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
Face/Off playing it." "Rolling Stone"s Peter Travers said of the film, "You may not buy the premise or the windup, but with Travolta and Cage taking comic and psychic measures of their characters and their own careers, there is no resisting "Face/Off". This you gotta see." Richard Corliss of "Time" said that the film "isn't just a thrill ride, it's a rocket into the thrilling past, when directors could scare you with how much emotion they packed into a movie." Barbara Shulgasser of the "San Francisco Examiner" called the movie "idiotic" and argued that "a good director would choose the best