Trivia

Dying of the Light (2014) had a $5 million budget of which $1 million was Nicolas Cage's salary. The shooting location was mostly Romania with some additional scenes shot in the USA and Australia (doubling for Kenya). The film's independent financier was David Grovic, a Bahamanian businessman whose few prior film credits include the critical failure The Bag Man (2014), which Grovic financed, directed, co-wrote and acted in.

This film was taken away from director Paul Schrader in post-production and re-edited by the producers. In October 2014 Schrader posted on his Facebook page: "We lost the battle. Dying of the Light (2014), a film I wrote and directed, was taken away from me, re-edited, scored and mixed without my input. Yesterday Grindstone (a division of Lionsgate) released the poster and the trailer." Schrader had already posted in September 2014 photos of himself, Nicolas Cage, Anton Yelchin and Nicolas Winding Refn wearing black T-shirts printed with the terms of the non-disparagement clause they had signed with the film's production company, Grindstone Entertainment Group: "No publicity issued by artist or lender, whether personal publicity or otherwise, shall contain derogatory mention of company, the picture, or the services of artist or others connected with the picture." Commenting on the photos Schrader further wrote: "Here we are, Nick Cage, Anton Yelchin, Nic Refn and myself, wearing our 'non-disparagement' T shirts. The non-disparagement clause in an artist's contract gives the owners of the film the right to sue the artist should the owner deem anything the artist has said about the film to be 'derogatory.' I have no comment on the film or others connected with the picture." Through their silent public protest Schrader, Cage, Yelchin and Refn have basically disowned this released version of their feature and encourage potential audiences not to see it.

Nicolas Winding Refn admired Paul Schrader's spec screenplay and was going to direct it years earlier with Harrison Ford and Channing Tatum in the leads until Ford exited the project because of creative differences about the story's bleak ending. Refn opted to stay on as an executive producer with Schrader directing his own screenplay. Refn later publicly criticized the producer's decision to change Schrader's version and called the re-editing against the director's will "artistic disrespect".

On 8th Dec. 2014 cinematographer Gabriel Kosuth published a guest column on Variety.com, where he wrote that he "...was denied the possibility to accomplish in post-production what is any cinematographer's duty [according to the American Cinematographer Manual]: 'assuring that what audiences will see on cinema and television screens faithfully reflects the look intended by the director'". Kosuth complained about the significant digital alterations made by the producers in post-production: "The film we shot had images with strong, violent colors and was dark. This one is not. (...) Paul Schrader wanted color to play an unusual, extremely important role in the visual style of his movie. An expressionistic approach where color doesn't just represent moods and feelings, but meanings and symbols. This is why he insisted that color should be embedded in the very fiber of the image - using filters on lenses and colored lights - so that we were not merely catching colors on film, but truly sculpting the picture with color. The moment you try to 're-paint' or modify such a thing, it is supposed to crash to pieces. And this is what has happened to Dying of the Light (2014) - an unpleasant and tragic demonstration of the limits to the so-called wonders of digital post-production. By surgically eliminating the expressionistic color from the image - the pasty yellow-green of the African scenes, the dense sepia-chocolate of the American ones, and the bluish-green from the European ones - an unknown author has offered the public not only a crippled caricature of everything, but a collection of images deprived of soul, emotion and significance. (...) As pretentious as it may sound, the reality is that color affects not only the perception of the artist's world on screen, but the perception of an actor's performance too: Eyes, skin, make-up, hair, come to us in an 'intended' emotional color. (For those who don't believe, try watching Apocalypse Now (1979) in black-and-white.) The unbalancing of a well thought 'color formula' has the effect of mutilating not only atmosphere, composition, and centers of interest in the frame, but also detailed production design, costume and make-up concepts all based on that original formula. I'm writing this letter because I'm trying to understand why would someone deliberately ruin such a visual expression. Just because it's possible? By pushing some magical buttons at a console, or because of some kind of aesthetic Daltonism? Why would someone damage something achieved with unknown effort and sleepless nights? Just because there are people today who cannot take a human activity called artistic creation seriously?"

Originally titled "IN THE DYING LIGHT".