Doug Liman Blog: Art or Thrill Ride? Was I Right to Go to Baghdad?

Share on Facebook posted 01-11-10 by Doug Liman

I just blogged about my flight to Florida and have got some comments from people in my life questioning my decision-making process when it comes to life-threatening situations. They seem to believe I’m a little deficient in this area. I think it all stems from my attraction to a challenge. Flying my own plane occasionally puts me in those kinds of situations, where I need to weigh the safety of the situation and make a decision, but circumstances like that don’t often come up in my filmmaking. In Fair Game, however, I was confronted with this issue in a very real way.

I have a good friend who is at a very high level in the State department and he said he could get us into Baghdad to shoot the Baghdad portions of Fair Game, in the actual locations of the story. Now, I could go on about my need for authenticity, and the fights I waged with Universal to shoot The Bourne Identity in Paris and not Montreal, or the fact that Jumper did not shoot in a soundstage but was shot all over the world because it is important to me as a filmmaker that if people are spending $10 to $12 to see a movie, I should really show them a place that they may not have the money or opportunity to visit. Why not show people the real Baghdad as opposed to a “movie” Baghdad that might actually be located in Southern California, Morocco, or Jordan?

I can defend the decision to film in Baghdad on those grounds, and I have a track record to support it, but I would be lying if I said there was not some attraction to the challenge of shooting in an actual war zone. I was not cavalier about going there; I too watched those horrible videos of westerners being kidnapped and killed in Iraq, and I really was not eager to suffer that fate on any level. In fact, I was terrified of it. I was probably more scared of going to Baghdad than anything I have ever done in my life. Maybe there have been moments on some of the whitewater rivers that I have run when I’ve been as scared, but this anxiety was up there.

So I came up with a lot of rationalizations of why I should go:

I have a history of doing this in my movies
It’s important to me as a filmmaker
Because it is a political movie and it’s purporting to tell a true story about a real place, I have an obligation as a storyteller to actually go to the real place and see it with my own eyes and not sit here in New York City and make conjectures about what it might be like

I then offset these rationalizations with the recognition that if we went to Baghdad I would be a very high value target: Jewish, Prominent American Filmmaker. I would be about as juicy a target as you could provide. And the people in charge of protecting me there would be putting their lives put at risk. It’s not fun and games — someone could get killed. All of that was weighing very heavily on me, but at the end of the day it was the fact that I am drawn to challenge and danger that pushed the decision in favor of going to Baghdad. If it weren’t for my attraction for danger, I would surely have used the last reason (that my trip would be putting other people in danger) as the rationale for not going.

I think that it was so dangerous for foreigners at the time we were there that I don’t think you could casually have gone as a westerner. It would be really irresponsible. You’d be putting people around you in danger. But because we are making a film that is going to be seen by millions of people it balanced the risks the way that journalists balance the risk of reporting from war zones. While Fair Game is not a documentary, it has the potential to be the popular, historical record of the events it chronicles. I take the responsibility very seriously.

In the early 90’s, my father had a very public dispute with Oliver Stone when Stone put out JFK, because my father thought Stone was very reckless with his power as a filmmaker over popular opinion and history. There’s an irony in that, because I just set up a project about the Attica prison uprising with Geoffrey Fletcher (the screenwriter of Precious), and Geoffrey, not knowing anything about my father, gave me a copy of Oliver Stone’s JFK director’s cut. He thought that, because I was doing Fair Game, I should take a look at JFK again. (More on Attica later.)

So, up until the moment I got on the plane to Baghdad, I was undecided. I have a really great group of friends from college; we’ve called ourselves the Buttheads ever since someone called us that sophomore year. In the best possible way to go through life, we took what was someone’s insult about us and proudly used it as our banner. We have a listserv where we continue the kind of banter that used to take place around the college cafeteria table, and it continues this day. It is usually about not the most serious subjects, but I did turn to the group and say, I am thinking of going to Baghdad next week, and here are the pros here are the cons, and it was the Buttheads who finally gave me the confidence to go. Had the discussion been unanimously opposed, I probably would not have gone, but it was actually a very vigorous back and forth. My friends from college are all married, they all have kids, many have Ph.D.’s, are college professors or entrepreneurs, and they are all very responsible. Each and every one of them is an amazing person and a completely solid human being. Not that I didn’t first get exposed to confronting danger with my best friend John Christie, and got exposed to getting arrested back in the day through this very same group of friends, but they are the people I most respect in the world. After a vigorous debate, I decided I should go. But I am also aware that I have a problem with walking away from a challenge. I wasn’t sure I could live with myself if I did not get on that plane, as scared as I was. So I did.

More on my Baghdad trip and my Attica project later.