Doug Liman Blog: Emergency Practice for Would-Be Heroes

Share on Facebook posted 08-19-09 by Doug Liman

I’m a private pilot; I fly a small prop plane called a Mooney. Unlike the gas-guzzling jets that the Hollywood celebs fly around in (hypocritically), my airplane’s actually as fuel-efficient as a car (it gets 20 mpg), because it’s small. I had the pleasant surprise, when I went to fly the plane recently, that the people who work where I hangar it left me a copy of my “hero” article attached to the yoke (essentially the steering wheel) of the plane; every one of them had signed the article. It was actually quite touching, and I now use the article to freak out passengers of my plane.

Other than Jez Butterworth, one of the writers on Fair Game, I had two other guests up to my house in Martha’s Vineyard, and then “Captain” Avram Ludwig finished sailing our sailboat up there from NYC and arrived midweek. He and I had made the first leg of the sail together, from NYC to Fire Island, where I got off and took my plane, and he continued on. We ran aground twice during the sail to Fire Island. One of the things that the press asked me and Avram after we scooped the three boat-crash victims out of the Hudson River a couple weeks ago was, “How were you guys so prepared for the emergency? Did anything from making action movies prepare you for that?”

Sailing with Captain Ludwig two days later, after heroically running aground the second or third time, it dawned on me that what had prepared us for an emergency was the frequency with which we find ourselves in dire straits. Call it Method emergency preparation.