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Doug Liman Blog: Moon Crash Party at Dawn — Descent Into Darkness With a Roomful of Astrophysicists

Share on Facebook posted 10-19-09 by Doug Liman

Last week was grueling. We’re under the gun to complete a cut of Fair Game that we like enough to screen for people, and at the same time we’re trying to turn in a workable budget for my Moon project. The Moon budget is 350 pages long and way too high. It was one thing for me to get involved with the Fair Game budget, cutting it from $35 million to $25 million, but that budget was only 55 pages long. To get involved with cutting a 350-page budget is really difficult. Towards the end, you find yourself letting things go because you are just so exhausted. Luckily, I have two amazing line producers, who don’t get tired the way I do. By Friday I was ready for a jolt of creative, and luckily, that was the morning NASA was crashing two spacecraft into the surface of the Moon. There is a giant telescope on top of the physics building at Columbia University, so at 6:30 in the morning on Friday, Professor Arlin Crotts, of the university’s astronomy department, held a Moon crash party for a bunch of genius physics geeks — established physicists and the good professor’s students — and me.

Supposedly, with a good telescope from earth, you were going to be able to see the dust being kicked up on the surface of the Moon, but Friday morning turned out to be very overcast. It was obvious that we were not going to see anything from the telescope. But Arlin wasn’t going to be defeated, and he arranged to have a signal brought from another telescope located somewhere else. My Moon project’s all about really smart physics types, and to be honest, while I was eager to see the crash, I was even more interested in seeing what a Moon party looked like. I wanted to study the people who go to a Moon party as much as study the spacecraft that they were crashing into the Moon. I have to say that the actual event, as televised by NASA television, was ridiculously uneventful. It sounds like a cool idea and all — they actually had a camera mounted on the spacecraft as it was crashing into the surface of the Moon — except that they’re looking for ice on a part of the lunar surface that is permanently shadowed, so as a spacecraft flies into the shadow the scene goes pitch-black. So you can’t see anything. It’s like you’re plummeting towards the Moon and then it goes black and then the signal disappears. That was it.

To get up after only four hours of sleep for that was, well, let’s just say I was glad that my movie is a character-based movie and we won’t be entirely dependent on crashes in dark craters of the Moon to succeed. The people at the party did not disappoint, however. Jake Gyllenhaal, the star of my Moon movie, is better looking than any of us there, but he’d still fit right in. I think that we, as audiences, have accepted movies where better-looking people play the real person. For example, Julia Roberts is a lot prettier than Erin Brockovich. (Fair Game was one of these unusual situations where the real Valerie Plame was actually totally hot.) Jake isn’t playing the hardcore scientist of the movie; he’s the mastermind. He is using the hardcore scientist in a way, like I am using the physicist at Columbia to research my movie. I realize that I’m saying that I’m the Jake in this scenario, but that’s the way it is. I identify with a character in all of my movies. Sometimes more than one — they’re different sides of me. In Mr. & Mrs Smith, it was John Smith. And when Jez Butterworth (the writer of Fair Game) read Moon, he pointed out massive similarities between the Jake Gyllenhaal character breaking all the rules to complete his mission and basically how I put together my movies. Which actually makes me feel better about the movie, because I think that when you do a big epic story, if you cannot ground it in something really personal, it becomes sort of meaningless fluff.

The first Bourne Identity feels as personal as it does because every one of these characters is based either on somebody I know or on me. So there’s a real grounding to the movie. And here we’ve got a movie about people building a rocket and going to the Moon, so if you don’t ground the movie, it’s really going to just be completely untethered and unrealistic.