Trailer
Plot summary
Evan Lake holds a desk job at Langley with Milton Schultz, the younger colleague he has trained. Twenty-two years after the terrorist Muhammad Banir tortured him during an operation in Africa, Lake is losing his memory to frontotemporal dementia, and his superiors treat him as a liability. In Bucharest the police chase a Kenyan courier who throws himself and his USB drive from a bridge, and the recovered drive reaches the CIA. Milt matches its contents to large shipments of an experimental thalassemia drug traced to a University of Bucharest clinic. Because the disease is hereditary, he argues that Banir, presumed dead, is still alive and ordering the medicine through a middleman. Lake asks permission to pursue him and is refused, so he resigns, and Milt travels with him to Romania.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Dying of the Light (2014)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Paul Schrader posted on Facebook that his film Dying of the Light was "taken away" from him and reedited, scored and mixed without his input; the post showed him, Nicolas Cage, Anton Yelchin and Nicolas Winding Refn wearing T-shirts printed with their contracts' non-disparagement clause.
- Paul Schrader was denied final-cut privilege by the studio, which heavily reedited the footage without his consent; he and his principal cast disowned the released version of the film and campaigned against it.
- In 2017 Schrader rebuilt a rough version of his original cut under the title Dark, working from DVD copies of the workprint; it is not for official release but can be seen by request at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the Harry Ransom Center and the Museum of Modern Art, and in 2018 he shared it on The Pirate Bay via BitTorrent.
- The film's director of photography, Gabriel Kosuth, wrote in a Variety guest column that his color-significant cinematography had been digitally altered and that he was denied the chance to ensure audiences saw the look its director intended.
- Nicolas Cage was cast in the lead role of the film, replacing Harrison Ford, and Anton Yelchin later joined, replacing Channing Tatum.
