In Sympathy for the Devil (now available on VOD), a pair of unnamed characters played by Nicolas Cage and Joel Kinnaman spend almost the entire movie driving around Las Vegas, from the Strip to Downtown to desolate areas between Henderson and Boulder City. Whenever the characters are in the car, though, they’re actually just at a single place in town: Vū Las Vegas, the virtual production studio that opened in April 2022.
Vū is home to an LED Volume stage, the same technology used on big-budget sci-fi and fantasy series such as The Mandalorian and House of the Dragon. It’s a high-resolution screen that allows actors to be filmed in front of real-time backgrounds representing any location the production might want to depict. That gave Sympathy for the Devil director Yuval Adler the freedom to take his characters anywhere in town, with much greater flexibility than shooting on location.
“Shooting in the LED Volume, we can control everything,” says Vū CEO Tim Moore, who’s also an executive producer on the movie. “There’s no turning around the cars, there’s no waiting for weather.”
“If you’re doing a five-minute driving sequence in a film, it’s one thing, but this was like 35 minutes in the car,” Adler says. “So we definitely knew that we wanted to do it in this technology and not with a green screen, which looks like Seinfeld driving.” The rest of the film was shot on location in Vegas, Henderson, and Boulder City, thanks to Cage’s encouragement.
The script, in which Kinnaman’s hapless father-to-be is carjacked at gunpoint by Cage’s gleeful maniac, was originally set in New York City and was moved to New Orleans for tax-incentive purposes before arriving in Vegas. “Once we were able to show them the facilities and the options here in town, and we did get some help from the state of Nevada on some tax incentives, it ended up being a really good deal,” Moore says. “It became Vegas because of Nic,” Adler adds.
Adler, who’s based in New York City but grew up in Israel, felt an affinity for the Vegas setting. “Something about Vegas is great for this film,” he says, “the desert aspect of it — that they can get out of a big city and suddenly be alone in weird places.” He was adamant about avoiding Vegas clichés. “I actually don’t like it when you go to Vegas and you’re shooting the Strip. You don’t shoot Taxi Driver in New York and shoot the Statue of Liberty. Who cares?”
Adler did include some brief Strip images in the movie’s opening, but most of Sympathy for the Devil is set in out-of- the-way places with which only locals would be familiar. “You’re shooting a film in Vegas, and everybody thinks you’re on the Strip, but no, I’m in some industrial shithole in Henderson all night,” Adler laughs.
That commitment to authenticity extended to working with the LED Volume, making sure that every background image matched the places the characters would really drive to. Adler explains, “The challenge — and I was pretty fanatical about it — is actually to map the drive in the real world and then also shoot plates on exactly the same drive, and then project them at Vū, and then go with a second unit to exactly the same places and shoot it outside, and then have it all match.”
Those results paid off, creating a tense, darkly funny thriller that allows Cage to give one of his signature larger-than-life performances. “I embraced the Cage,” Adler says. “He was starting to do crazy shit and funny shit, and I would just laugh behind the monitor and egg him on.” Two of the movie’s highlights came directly from Cage, who suggested that his character sing and dance along to Alicia Bridges’ 1978 hit “I Love the Nightlife (Disco ’Round)” and personally wrote a bizarre, mesmerizing monologue about something his character calls the “mucus man.”
Sympathy for the Devil is Cage’s sixth movie set at least partially in Vegas, and he’s long been a valuable booster for the town. Sympathy for the Devil was the first major feature film to shoot at Vū, which has since hosted productions from Mel Gibson and Mark Wahlberg, another local resident. After his Vegas experience, Adler is looking to return: “I’m actually writing something now that I want to do in Vegas. Forget the Strip and whatever. Living in the desert outside, there’s something cool about it.”
Sympathy for the Devil is out now on select streaming services, and will be screened at The Beverly Theater from August 18-24