Doug Liman Blog: The Time is Now — Previewing Fair Game for a Live Audience » 30ninjas

Doug Liman Blog: The Time is Now — Previewing Fair Game for a Live Audience

Share on Facebook posted 08-30-09 by Doug Liman

Most of my time these past few weeks has been spent editing Fair Game, my Naomi Watts–Sean Penn spy thriller, in my chicken coop on Martha’s Vineyard. We’re getting ready to start previewing it, which means showing it to an audience who aren’t friends. We shot this film fast, we’ve been editing the film fast, and so it’s ahead of schedule for me to preview, but we all feel it’s ready. For me, it’s a necessary part of the process, since at some point you lose your objectivity. I’ve screened the movie three times a week since July 1. I’m usually bringing in somebody new to watch it with me, someone who hasn’t seen it, to give me a little bit of objectivity. I don’t usually have to ask them any questions or anything when it’s done; it’s just the act of watching the movie with somebody who hasn’t seen it before, and maybe observing their physical responses to it, that gives me the little bit of experience of seeing it for the first time. Fair Game is a piece of mass entertainment, and at a certain point it has to be put in front of a theater of people. This isn’t a small artistic little personal movie where I don’t care what the audience thinks; at a certain point, I need to know.

So now we are debating the hows. This is the one thing that’s changed since I’ve started making movies: Everyone who attends a preview blogs about it. Suddenly there’s a sense that, the success of your movie, which isn’t finished, is hinging on a 17-year-old blogger who may or may not have good taste (though I think many do). The scary part is that you don’t know what their qualifications are to be talking about your movie. Plus, it’s isolated. Once the movie’s out, you know, and it’s shown to shown to hundreds of reviewers, well, then the law of averages takes over and pretty much whatever’s written about the movie is fair. But the prospect of five random people blogging about a preview scares studios and financiers. Fact is, those five random bloggers can have a disproportionate influence on what the public, which hasn’t yet seen the film for itself, feels about the film. So it’s quite understandable why Fox never let me preview Mr. & Mrs. Smith or Jumper.

The Bourne Identity predated all that, in a way. We previewed that movie, and the audience’s reactions to those screenings were a critical component in shaping the final cut of that film. So finally being allowed to preview again (because Fair Game is financed by an independent company) is exciting. I understand the issue for the studios — in the case of my last two studio films, Jumper and Mr. and Mrs. Smith, they both had good buzz on them, so the feeling was that previewing the film could only hurt you, because people were already excited to go see the movie; we didn’t need someone to say something good about it. Nobody knew anything about The Bourne Identity. Nobody was saying anything good or bad about it. Nobody cared about it. Consequently, we weren’t risking something we already had by previewing it. And Fair Game is more like The Bourne Identity not only in tone, but also because it’s an action film that’s off the radar; there’s no built-in audience that we’re going to lose if some teenage boy blogs that it wasn’t cool enough. In this case, just as the blogs could hurt us, they could help us. But at the end of the day, the people who finance movies would be much happier if there was a way for nobody to write about an unreleased film because the scary thing is that you just don’t control what gets written. But “buzz” aside, marketing aside, I’m still trying to make Fair Game the best movie it can possibly be, and it’s my judgment that learning from a live audience’s reaction to the movie will help me do that.