It’s hard to find a guy who doesn’t take pleasure in blowing things up or setting things on fire, and I have a healthy history of pyro in the name of filmmaking. It’s one of the rare professions where I can say that playing with fire and blowing things up are legitimate ways to pass the time. So I can’t lie and say that I wasn’t really glad when Avram came down yesterday and said, “Let’s go up and shoot some inserts,” meaning that I got to take a break from my other work to go light things on fire.

I am now at the stage of Fair Game where we are finishing up the special effects. You wouldn’t think that a realistic spy movie like Fair Game would have that many special effects, but I am a big fan of technology. (The Bourne Identity actually had hundreds of visual effect shots, and it doesn’t look like there’s a single shot in there. In fact, my fine visual effects supervisor for that film, Peter Donen (who is, sadly, no longer alive), always said that it was his most successful work because you literally cannot spot a single VFX shot).

One of the VFX shots for Fair Game involves some CIA tech officers equipping an “asset” to go behind enemy lines so she can spy for the United States. They’re giving her supplies that the CIA actually does use behind enemy lines, one of which is a kind of “flash paper.” The function of the flash paper is that in an emergency you can light the paper on fire and it just evaporates. We shot this scene in Jordan, and for legal reasons, we could not bring this flash paper into their country — it’s an explosive. The way we’re doing the shot is pretty simple: The character in Jordan is holding a regular pad and brings a regular match to it, and then the character drops the pad. The visual effects team has to make that pad go up in flames in a flash. So to help my effects people, I eagerly volunteered to go ahead and get some flash paper (we can get it here legally in New York) and shoot the flash paper as an element. The VFX people then composite that shot in, and then when they’re done, it looks like it was in the shot in Jordan and the paper really did go up.

This fire shot is the element that Avram and I needed to shoot. Now, the thing about Avram trusting me with a match like this is that the last time I, Avram, a match, and a combustible and interacted, it didn’t turn out so well. I was leading a whitewater rafting trip with some of my friends (no professional guide) down the Hell’s Canyon of the Snake River in Idaho. It’s a very remote river, and we’d all come from all over the country, meeting at the put-in of the river, which wasn’t near any towns or anything. Trouble was, the friend of ours who was supposed to bring a stove had panicked at the last minute about flying with it, so we were stranded in the middle of nowhere with no way to cook. Meanwhile, I had picked up white gas in Boise when I’d landed, as fuel for a camping stove. So we had two gallons of white fuel but no stove. There was a tiny store at the put-in, so I bought some charcoal, and we put into the river for a three-day trip into the remote wilds of Idaho. The charcoal lasted for only one meal. It was a disaster. We had a group of people and no way to cook any of the food we’d brought, like spaghetti, and we had two and a half more days left until we were to reach the take-out. So Avram and I decided that we should try to burn the white gas without a stove. It’s a liquid when it’s room temperature but turns into a gas when it’s heated. Avram wisely suggested (having had some experience with fire, not all of it good) that we do a flammability test. We poured a teeny amount into a Dixie cup and I brought it over to the fire pan, planning to test it. But the second I poured a drop into the fire pan (which was hot from the last of the charcoal, but there was no flame) the whole thing just went up in a fiery explosion. It turns out that white gas is extremely flammable, and that as a result I was suddenly the only thing not on fire within a ten-foot radius of the pan. Avram was the only other person within ten feet, and he, I’m sorry to say, was on fire. Our friend Rodger yelled, “Run to the river!,” but we were a good 100 feet from the river in the middle of a boulder field, so instead Avram dove into a bush and two of us jumped on top of him to put him out.

So I couldn’t help but think of that little mishap yesterday as Avram was standing there, holding this highly combustible flash paper for Fair Game, and said, “Roll Camera!”

Related posts on 30ninjas.com:

• Doug Liman Blog: How To Light Your Producers’ Office on Fire
• Doug Liman Blog: Of Hurricanes and Dinghies: Misadventures with Captain Ludwig
• Doug Liman Blog: Baghdad in Pictures
• Doug Liman Blog: Fair Game and Covert Affairs Collide in DC
• Doug Liman Blog: What I Learn From Sherlock Holmes, My Dear Ninjas
• Doug Liman Blog: Emergency Practice for Would-Be Heroes