Doug Liman Blog: Science Fact — On the Moon, You’re Superman » 30ninjas

Doug Liman Blog: Science Fact — On the Moon, You’re Superman

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

I feel it’s within my control whether or not we make the Moon movie. It’s at that point where if the project doesn’t go it means either I messed something up or I’m choosing not to do it right now. But everything is sort of falling into place. Don’t get me wrong, this is a fickle business and anything can happen. Brad Pitt could announce tomorrow that he’s doing a Moon project (but you wouldn’t do that to me, would you Brad?) and suddenly someone beat us to the punch, or I could lose my star. What I don’t think will happen is a stalled project, and that’s because of the script. It’s crossed the critical threshold.

To me, that’s the hardest part of the business, that’s the part that doesn’t get any easier. It’s not since Go that I’ve been handed a script that was ready to go. On Go we had to do some reworking on it, but it basically was ready. It came in the mail and it defined my destiny. That hasn’t happened since then, and it didn’t happen on this one. I, obviously, generated this story from scratch. So given how commercial an idea this is, if you can actually write a good script around an idea this commercial, it’s gonna be a movie. A film like The Bourne Identity wouldn’t have even gotten made today — it’s just not big enough or commercial enough, or something you’re taking to Comic-Con. So, as much as I complained about how hard it was to raise the money for Fair Game because, like The Bourne Identity, it’s an adult spy movie that’s not obviously commercial, on a project like Moon I’ll be on the other side of the commercial divide and I’ll reap the benefits of that. There are action figures they can do to tie in with the film, there are video games — all this shit that studios need to justify and pay their overhead. All that ancillary stuff, the kind of stuff that The Bourne Identity could never generate and Fair Game could never generate. Look, I recognize that studios are businesses and they need to make money, and Paramount can make a ton of money on my Moon project, so that’s why it’s up to me to decide when this project is ready. As much as they have to greenlight my movie and agree to spend $100 million, I know that the carrot I’m dangling in front of them is ridiculously commercial — but I need to decide when it’s ready, when I can deliver a movie that’s worth it.

Simon Kinberg pointed out to me how last week, while we were working on one of the action sequences, we were literally going, “Oh that is so fucking cool, that is so cool, that is so cool.” This movie will redefine action the way The Matrix redefined action. In Moon, they’re fighting in one-sixth gravity. You’ve just never seen that before. Ever. And you’ve never seen a car chase in one-sixth gravity, you’ve never seen fights in one-sixth gravity. It won’t look like any other movie. This affects the movie is so many ways. It’s all of the amazing things you can do once you embrace one-sixth gravity. You know, you’re literally Superman on the Moon. Think about it, Superman came from the planet Krypton, and the concept behind Krypton is that it had much stronger gravity than Earth. So if you took an ordinary guy from Krypton and moved him to Earth, in Earth’s lighter gravity he would become Superman. That literally was Superman’s power: He’s from a planet with lower gravity. Well, Earth has six times the gravity of the Moon, so if you take anyone from Earth and move him to the Moon, he literally is a Superman. He can leap off an 80-foot cliff and survive easily. On the Moon, we can can have a real-version bullet time (from The Matrix). Our action sequences on Moon are as outrageous as Transformers or Star Trek but will be 100 percent real. Bourne is to the James Bond films as Moon will be to Transformers. Outrageous, but very real.

If you can make it to the Moon, you get to be a superhero. That’s science fact, that’s not science fiction.