So the week started out on an unusual note for me — I headed out to Staten Island to receive a commendation from the U.S. Coast Guard for the rescue Captain Ludwig and I performed in August. It was really touching and a little embarrassing to be standing in a conference room full of uniformed [...]

A couple of posts ago, I talked about working with my composer, John Powell. Out of all the different people I work with on my films, I’m most consistent with my choice of my music team (aside from my agent, my lawyer, and David Bartis, my business partner). After making Swingers, I started doing commercials, [...]

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It’s hard to find a guy who doesn’t take pleasure in blowing things up or setting things on fire, and I have a healthy history of pyro in the name of filmmaking. It’s one of the rare professions where I can say that playing with fire and blowing things up are legitimate ways to pass [...]

Surprised? Well, the reality is that the actual process of filmmaking on set is painstakingly slow. It can take hours to film something that will last for mere seconds on screen. By comparison, the process of sound mixing, once the picture has been “locked” by the editing team, is fast and has an immediate pay-off. [...]

Last week was grueling. We’re under the gun to complete a cut of Fair Game that we like enough to screen for people, and at the same time we’re trying to turn in a workable budget for my Moon project. The Moon budget is 350 pages long and way too high. It was one thing [...]

I’ve been working on Fair Game, my Naomi Watts spy thriller, with the editors, Saar Klein and Chris Tellefsen, and I’ll be showing it to my producers on Monday. This is sort of my favorite part of the process with two editors — it’s just a purely creative environment where we look at sections of [...]

Fair Game Blog
Fair Game is a political thriller, directed by Doug Liman and starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn.
Crucible Training
Again I’m too excited to sleep and get to the training way earlier than the 8am start time.
I get the skinny from Kelly as to what is in store for Naomi. He says he [...]

McCann was not a large man by any means. But his aggressive efficiency of movement in every gesture made him physically imposing. In fact, his body language alone was enough to communicate to me that I should immediately turn the camera off.
However, after that, almost seamlessly, Kelly McCann became as affable and polite a host [...]

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Slideshow of Doug’s scout in Jordan.

Another welcome surprise this morning. Instead of just driving straight back to NY on Monday morning with the picture car, I get to drive Janet Zucker, the producer, and Doug down to Virginia where Naomi is going to do some training for her role.
Naomi is playing Valerie Plame, who was a C.I.A. non-official cover [...]