Even though I’m not in production, I’m still having a problem getting enough sleep. I usually try to get eight hours but regularly only get five hours. Last Friday was my first sleepless morning on my still-untitled Moon movie (hopefully the first of many), but sleep’s something that no one ever really talks about when they talk about filmmaking. No one ever mentions that after the years of work that goes into getting a script ready to shoot, when you finally get to make that movie, you’re going to have to get woken up five or six mornings a week after only four or five hours of sleep. You’re dead tired, and you’re dragged out of bed to go to work week after week after week after week. When I’m in production, I obsess about getting enough sleep because I don’t think I do my best work when I’m exhausted. Once you’ve been through the experience that I went through with The Bourne Identity, where I was shooting during the day and working with the writers at night — so I got like three hours of sleep a night for four months — I know how miserable I’ll be in the end. Let me tell you, I totally believe extreme sleep deprivation works as a form of torture (and my sleep deprivation is voluntary; I can’t imagine being imprisoned, shackled, and forced to stay awake). I don’t ever want to go through that again, I know that. I’ll reveal any state secrets as long as I don’t have to go through that again.

Since working on Bourne, I’ve developed a technique for trying to get enough rest. Reckoning backward from the time I have to wake up, I figure out what hour I have to go to sleep to ensure that I get seven hours of sleep. Sounds simple, right? But the problem with production is, if I’m getting picked up at 5:15 a.m., I’ll get up at 5 a.m., which means I should go to sleep at 10 p.m. at the latest. Trouble is, that’s impossible. Most likely, I’ll get home at like 11 p.m. — already an hour in the hole — and you haven’t had dinner, and plus you’re all wound up from the day so you can’t just switch it off and go to sleep.

I certainly don’t do anything social during production, because you always really regret that the next day. But there are other directors who do party, and I don’t know how they do it. In fact, there is one director (who shall remain nameless) who’s actually had pictures taken of him sleeping on the set while they’re shooting the climactic third-act battle of his movie! So I guess that’s one technique to getting enough sleep: get it on set!

A hilarious thing about the movie business is that you can get away with anything as long as you call it “process.” Literally, anything. I mean, he’s sound asleep! The director is literally sound asleep on set — what the hell’s going on here? Well, he’s slept through his last three movies, and they were huge hits. It’s how he works; that’s his “process.” He’ll wake up at some point and give notes, but for now, let him catch a few Zs. I haven’t been in the business that long, but at this point I can’t think of a single outrageous behavior that I haven’t seen occur on set and then heard excused as someone’s process.

I have a friend who was directing his first feature film, and the actor who’s starring in it came up to the director, my friend, and said: “Just to let you know from the beginning, I’m going to be stoned in my trailer every morning and all day long. But before anyone panics, I’ve been stoned in every movie I’ve been in, and I was stoned when I auditioned for you. You’ve basically never seen me when I’m not stoned. The guy that you’ve cast is basically stoned, so don’t be alarmed that I’m in my trailer getting stoned.”

Then there’s the director who was known for fondling P.A.’s in the video village. Explicitly fondling them — putting his hands down the pants of P.A.s in the video village in front of everybody. And what did the studio do? They built a tent so no one could see. They created a private little video village for him so they wouldn’t get sued for sexual harassment by the rest of the crew.

So there it is. You know, I feel a little lame that my unusual behaviors aren’t that extreme, but I have started to like it when people say I turn up on set and I’m so disorganized that it’s just my “process.” They’re like, “Where’s your shot list?” Well, I didn’t have a shot list on Swingers, and I didn’t have a shot list on Bourne, so that must be my process. So I’ve started to use that to justify certain things, to get certain people off my back. Then again, I’m now meticulously going through Moon shot by shot for special effects. So much for my “process.”

Related posts on 30ninjas.com:

• Doug Liman Blog: We’re Still Waiting for the Director to Show Up
• Doug Liman Blog: It’s Time To Hammer Home My Next Action Feature
• Doug Liman Blog: Less Money? Be More Clever. If You Can’t Blow It Up, What’s The Next Best Thing?
• Doug Liman Blog: You Asked — Is It Essential For a Director to Know How To Do Every Job?
• Doug Liman Blog: Making a Connection On The Express After a Long, Cold Day
• Doug Liman Blog: Flying to Canada To Protect The Action in Covert Affairs