Doug Liman Blog: We’re Still Waiting for the Director to Show Up

Share on Facebook posted 11-11-09 by Doug Liman

So far in Fair Game‘s postproduction we’ve only really done pickup shots and small changes. We might end up doing some reshoots, but I really try to get it right while we’re in production; I don’t fool myself into thinking, “OK, we’ll just fix it in post.” When I have a conviction on the set that we don’t have it, I literally cannot go to sleep that night if I don’t know that I am fixing it. My fixation on getting it right is part of my process, but I’m not always the most politic about expressing it. I show up the next day, and I haven’t slept, and I won’t sleep until we get the scene right. I can’t move on.  Sometimes it can be about what amounts to a trivial detail, as when I considered reshooting a second-unit shot of a truck driving nuclear components for Fair Game because of how the pallets were strapped down — and sometimes it has a chance of making or breaking the movie. The challenge is to know the difference. In the case of Fair Game, after a sleepless night over the truck shot, I decided it was not worth jeopardizing other more important scenes with the distraction of reshooting it.  I was not always so rational.

On the set of The Bourne Identity I had what I consider one of the most defining moments of my career. I was shooting a scene in the Czech Republic where Matt Damon has just shot Clive Owen, and we had the contrived deathbed confession — you know, the one where the character says exactly what he needs to say and then dies.  The scene had to do double duty: For the plot, Matt’s character, Jason Bourne, needed to get the next clue on his search for Treadstone. And on an emotional level, this was the first confirmation Jason got that there were other people like him.  The scene, when we first shot it, was falling flat and just wasn’t believable. It was failing. I couldn’t sleep that night, and at three in the morning I came up with the reason the scene wasn’t working.

The next day we were in the same location, so I hustled through the scheduled work and left myself two hours at the end of the day to go back and reshoot Clive’s death scene.  We set about reshooting it, but it still wasn’t working, and I refused to believe that it would somehow magically work in post. And at just about the moment I thought I had finally cracked the scene, we lost the light.  I said, “I think I know how to do this scene right, and tomorrow morning we will come back and get it.” At that point, the producer said, “Absolutely, no. That’s it. You reshot it once, you are not reshooting it twice.”

That night, the producers called the studio and ratted me out, and the head of the studio called me and said, “If you go back and shoot the scene, we will fire you. You cannot reshoot it again — you shot the scene twice already, and you have to move on.” Those were the orders I was given for the set the next morning. It was very, very clear: “You cannot shoot that scene.” The next day, we were still in the same location. So I tried my best with the producers to convince them that I knew exactly what was wrong with Clive’s death scene, and that I could reshoot it in ten minutes. I’d been up for two days in a row thinking about it, so I felt confident I could finally crack it. They said, again: “Absolutely not.” The line producer then instructed the crew to disobey me if I tried to shoot it. He dressed me down in front of the entire crew in what amounted to the lowest point in my career, saying, “We’re still waiting for the director to show up.” I’ll probably call my autobiography that.  I turned to Matt and Clive and said in a whisper, “We are going to reshoot this scene. Once I start rolling camera they’re not going to do anything until I call ‘Cut.’ ” I knew that I had a four-minute roll in the camera, and this scene was a minute and a half. “I am going to shoot Matt’s side for a minute and a half,” I whispered to the actors, “and then without me calling ‘Cut’, Clive will spring back to life, and I am going to shoot Clive’s side for a minute and a half. And then, still without me calling ‘Cut,’ Clive will pop back up one more time, and I am going to shoot pieces of the master.” I really had been up for two days in a row thinking only about this one thing, so I really did know exactly what I wanted. I’d even talked about my idea for the scene with Matt and Clive before we got to the set, because I’d thought I could convince the producers to let me shoot it. I had no idea the producers would put me in this position — forcing me to risk being fired in order to get a pivotal scene in the movie right — or that they would physically stop me from doing it by ordering the crew not to listen to me. But it didn’t matter to me: I went ahead and did it anyhow. I still have this piece of film. It’s the entire scene in one take. It’s Matt’s close-up, and you see the camera shake, because I quickly run and reposition and call “Action” to the actors again. And then it’s Clive’s close-up. And then it’s the master shot as I quickly run and reposition the camera yet again. That footage is what is in the final cut of the movie.

After I was done, I said, “OK, I am actually done with the scene. I can now sleep and we can move on.” They didn’t fire me because I only spent four minutes on it, and I agreed not to keep shooting it anymore.

As horrible as those two days were, I would not trade that experience for anything. I look back, and all I can hope is that I still have the guts to do that if I am confronted with a situation like that again. Now, if I tell producers on a film that I want to shoot a scene again, for the most part they’re like, “Yeah, it’s Doug’s process.” I had that very experience on the last two days of shooting Fair Game. On the last day I wanted to reshoot something that we’d shot the previous shooting day. And the last day’s shooting schedule was already so packed that I went to my AD and my producer, and I was like, “I know that our last day is already totally full, but we don’t have that other scene yet.” They just said, “OK,” and I was spared having to waste valuable time arguing. By contrast, the amount of time we spent arguing on the Bourne thing was crazy, and I could easily have reshot the scene in that time. If the Bourne producers had just said “OK, that’s Doug’s process, he has a keen eye for knowing when he hasn’t gotten a scene,” it would have been a lot easier.

But I don’t think the studio was villainous in the way they behaved with that Bourne scene. From their point of view, they were like, “It’s an untested director, shooting 6,000 miles away in Eastern Europe, who’s shooting a scene for the third time.” That’s what can happen when art meets business. You just cannot control production the way you control an assembly line that turns out cars, nor can you let it be total anarchy. You have to control it somehow. By nature, sometimes the studio doesn’t want an artist at the helm of a picture; they want a product manager. But at the same time they want a film that’s art, because it can be the most successful movie. You have the same company that makes movies making refrigerators. It’s a very tricky situation; they are trying to protect their investment and control costs (it’s the only responsible thing to do) while the director is trying to deliver the best possible movie (also the only responsible thing to do). In the end, I think the back and forth between the filmmaker and the producers/studios is a necessary, often-cathartic part of filmmaking and can lead to the best films.