark, hilarious, surreal, wildly original high-concept dramatic comedy as a painfully average man who suddenly begins turning up in everyone’s dreams, catapulting him to instant worldwide celebrity status.
And few would know better than Cage himself, who starred in the 2002 Kaufman-Jonze collab Adaptation. The 59-year-old screen vet and Oscar winner certainly saw the parallels.
“It’s interesting that you mention that, because, yes, this movie is original, and that’s why I love it,” Cage told Yahoo Entertainment about Dream Scenario, the second narrative feature film from Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli (Sick of Myself).
“The interesting thing about Kristoffer is he’s also a really terrific actor, and he made a couple of short films where he starred — one was called Ear — and he did some moves in that movie, some vocal expressions, some exasperation, that I thought was very much like Charlie Kaufman in Adaptation. It turned out [Kristoffer] loves that movie, and I think he wanted to kind of harken back to that style, that motif of a film like Adaptation with this. So that's a good parallel to make. I do think it was on his mind.”
Borgli is something of a Norwegian Tarantino. Like the famed Pulp Fiction director, Borgli went to film school by working at a video store and consuming as much cinema as he could. “I lived in a smaller town outside of Oslo, and my immediate surroundings were so different from the movies that I loved,” he says.
“It was so unexciting compared to the movies that I was watching. I was watching David Lynch, I was watching some Kaufman, some [Luis] Buñuel, and I remember [loving] all the movies that go into the heads of someone inside of dreams. Those are all exciting movies that aren’t so related to their environments. That’s a thing that I could do in Norway. … The most interesting location that you can find is a dream.”
Cage’s character is an unaccomplished college biology professor and married father of two named Paul Matthews. He yearns for credibility in his field (if he only he could sit down and write that book) — but his newfound fame is not, in fact, a dream scenario. Sure, it’s a hoot at first being a celebrity. But when Paul suddenly turns violent and terrifying in everyone’s dreams, the world turns on him. He’s shunned, terrorized, dismissed from his post.
In other words, he’s canceled — and Dream Scenario becomes a commentary on ego, vanity, masculinity, narcissism and, most of all, cancel culture.
Borgli says the story was inspired by news reports he read about college professors being fired from their posts and losing tenure over accusations — both serious and slight. “There was a huge discrepancy between sort of the students point of view and then what they had experienced,” he says. “It was different things, but mostly it was stupid things they said or not being delicate enough about certain points of views, personal points of views about topical things that in some cases maybe deservedly got them fired, and other cases seemed ridiculous.”
Working in elements of Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious with a healthy dash of A Nightmare on Elm Street, “I thought I’d hijack this high-concept idea from the horror genre and place it in our culture as a way for me to investigate and process the culture at large,” Borgli continues. “I could look at how it felt for the person at the center of it, for his family, for his job, and then the response pattern of our culture at large. And in that way it felt like this is a way to make a snapshot of our current times and also sort of social satire.”
Since its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, Dream Scenario — while wildly praised — has also been characterized as “going after” or a “takedown of” cancel culture.
Borgli insists that is an oversimplification.