Sympathy For The Devil Producer Allan Ungar Reveals Filming Details

Sympathy For The Devil Producer Allan Ungar discusses working with Nic Cage and Joel Kinnaman, crashing cars, and filming details in this exclusive interview.

Sympathy For The Devil Producer Allan Ungar Reveals Filming Details

Sympathy For The Devil Producer Allan Ungar discusses the new film, starring Nic Cage and Joel Kinnaman, in this exclusive interview.

SYNOPSIS: After being forced to drive a mysterious passenger at gunpoint, a man finds himself in a high-stakes game of cat and mouse where it becomes clear that not everything is as it seems.

Mama’s Geeky: Can you talk about how Sympathy For The Devil all came together, and bringing on Nic and Joel?

Allan Ungar: The film came together extremely quickly. We knew that Joel had a window, and Nic had a window. And we needed to hit that. We started discussing this in mid-May of last year. And Joel and Nick both had hard outs, I think it was like August. So it left us no time to get the film financed and prep shots. It was quick. The director, Yuval Adler, had been actually chasing the script for years.

He’ll say it didn’t happen quickly in terms of the development of it, but he had been chasing Luke Paradise, the writer, for years and checking in on the option every couple of years to see if it had lapsed or not. Eventually, after a few renewals, he found out that the producers who had it last couldn’t get it done. So it basically went right from there to us at Hammerstone. In mid-May I got the call that this was on the radar, and we were on the ground in Vegas four and a half weeks later prepping. It was the fastest production I’ve ever been involved in. 

Mama’s Geeky: How long did it film for?

Allan Ungar: Filming was about four weeks. Originally the film took place in New York in the dead of winter. The characteristics of that world were a little different, and then we explored different places that we could shoot. The biggest challenge being how are we going to capture pages upon pages in a car. It’s very expensive to shoot on roads practically. With police and permits and all kinds of stuff. And then if you have a continuity issue, you have to match in the accuracy and start again. It’s a nightmare.

So we decided, and Yuval was always really adamant about finding the most flexible way for the actor so that the environment wasn’t intrusive, and we’re like, Hey, we got to do virtual production. And we knew that it’s a thing that mostly the big studios and Disney were employing, and we thought, oh, maybe it’s really super expensive. And lo and behold, we found View Networks, which is a studio in Vegas. They also have a headquarters in Tampa. A 40,000 square foot studio.

They had never hosted a feature film before. They did a lot of stuff for NFL, UFC, ESPN, a lot of commercials. But to house a feature film for over a month had not been done before. We were actually the first movie in the history of the state of Nevada to use virtual production, which was really cool. So the government there was really supportive of this. Basically we moved into the soundstage and anything that you see of the two of them in the car is done on a soundstage.

Mama’s Geeky: I never would have known that. I assumed it was practical.

Allan Ungar: What’s funny is that we were able to combine it with practical shots because we did an entire day of just driving pickups. We mapped out a route in the film, because it’s supposed to take place in real time. Yuval was always very specific about this corner is where they turn right, this is where they turn left, as we’re basically going from Vegas to Boulder City. We were very specific about the geography of it, so we needed to match the shots on the soundstage to real life. We did that by actually capturing those places.

We built a rig with eight cameras and we drove around one night just doing the route that the guys did. It was basically Yuval and our cinematographer in the backseat with eight screens, just seeing 360. And I, because put the producer in charge of the liability, I was behind the wheel driving the car and coordinating with the police. We were doing all kinds of maneuvers just to match what you’d see in the film. So it was a crazy process.

Mama’s Geeky: Is having the focus mainly be on just two characters daunting at all? Because it has to be done right to be pulled off.

Allan Ungar: We were always concerned about finding the right balance so that the audience never felt like it was dragging out because, I believe it’s after the gas station, there’s a nine or ten minute long sequence where we don’t even show shots outside the car. It’s really meant to be claustrophobic.

Yuval was really trying to hit this idea of being pinned in there with the driver, feeling what he feels as you’ve got Nic with a gun in his face and he’s trapped. He’s trying to get back to his wife. He doesn’t know where he’s going. We don’t know where we’re going. And so trying to emulate that was certainly daunting. But I felt like we knew that if we pulled it off, it would really serve what we needed to for the audience, and it would work well.

Mama’s Geeky: Was being set in real time always the plan from the beginning?

Allan Ungar: That was all Luke Paradise, the writer. That was the script. It was very specific. Pretty much at the title page it says that this is all in real time. It’s funny. Very often film can deviate. We like to say that there’s three movies: the one you write, the one you shoot, and the one you edit. This really didn’t deviate in any way. It was pretty much to the book, with the exception of Nic introducing some of his ideas and the things that you obviously want him to bring to the table, which is completely improvised.

I read on Twitter that Richard Roeper had made a comment about one of his favorite lines of all the movies he’s watched in the last few weeks and one of the lines, Sure enough, was an improv line from Nic. So I went to Luke and I was like, Listen, I don’t want to upset you, and he was like, it’s totally okay.

Mama’s Geeky: What is Nic Cage like in person?

Allan Ungar: It was such a bucket list thing for a lot of us on this film. Growing up, the Cage trinity, I swore by it. The Rock is my favorite movie of all time. It’s funny because letterbox asked us on the red carpet, what are your favorite movies? And I was like, Oh, I’m gonna start with a Nic Cage movie. I don’t mean this in a cold way, but he’s such a pro. He shows up. He knows everybody’s place, everybody’s line. The things and creativity that he brings to the table are just unmatched and unparalleled. He really understands that character.

Yuval joked that you can imagine in prep, Nic is just sitting and digesting the script every night. Reading it top to bottom, and just becoming that character and trying to figure out the best way to create empathy. Not to spoil anything, but even though he’s the villain in this film, you still want to relate to that villain. I think the greatest villains in all of cinema you try to relate to and I think we’re seeing a little bit of a comeback of that now in a lot of films that are coming out, but he’s there to show up and do the best version of that character that he can.

There’s a lot of actors who love to sit around, and schmooze with the cast and the crew. Nic’s super friendly, but he just he cares so much about the work. He puts everything into it. And he’s just there and he’s just focused.

Mama’s Geeky: This movie feels like it is Nic Cage being Nic Cage.

Allan Ungar: Listen, that’s the thing that we talked about. You don’t want that to overshadow the film of course. So I think for Yuval, he wanted to create a really grounded performance with Nic, but also let Nic go wild and be Nic at the time that it called for it. Originally there was a discussion, does he start at an 11? And crank up to 20? Or does it start a little bit more measured and more subdued? We’re really not sure what’s going on, build that intensity. And then at the appropriate time, crank that up to 11, which is what we ended up doing and I think worked really well.

Mama’s Geeky: Can you talk about working with Joel as well?

Allan Ungar: The thing about Joel is that he’s often playing elite. He’s super charismatic and charming. He’s done the action hero, handsome, charming guy before and we wanted him to be the antithesis of that. He’s got to be unassuming. Obviously, he’s an everyday guy. So it’s like, how do we turn the guy from The Suicide Squad into a substitute teacher, essentially. That was the thing. It was Joel’s idea of bringing the glasses in. He wanted a pen in his front pocket and his shirt as a warehouse worker.

A lot of these ideas that Joel brought to the table to make sure that the audience never actually felt like he was the guy that Nic thought he was. I think what Joel did really, really well is that as the film goes on, he starts to match his energy. He matches Nic’s energy as he starts to fight back and go into fight or flight mode. Joel was great.

Mama’s Geeky: I thought they were so good together felt like a really great choices for a movie where you’re essentially focusing on two people. They have to both really bring their A game and I felt like they did. I loved their chemistry together.

Allan Ungar: Oh yeah, their chemistry is great. They were great. It just gets better and better as the film goes on.

Mama’s Geeky: Avoiding spoilers, but what was it like shooting that final scene with the car crash?

Allan Ungar: Trying to find a place in the middle of the night, in the middle of the desert, to flip a car is a much harder that you think. We had to bring in this massive Condor, which is a light that basically simulates moonlight. We were driving around near Boulder City, trying to find a location that we could control for safety. Obviously, you have to think about things like the creatures of the night and snakes and you have to bring in wranglers so becomes like a whole thing.

We ended up narrowing it down, and we found this incredible spot that we’d only seen during the day, which is a dried up lake, like a crater in the middle of the desert, a few miles from Boulder City. Yuval would like to say he didn’t want Dukes of Hazzard, he wanted it to be gritty, and he wanted to be realistic. We did a few different tests just to see the right way to flip the car. It was actually my first car flip and Yuval’s first card flip as well. We worked with a really great stunt coordinator, who came in was like, Alright, if we want it to feel raw and real, this is the way to do it. We towed it so instead of a driver operating it, which is a little bit riskier, the car was towed on a line connected to a truck. And then basically you separate the cable at the last second and let the car do the rest on its own.

But what happened was, as if Murphy’s Law, the car up ended, and then just dropped and didn’t slide down the embankment. It just stopped. So we had to spend a couple more hours simulating what you see in the movie, which is the car flips and then slides down the embankment. So then we had to tow the car down this 90 degree angle to make you think that it’s still going. So it didn’t go off perfectly. But it works.

Mama’s Geeky: So do you have just one car and hope the stunt works the first time?

Allan Ungar: This is a very fun story. Without getting into too much of the politics, there was a specific car that was going to be sponsored to us. Yuval, to his credit, creatively really wanted a beat up old Chevy Impala. That’s what he wanted. We had to find two cars, so we had one that we can destroy, and one that would have to be used for a lot of driving purposes and on the soundstage, which was actually at the end of the production, so we couldn’t fully destroy that. We had to find these two, almost identical cars, from 20 some odd years ago, knowing that it’s 110 degrees in Vegas. These old cars, the air filtration system and the AC is not going to be perfect.

Oh my God, it was a disaster at times. We look back now and laugh on it, but our first day was in the parking garage at the hospital and the car’s AC just didn’t work. We’re underground and it’s 100 and something degrees outside, which means about 15 degrees hotter in that garage. I said to Yuval, I hope the Apollo was worth it. But no, we found two of them, and there was some paint touch ups and we had to change the interior to match them a little bit. I mean, they’re not 100% identical, but we basically destroyed one of them and the other one was used for anything that we needed. 

Mama’s Geeky: Nic really brings his all in the diner scene, which is one of my favorites. I back him up on the tuna melt issue he has.

Allan Ungar: Honestly, that was the scene. That diner scene was what made me want to produce the movie. I knew that once that hit, it was going to be a powder keg and it just wouldn’t stop. Now that the reviews are starting to come out, I think the San Francisco Chronicle wrote that Nic’s dance sequence is probably the best use of that narrative device since Reservoir Dogs. Nic chose the song actually. That song was his idea.

So here’s the fun story. Originally in the script, it was Elvis and with Nic’s connection to Elvis, he’s like, No. Also there’s no way we could afford it. We struck it from the script. We were doing these rehearsals, and there was a jukebox in the background. Yuval encouraged Nic to use the environment around him, and that’s how the scene got built. So we reached out to the music supervisor, which was the same one we used on Bandit, and he was incredible. He’s like, here’s a list of songs that you could use, all fun Soul music from the 50s and 60s. None of it clicked for Nic.

Then Nic came up with the Alicia Bridges song that we used, and it was a lot of fun. When we put that sequence together, we knew that the audience would dig it. And sure enough, at the world premiere, people just started clapping. It became a whole thing, and we were like, alright, this is definitely going to be a Nic meme, and it better be a Nic meme.

Mama’s Geeky: I love that for most of the movie, I was just as in the dark as Joel’s character was.

Allan Ungar: I will say RLJ did a fantastic job with the trailer because it didn’t really give you a sense of what was going to happen. And I really appreciated that. Because sometimes, it’s like you’ve watched the whole movie in two and a half minutes on YouTube. They did an incredible job sort of getting it out there. And so really, it’s only been a couple days since people really started seeing it, and now they’re talking about it, which is great.

Mama’s Geeky: Well, thank you so much for your time. And congratulations on the film. It’s so it’s so fun. I can’t wait to watch it again.

Sympathy For The Devil is now playing in select theaters.

NEXT: Bandit Director Allan Ungar Talks Adapting Real Life Story

About Sympathy For The Devil

After being forced to drive a mysterious passenger at gunpoint, a man finds himself in a high-stakes game of cat and mouse where it becomes clear that not everything is as it seems.

Sympathy For The Devil is now playing in select theaters.