Posted in: Exclusive, Interview, Movies | Tagged: interview, joel kinnaman, nicolas cage, rlje films, Sympathy For The Devil, Yuval Adler

Sympathy for the Devil: Dir Yuval Adler on Cage-Kinnaman Thriller

Director Yuval Adler spoke to Bleeding Cool about his action-thriller in RLJE Films Sympathy for the Devil, Nicolas Cage & Joel Kinnaman.

Few directors get the golden opportunity, like Yuval Adler, to work with two established action powerhouses like Nicolas Cage and Joel Kinnaman. Cage continues to be a machine on screen with his eclectic roles in Renfield (2023), Pig (2021), and the self-aware The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022). He even realized his dream of playing Superman, one of several in a cameo, in The Flash (2023), which was repurposed from a once- thought lost and forgotten project. Kinnaman, when he hasn't fronted both Suicide Squad films, was also the star of AppleTV+'s critically-acclaimed series For All Mankind and Prime Video's action drama, Hanna. In RLJE Films' Sympathy for the Devil follows a driver (Kinnaman) who's forced to drive a mysterious passenger (Cage) at gunpoint, and he finds himself in a high-stakes game of cat and mouse where it becomes clear that not everything is at it seems. The Secrets We Keep director spoke with Bleeding Cool about working with the stars, difficulty working with fire in stunts, and the films that influenced him.

Sympathy for the Devil: Cage Vs. Kinnaman

Bleeding Cool: What intrigued you about 'Sympathy for the Devil?'
Adler: The action, characters, their dark sense of humor, and the fact that it's so contained in these two guys. You get to spend time with them, like in a theater piece. It's got to be cinematic theater, like a graphic novel or a comic book. When I read the [Lucas Paradise] script, it allows for fantastic performances, and that's why I was hooked.

What was working with Nicolas [Cage] and Joel [Kinnaman] like? Can you tell me about their chemistry together?
Their chemistry was great. Nic wanted to do this big performance, and Joel wanted exactly this kind of character in The Driver. He changes, but mostly he's more representing us as the straight man watching this unfold compared to Nic's craziness. He did something he usually doesn't do, which he's used to having this charisma and power. Here, we wanted him to look like an average Joe, like a substitute teacher, not like somebody from 'The Suicide Squad.' To be somebody who has quietness contains Nic's performance. Then you have the change that he needs to have as a character, which is remarkable because it sells you one thing and then flips it on you, so I like that aspect.

Was any aspect of production challenging to get in this film?
The hardest scene technically is the fire scene; because Nic has these Molotov cocktails, he starts throwing them around, and things go on fire. It's tough. You do a take; you must turn it off. You must put the fire out, you must wait out the smoke, then you must do another fire take and put the smoke again to another take, and it has to match. The fire should be there, but the car has already burned, so what do you do? It isn't easy. That was driving me crazy during the car rides and this LED technology. We didn't have much time and were all new at it. It was great once we figured it out, but it took us time to match what was happening in the LED with what was happening outside.

Were there any other works that inspired this film? I've seen some similarities with Michael Mann's 'Collateral.'
'Collateral,' you can say it's similar because of the car, but story-wise, it's not similar. A story that's more like that is 'A History of Violence' (2005) or 'In Bruges' (2008), where again, it's two guys that are in their universe, and slowly things come out. There's something like a painter; I play with this dialogue. With the performances, we had long takes that took a lot of time. We had two cameras typically, but sometimes we did stretches of 5-7 minutes. It's a lot for the actors in the film to sit down in the arc where they do a whole lot in one shot. It's also a privilege for the actors, who love this.

Was there anything you felt limited, given the scale of the project as an indie film?
There wasn't something, literally. We had 20 days, which is a short time. Doing everything in 20 days and 20 nights gets difficult. That was when we felt the budget. The other stuff we had, like the car.

What are your biggest influences as a filmmaker?
From filmmakers who inspired me, there are too many to name. For this film, which is a departure from my previous work, 'Sin City' (2005) is a great reference, and I enjoyed that film because it had a specific heightened look. We are not as extreme as 'Sin City,' but there is something that I could learn from the film. Films that are character studies where it's a bunch of them are drawn together. [Quentin] Tarantino's The Hateful Eight (2015) had a bunch of characters thrown into a small space, and then you let them duke it out. Here we have two people, He has eight people, but the idea is that there's something about the claustrophobia of it that was relevant.

Sympathy for the Devil is currently in theaters.

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