Why ‘Dream Scenario’ Director Kristoffer Borgli Dreamed of Nicolas Cage With K-Pop Hair

What if everyone in the world went to sleep and synchronously dreamed about the same man? An idea that proliferated the web fifteen years ago as a now-mythic copypasta meme, inspired by the theories of psychologist Carl Jung, reincarnates as the premise of Dream Scenario, the uncanny new A24 film by Norwegian writer/director Kristoffer Borgli.

In this case, the dream man in question happens to be Nicolas Cage, who plays the unlikely object of everyone’s unconscious minds: a schlubby, balding biology professor named Paul Matthews. Meek yet arrogant, Paul craves renown in his scholarly community and resents his more accomplished peers, until he becomes a celebrity literally overnight upon learning he’s been casually appearing in the dreams of his students, neighbors, and strangers alike. Paul is quickly seduced by the spotlight– his teenage daughters suddenly revere him, students line up to snap selfies with him, a hip ad agency tells him he’s “the most interesting person in the world right now” before pitching a partnership with Sprite –but it’s not long before the tide turns against him. As mysteriously as the dreams began, they give way to violent nightmares, and Paul’s visitations in the collective unconscious start to have cruel ramifications in his waking life.

Dream Scenario is part metaphysical fable about the perils of fame, persona, and groupthink, and part absurdist comedy magnifying the quotidian horrors of social and corporeal life. (If that sounds too heady, know that it also features one—well, two—of the most devastatingly funny farts in cinema history.) The film belongs to a larger body of work in which Borgli explores similar themes– celebrity, media, (de)construction of identity—including last year’s grotesque comedy Sick of Myself, in which a 20-something Oslo woman deliberately contracts an infectious skin disease for attention, and his 2017 debut feature DRIB, a Kiarostamian docu-fiction hybrid about an internet edgelord who becomes a spokesperson for an energy drink. Borgli is continually interested in id-dominant characters unraveled by their addiction to attention, but neither dignifies nor demonizes his protagonists so much as he lays bare their desires and cranks them up to their highest intensity– inviting us to consider what sort of things we’ve done or might do to satisfy our own.

Born in Oslo and based in Los Angeles, Borgli is a perceptive cultural satirist with an irreverent sense of humor and appetite for mortification that approximates Nathan Fielder or Larry David. In terms of filmmaking, Borgli cites David Lynch as a primary influence on his craft, but Dream Scenario also strongly evokes the work of Spike Jonze, in its high-concept surrealism, impish humor underpinned by earnest longing, and of course, in Cage– whose perfectly pathetic rendering of Paul is one of his strongest performances since Adaptation.

Another auteur/quirked-up white boy icon that influenced the film even more explicitly is David Byrne of Talking Heads, a band that factors prominently in a pivotal sequence near the film’s conclusion. It’s a scene that may be the most shocking of all for how tender it is, distinguishing Dream Scenario as Borgli’s most romantic and poignant work yet. (Mild-to-medium spoiler alert: Some of the details of this scene are discussed at the very end of this interview.)

Ahead of the wide theatrical release of Dream Scenario this week, Borgli took the time to chat with GQ about lucid dreaming, editing his own films, and working with (and dreaming about) Nick Cage.

GQ: Where did this project start for you?

KRISTOFFER BORGLI: I was writing it at the beginning of 2020, at the same time as there was a global pandemic ramping up, which felt uncanny and strange because I was writing about a dream pandemic. I was thinking about massive cultural response to a phenomenon, and here it was, happening at the same time, in a very physical way. But the very first seed of the idea came from the character. I was thinking about a middle-aged academic who felt entitled to recognition for work he hadn't even done. I thought that was a funny character, but I didn't know what to do with that. I didn't have a story. I was reading about the collective unconscious, the Carl Jung idea of how we are metaphysically linked in a cosmic way, and it felt like a high-concept horror movie. I wanted to rip that idea out of the genre that it belonged to and place it somewhere where it didn't belong: in the hands of a suburban American dad.

The character has some parallels with Signe in Sick of Myself, who is also desperate for recognition and attention. Dream Scenario engages with similar themes as your other work, but I’m curious what you wanted to say or do differently with this project.

These movies were written in sort of the same moment and from probably the same mindset. I have been very interested in how a person who seemingly has everything that they should want in life makes themselves miserable by focusing on the wrong things. That comes very naturally to me, to be drawn to the top layers of the Maslow Pyramid of Needs.

With Dream Scenario, one of the key elements was that I wanted to do a movie that dealt with dreams. That felt really exciting to me as a person who grew up with David Lynch movies and was fascinated with the idea of taking a camera into your head. The other thing was that the Norwegian project felt like I was inviting people to a very niche corner of my world. I thought, "This time, I want to make an American movie, and I want to meet the audience halfway." I thought if I start the movie in a suburban kitchen, then most people will feel that they can relate to and recognize that space, before the movie goes into strange territories.

At what point did Nick Cage come to mind for the character, and how did he get involved?

I wrote the script without anyone in mind. I didn't even have a list of actors that I wanted to work with, because I was writing this before I even made Sick of Myself and didn't have a name. I thought, "I just need a good actor." That's the level of ambition I had. Once we set up the movie with A24, and Ari Aster and Lars Knudsen as my producers, then we started talking names.

As soon as Nick Cage was on the table, it became undeniable that he was the best-suited person to play this character. The movie requires many versions of the character: the real-life version of him, and the many different ways that he is portrayed in dreams. So I needed someone with that range, which Nicolas Cage definitely has. But on top of that, there's almost an allegorical value to the script that talks about Nick Cage and his image in the modern world. How he's been meme-ified and turned into this mythical icon, and has ups and downs of loving and hating fame, and fame haunting him.

Jung believed the collective unconscious was informed by ancient myths, archetypes, and primordial images. It makes you wonder whether memes and celebrities are modern extensions of that.

Those century-old ideas suddenly feel more relevant and current now, [with] the way we've made the collective unconscious a reality by connecting every brain on the planet. [Paul is] like an egregore, which is a spirit that is willed into existence by a small group of people and then that spirit comes back to haunt and dominate those lives. I feel like Nick Cage has willed his own spirit into existence, and that spirit has come back to haunt and dominate his life. I think that has happened through mass culture– that it's been in constant dialogue and evolution through memes and ideas being co-opted and remixed, and he has lost control over his own image. [Cage] knows what that feels like, and he could bring that into the movie and portray the character authentically because of it.

Did Cage start to show up in your dreams at any point during production?

There was one in particular in pre-production. He was a week out from coming, and I had an extremely vivid dream about him coming to set with big, spiky hair and saying, "I'm only doing the movie like this." And we had to shoot the movie with him looking like a K-pop star, which was, of course, a nightmare to me. I shared that dream with him as soon as he came to Toronto, and it felt so weird, because of course he was nothing like that. He was like, "I would never do that." I had the experience [that’s depicted in] the movie, of having a version of someone come into my [dreams] and it created expectations of him being difficult. In real life, he was very collaborative.

Do you believe dreams are symbolic messages from our subconscious?

I'm very happy to entertain mystical things in movies. I think that's an exciting place for them. But in my real life, I feel like I'm a little bit more rational. I'm not very superstitious or a believer in anything metaphysical. I've done a lot of research on dreams and their supposed meaning– There's no consensus. It's one of the great mysteries of our lives. It's so bizarre, this great hallucination that happens every night.

Dreams tell us that we can have experiences without engaging with the world at all, and I think that's very fascinating. I'm very pleased when I hear someone saying, "I had a dream about you." I get very interested. I want to hear about it. And I keep a dream journal. I write them down. But I have no idea if they have any significance.

Keeping a dream journal is supposed to be helpful for learning how to lucid dream. Do you have any experience with lucid dreaming or astral projection?

Lucid dreams, yes. And I have sleep paralysis a lot. I have weird out-of-body experiences when I dream sometimes. I've been researching lucid dreaming a bunch. If you see the movie, there's hints about certain rules of dream logic that are subtle, but if you know them, you know there might be areas of the movie that might not be real.

I know there’s a rule about looking at your hands… and clocks and light switches are not supposed to work in dreams, right?

You actually said one of them. There’s a scene. When you see it again, you will notice.

If you could astral project into anyone’s dreams, who would you choose?

It would be really fun to use it as a prank on friends. Just show up and be a complete menace. It would be fun to do it with Ari Aster, because I imagine his dreams are really trippy. It'd be fun to hang out in there. And then I would love to enter my girlfriend's dreams, so that she finally has a dream about me.

If you became a celebrity overnight like Paul, how do you think you would cope? What is your relationship with fame like?

I would be much more hesitant to engage. I see what it can lead to, and I would be wary of that. There’s a little bit of that warning I have to take on as I grow an audience and am speaking to a bigger number of people with each movie that I make. If the way I engage with the public consciousness is through my art, and it’s the work that is dissected and talked about and lives in people's heads, that’s completely fine. But personally, I would love to stay out of that space and not occupy people's heads. So I'm very hesitant to engage, but I know that I kind of have to. I've got to promote my movie. It's a necessary evil.

You were your own editor on Sick of Myself, for what you’ve said were budgetary reasons. I was intrigued to see you did it again for Dream Scenario. Why did you take on that role again, and how is your experience of editing your own work?

Yet again, it came from budgetary issues. Being able to shoot on film is costly and always sort of a fight. A way to win that fight is to offer to edit the movie really cheaply. That's [what has] happened so far in my career. I don't know if I'll ever get to a budget level where I can afford an editor. But I think I've actually grown to like it. It's an interesting space to be creative. When you're writing, anything is possible, and it's hard to focus. When you're working on set, you're limited by the day and the physical nature of the shoot. When you're editing, you're not trying to be creative in the same way.

I don't want to follow the rules that I set up for myself writing or directing the movie. The editor version of me is trying to shake the footage up and make something new again. It feels like I'm three different people and each one of them is trying to claim ownership over the movie. But the final version is the editor, and now it feels hard to give that up.

We have to acknowledge the references to Talking Heads, which feels synchronous given the way they’ve been permeating the collective consciousness this year around the re-release of Stop Making Sense. Can you talk about the inspiration there?

I wanted to create this Chekhov's gun, where you introduce something in the beginning or middle of the movie and you have a payoff at the very end. The idea was that [Paul and his wife Janet] were going to debate a fantasy, almost a sexual fantasy, sort of the best-case version of a dream that you want to experience. And I needed it to be an experience that didn't require words. I wanted it so as soon as you see him looking like she described him, you will understand what's going on. It was also an opportunity to give some backstory to the character: that he used to be cool enough [in the past] that at one point he had dressed up in the David Byrne suit.

It felt similar to my father, who is a retired professor and has always just been my dad, but once I started going through his record collection, it was really good, and I got curious about, “When was my father cool?” In that sense, the Talking Heads reference seemed to fulfill multiple things at once. And it was a complete accident that A24 was also re-releasing the concert film, but I thought of it as a happy accident, because more people get that reference now.

The “City of Dreams” needle drop is also a beautiful choice.

I was begging that we would get the rights to that, because it was the perfect note to end on. I'm very happy about that.

Originally Appeared on GQ