Question of the Day - 18 August 2025

For those who haven't seen it, Leaving Las Vegas (1995) is a dark, but touching, romantic drama based on the semi-autobiographical novel of the same name by John O'Brien, who shot himself a couple of weeks after selling the film rights. Family members called the novel O'Brien's "suicide note."

Directed by Mike Figgis, the movie stars Nicolas Cage as an alcoholic who travels to Las Vegas with the express intention of drinking himself to death. But soon after arriving, he hooks up with the heart-of-gold hooker Sera, played by Elizabeth Shue, in whose arms he finally expires. Cage won his sole Academy Award for Best Actor that year for his performance.

The movie itself was made on a shoestring budget of just $3.5 million ($500,000 less than the marketing and promotion budget). So tight was the production money that Figgis himself scored the soundtrack to his film, which he shot on Super 16 instead of 35mm film (that actually adds to the raw quality of the picture).

In a subsequent interview with website filmcritic.com, the director described the realities of working within those financial constraints. "We didn't have any money and we weren't pretending to be something we weren't." There was no way they could afford to shut down the Strip to traffic, as larger productions do, so Figgis had to shoot with all the real-life traffic on Las Vegas Boulevard doing its thing, which, he says, was "brilliant" for the added realism it brought to those scenes.

As for why the movie wasn't embraced by the casinos, they didn't relish being individually associated with a story that focused so heavily on alcoholism, prostitution, and personal destruction, nor did they like the idea of portraying greater Las Vegas in that light. And don't forget, this was in the mid-1990s, when Sin City was actively trying to rebrand itself as more family-friendly. Leaving Las Vegas was exactly what the city didn't need: tarnishing its new image as a fun, carefree, kid-happy destination. 

In addition, as a film with a microscopic budget, it had neither the leverage nor the financial clout of a major studio production to secure filming rights at the big-name casinos. Thus, many scenes were shot “guerrilla-style” without permits or formal permission, especially on the Strip and in certain casinos, and the crew used handheld cameras and filmed quickly to avoid detection. As such, a lot of filming did take place in Las Vegas, including at Excalibur and Bally's and in front of Circus Circus, the Mirage, and the Flamingo.

But the River Palms in Laughlin finally stepped up and provided the location for the interior shots of the casino in the film, including the famous scene where Cage flips over a blackjack table, which was, we've heard, unscripted and unappreciated by the casino. (There was only one take.) A number of other scenes were also filmed in Laughlin, which obviously wasn't worried about any lasting images, given the name and presumed location of the film.