À tombeau ouvert (1999)

Nicolas Cage: Frank Pierce

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Quotes 

• Frank Pierce : Saving someone's life is like falling in love. The best drug in the world. For days, sometimes weeks afterwards, you walk the streets, making infinite whatever you see. Once, for a few weeks, I couldn't feel the earth - everything I touched became lighter. Horns played in my shoes. Flowers fell from my pockets. You wonder if you've become immortal, as if you've saved your own life as well. God has passed through you. Why deny it, that for a moment there - why deny that for a moment there, God was you?

• Frank Pierce : You said if I came in late for another shift, you'd fire me.

  Captain Barney : I'll fire you tomorrow.

• Frank Pierce : The street's not like the ER. There's no walls, no controls. To make up for that, they try to teach me how to act without thinking - like a soldier who can take apart and reassemble a gun blindfolded... I realized that my training was useful in less than ten percent of the calls and saving someone's life was rarer than that. After a while, I grew to understand that my role was less about saving lives than about bearing witness. I was a grief mop. It was enough that I simply showed up.

• Frank Pierce : Oh, I see. With all the poor people of this city who wanted only to live and were viciously murdered, you have the nerve to sit here, wanting to die, and not go through with it? You make me sick!

• Tom Wall : Frank, what are you doing back there?

  Frank Pierce : I'm sick, Tom. I need a cure. Vitamin B cocktail, followed by an amp of glucose and a drop of adrenaline. Not as good as beer, but it's all I got.

• [Frank and Marcus are delivering a baby in a rundown building] 

  Frank Pierce : Oh Jesus, we'd better go. Call for backup. It's coming.

  Marcus : My God, Frank, what the hell is that?

  Frank Pierce : It's three legs.

  Marcus : That's too many.

• Frank Pierce : I'd always had nightmares, but now the ghosts didn't wait for me to sleep. I drank every day. Help others and you help yourself, that was my motto, but I hadn't saved anyone in months. It seemed all my patients were dying. I'd waited, sure the sickness would break, tomorrow night, the next call, the feeling would drop away. More than anything else I wanted to sleep like that, close my eyes and drift away...

• Marcus : Rule Number One: Don't get involved with patients. Rule Number Two: Don't get involved with patients' daughters, you understand?

  Frank Pierce : What about Rule Number Three: Don't get involved with dispatchers named Love?

  Marcus : Now, boy, you don't know nothin' 'bout Rule Number Three. Cannot begin to understand the complexities of that rule!

• Dr. Hazmat : I thought you said this guy was dead.

  Frank Pierce : He got better.

• Frank Pierce : Rose's ghost was getting closer. It had been six months since I lost her. A homeless girl, asthmatic, 18 years old. I used to block the bad calls out. I used to forget, but she wouldn't let go. And now she'd come to bear witness for all of them, all that had been lost. These spirits were part of the job. It was impossible to pass a building that didn't hold a ghost of something. The eyes of a corpse. The screams of a loved one. All bodies leave their mark. You cannot be near the newly dead without feeling it. I could handle that. What haunted me now was more savage. Spirits born half-finished. Homicides. Suicides. Overdoses. Accusing me of being there, witnessing a humiliation, which they could never forgive.

• Frank Pierce : I gotta get a drink. Sobriety's killing me.

• Mary Burke : I keep thinking about how tough my father was. Now I know he had to be like that - to make us tough. 'Cause this city, it'll kill you if you're not strong enough.

  Frank Pierce : No, the city doesn't discriminate. It gets everybody.

• Frank Pierce : Tom, where are the Band-Aids? This IS an ambulance, isn't it?

• Tom Wall : You okay?

  Frank Pierce : Never felt better in my life, how are you?

• Frank Pierce : Taking credit when things go right doesn't work the other way.

• Marcus : I put everything I had into saving this dumb-ass low-life suicidal. When he went down, it was like I wanted to go with him.

  Frank Pierce : That happened once in Ireland. This girl jumped off the cliffs of Moher and the wind blew her back up.

  Marcus : The wind blew her back up?

  Frank Pierce : Yeah, the wind.

  Marcus : No, that was Jesus, son.

  Frank Pierce : It was also the wind.

  Marcus : The wind, my black ass! That was Jesus.

• Marcus : Where you goin', Frank?

  Frank Pierce : I quit. I'm through.

  Marcus : Oh, you think just 'cause you quit, your ghosts gonna quit too? It don't work that way, Frank. I been there, son.

• Frank Pierce : We have rules against killing people on the streets, okay. It looks bad. There's a special room in the hospital for terminating. A nice quiet room with a big bed.

  Noel : You mean that? Why, thank you, man. Wait a minute, how? How are you gonna kill be?

  Frank Pierce : Well you have a choice: pills, injection, or gas.

  Noel : Pills, definitely pills.

• Frank Pierce : You have to keep the body going until the brain and the heart recover enough to go on their own.

• Tom Wall : Look up, Frank. Full moon. The blood's gonna run tonight. I can feel it. Our mission: to save lives.

  Frank Pierce : Our mission is coffee, Tom. A shot of the bull, Puerto Rican espresso.

  Tom Wall : Ten-four. El Toro de Oro! Blast off!

• Frank Pierce : The streets are not like the ER. There's no walls, no controls.

• Frank Pierce : 5 or 6 in the morning is always the worst time for me. Just before dawn. Just when you've been lulled into thinking it might be safe to close your eyes for one minute. That's when I first found Rose. She was on the sidewalk, not breathing.

• Frank Pierce : In the last year, I'd come to believe in such things... as spirits leaving the body and not wanting to be put back. Spirits angry at the awkward places death had left them. I understood how crazy it was to think this way. But I was convinced that if I turned around, I'd see old man Burke... standing at the window, watching, waiting for us to finish.

• Frank Pierce : The biggest problem with not driving is whenever there's a patient in the back, you're in the back. The doors close. You're trapped.

• Frank Pierce : I washed my face with three kinds of soap, each smelling like a different season. It felt good to be in a woman's room again, especially a woman who wasn't comatose or severely disabled. I felt that perhaps I had turned a corner, like I saved someone, though I didn't know who.

• Frank Pierce : [listening to the radio]  Hey, it's Love!

  Marcus : Yep, she only works when I'm workin'.

  Frank Pierce : I heard you and Love went on a blind date.

  Marcus : Yeah.

  Frank Pierce : She hit you with a bottle?

  Marcus : Why you gotta bring that up? She loved me like no woman ever has.

• Frank Pierce : I had to concentrate to keep my mind from wandering off on these short trips. It was the neighborhood I grew up in and where I'd worked most as a paramedic. And it held more ghosts per square foot than any other.

• Frank Pierce : Do you have any music?

  Mary Burke : What?

  Frank Pierce : Music. I think it helps if you play something he liked.

  Mary Burke : John. Play the Sinatra.

• Dr. Hazmat : You told me he was dead.

  Larry : Flatline.

  Frank Pierce : He got better.

  Dr. Hazmat : I hate pronouncing people dead over the phone.

  [checks the patient's eyes] 

  Dr. Hazmat : Yeah. Better, huh? They're fixed and dilated. This guy's plant food.

• [first lines] 

  Frank Pierce : The night started out with a bang. A gunshot to the chest on a drug deal gone bad. All the elements were in place for a long weekend: heat, humidity, moonlight.

• Dr. Hazmat : First-time heart attack. Age 45. He should've gone to CCU 10 hours ago. We got three bodies up there, just like the one you brought in. Over there, two AIDS patients. One is 12 and fillin' up with fluids. His mother won't sign the "Do Not Resuscitate." "Mercy killing" doesn't translate well in Spanish. It's a sin to have to tube that kid. We got three more ODs from this new killer junk they're callin' "Red Death".

  Frank Pierce : What's in it?

  Dr. Hazmat : It's a mix of heroin and I don't know what else. An amino acid, maybe. This stuff is so strong, they're drinking it with grain alcohol. You need ten times the usual amount of Narcan. And when they wake up, watch out, 'cause they're liable to go nuts on you.

• Frank Pierce : Major Tom! I'm going to Misery! You take yours to Bellevue.

  Tom Wall : Okay, Frank, you take yours to heaven. I'll take mine to hell.

• Mary Burke : You shouldn't smoke.

  Frank Pierce : It's okay. They're prescription.

  [gives Mary one] 

  Frank Pierce : It works better with a little whiskey.

• Frank Pierce : She's not a whore, Marcus.

  Marcus : We're all whores, Frank. You know what I'm talkin' about? The way she looked at me.

  Frank Pierce : She wasn't lookin' at you, man. She was lookin' at me.

• Frank Pierce : Got a beer?

  Cy Coates : Oh, that shit is poison, Frank. We don't have alcohol around here.

• Mary Burke : You know, everyone at that hospital's *crazy*! I'm going crazy too! You understand? I just have to - I just have to relax a little and not feel so guilty all the time.

  Frank Pierce : We can still go back. I'll walk you home. You sleep for a couple hours. Watch some TV. Take a bath.

  Mary Burke : Don't be such a cop.

• Frank Pierce : Did you give Mary something called Red Death?

  Cy Coates : Excuse me? Red Death? Tell me something, Frank. Does killing your clients sound like good business sense to you?

• Captain Barney : Look, I'm gonna fire you tomorrow. I promise you.

  Frank Pierce : What -what if there is no tomorrow?

• Tom Wall : Where you goin'?

  Frank Pierce : Come on, Tom, the city's burning.