Face/Off Werb and Michael Colleary tried to sell to a studio from as early as 1990. The first actors who were chosen to play Sean Archer and Castor Troy were Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger respectively but John Woo instead hired John Travolta and Nicolas Cage to play those characters. It took numerous studios, producers and rewrites before John Woo became attached several years later. For the Archer character, Woo considered casting either Michael Douglas or Jean-Claude Van Damme with whom he had worked in "Hard Target". When the film was eventually made, Douglas served as an executive producer. Werb and
John Travolta Civil Action" (1998), a Bill Clinton-esque presidential candidate in "Primary Colors" (1998), and a military investigator in "The General's Daughter" (1999). In 2000, Travolta starred in and co-produced the science fiction film "Battlefield Earth", based on the novel of the same name by L. Ron Hubbard, in which he played the leader of a group of aliens that enslaves humanity on a bleak future Earth. The film had been a dream project for Travolta since the book's release in 1982, when Hubbard had personally written him to try to help make a film adaptation. The film received almost universally negative