Having just watched Trapped In Paradise for the first time recently, this article caught my eye. Interesting for me, in that I never noticed that it was shot in Toronto and parts of Ontario, I can see it now that the author has pointed it out! Some good pictures from the movie too.

http://beta.torontoist.com/2011/08/reel_toronto_trapped_in_paradise/

Also it links to an interview with Jon Lovitz in which he discusses his career and talks about making this movie. It is a long article, and quite interesting, but here's the part about Nic and TIP.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/jon-lovitz,49464/

Trapped In Paradise—“Dave Firpo” (1994)

JL: [Pauses.] Well, I feel like I’m very fortunate to be in movies at all, but I called it Trapped In S***. I love Dana, and Nicolas Cage was great and we became friends, but the director [George Gallo] just wasn’t there. He wasn’t directing. It was a bad time in my life personally, because my father had just died Dec. 25. And I’m up in the snow with no light—we did night shoots for six weeks. It was like 25-below. Everyone was fine, but after six weeks, the whole crew started going crazy ’cause there’s no light. It really affects your mood. Then we moved to Toronto, so we’re shooting inside. It wasn’t fancy, but inside during the day, this was a luxury. It was like 31 degrees, but it felt like summer. So as soon as I worked during the daylight, my mood changed. 

But the director would say, “Just do whatever you want.” He was bragging about what a great director he was before he hired us: “I’m as good as Rob Reiner and Martin Scorsese.” This is George Gallo. I said, “Don’t you think you should let other people say that?” We never even got to read the script. He’d go, “Well, let’s rehearse this.” I’d go, “Oh good, we get to rehearse.” And he’d start screaming at me, “Do whatever you want!” And I go, “Saying ‘do whatever you want’ is not direction.” 

Six weeks in, Dana and Nicolas took over. We were doing this scene where we had to take these trash bags out from the trunk of a car and change clothes, and it was complicated. Nicolas was like, “What do you want?” And George goes, “Do whatever you want.” Nicolas said, “No!” Nicolas ended up basically directing that scene, because we had to choreograph it. It’s too much stuff in action; you can’t just do whatever you want. You have to shoot a master, then you shoot coverage—you have to match everything. You have to plan it out. It’s absurd. 

And the movie did horrible, but people like it. I’ve done a lot of movies where I thought, “This will be fun” and it’s a disaster but then people like it. So you never know. But what made me angry was the director started blaming us and said I didn’t know my lines, which was complete bulls***. I was on the set and I asked him, “Is this the scene where…?” Because when you’re doing a movie, they shoot out of sequence. So we’re shooting in the middle of this empty field and there’s nothing. I asked the director, “Is this the part of the scene after we steal a Lexus and it goes over the cliff, and we’ve climbed up the hill, and it’s starting there?” He goes, “I don’t know! I don’t have time for these questions! You have to know the script!” He was right—I should have known it better, and I hadn’t looked at it enough—but it turns out the answer to my question is “yes.” So I knew it enough. And he wrote the thing! It was like, “You don’t know where we’re starting the scene from?” I mean, he didn’t know anything. 

I don’t care, I’ll tell everybody: He wouldn’t even come out of his tent. It was freezing cold, we’re out there shooting this scene and there’s a problem on the set, and he’s 50 yards away in his tent. We go, “George, what do we do? There’s a problem.” And he goes, “I’m looking at f***ing Jupiter.” It was ridiculous.