Doug Liman Blog: Screening Fair Game for the CIA, and Why Cheney Is like Jaws

Share on Facebook posted 09-15-09 by Doug Liman

It’s been crazy trying to find time to blog about the end of my summer. I used to go through horrible postpartum depression after wrapping production of a film, but it wasn’t until after The Bourne Identity that I realized that the real problem with finishing a movie is that not only are you done with this huge creative endeavor, but suddenly you don’t even have an office to go to. It’s a freelance business, so suddenly you’re just at home, so it’s particularly lonely. By the time I did Bourne, however, I had an Internet company (called Nibblebox), and we had 20 employees, and I came back to an office filled with friendly and familiar faces, and so I didn’t suffer any depression at all. I felt like I had a home I was coming back to.

I’ve created the same kind of office for myself here in New York, where 30 Ninjas is headquartered, so there’s none of that postpartum solitude. Fair Game isn’t done yet; I’m still working with editors to finish it, and we’re editing with the same intensity we had when we were shooting, so combining that with starting to prep my untitled Moon movie, it means I’m working night and day. I really love it. Instead of depression, I’m in the other mindset where I’m looking forward to going through nothingness and depression after the Moon project. Of course, that’ll be in about two years …

So a week later, here’s an account of the last few days of my summer.

As I’ve told you, I was working from Martha’s Vineyard cutting Fair Game. I auctioned off a preview of Fair Game at a celebrity auction and got the funniest collection of people together to watch the movie. It wasn’t your standard audience for a movie. Only six people attended the screening. Of those six, one was a contract employee of the CIA and one was Scooter Libby’s appeals lawyer, Alan Dershowitz! It was kind of funny, given that we are trying to be as factual as possible on this film, and these are some of the people who can best judge how closely our film adheres to the facts.

As much as it’s obvious to me what the White House did, we don’t show it in Fair Game if we don’t have facts to support it. I think Oliver Stone takes a different tack, in which, if he believes something to be true, even if he doesn’t have the facts to support it, he’ll go ahead and put it in his movie as though it’s fact. I know in my heart that Dick Cheney orchestrated this whole thing, but I don’t know that for a fact, so I’m not going to say that in the film. I’m going to make this a strength of the movie. In Fair Game, when they take on the White House, it’s scarier because you don’t really know what’s going on inside. Just as Spielberg lucked out in Jaws because his shark didn’t work and he discovered that the less you saw it the scarier it was, we feel that the less you see of the workings of Cheney and Bush, the scarier they will be.

I’ll post very soon about my sail across 70 miles of open waters from Martha’s Vineyard to Orient Point, Long Island. Big wind, big seas, with Captain Ludwig, Hero of the Hudson.