Doug Liman may have made a splash with Swingers, but for the better part of a decade, he’s been nose-deep in spycraft. With The Bourne Identity, he jump-started one of Hollywood’s more reliable spy franchises. With Mr. and Mrs. Smith, he helped jump-start Brangelina. Most recently, Liman directed Fair Game, a real-life spy thriller about former ambassador Joseph Wilson (Sean Penn) and his wife Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts), the latter of which worked as a covert CIA operative until Washington Post columnist Robert Novak revealed her identity. When Liman was in town to debut Fair Game before an audience at the DC Labor Film Festival, I had chance to talk with him about his latest movie, as well as his past projects.

How closely did you work with Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame?

Because of the top secret nature of the work portrayed, the film is an inverse of how these stories are told. Valerie and Joe shared the more intimate details, the scenes that took place behind closed doors. Those scenes, not the historical facts, are the ones a filmmaker usually makes up. We were given access to the emotional scenes, how things felt, but we had to get the facts elsewhere: [Valerie’s] peers, the CIA, various journalists.

So Wilson and Plame spent time on set?

Yeah, and Valerie came along to our location scouts. We actually picked her office, the Counterproliferation Office in the basement of CIA, based on her description, and when she came with me as we were looking for the finalists, she said, “It’s eerie how much this feels like my old office.” She helped us with all the details of what it’s like to be a covert operative. And Valerie worked out of the Grand Hyatt while in Amman, Jordon, so that’s where we filmed. As long as she and the CIA weren’t sharing operational details, they were willing to cooperate. I want to stress her loyalty to the CIA, which still hasn’t waivered in any way.

Are Valerie’s assets fictionalized?

Nothing is fictionalized. For efficiency’s sake, we would combine characters when something became too repetitive or episodic. Take, for example, Joe Wilson’s op-ed piece. In the film, it was a single act, but the reality is that he had a back-and-forth with the White House for six weeks. It would have been the same thing over and over again, so we just cut to the chase. The same thing goes for the Iraqi scientist, who was an amalgamation of several people. But there really was one specific operation where a doctor from Cleveland was sent to visit/debrief her brother in Iraq. That’s 100% accurate. The doctor was driven into Iraq, not flown in, but we simply couldn’t afford to recreate a border crossing.

Both Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Fair Game take a look at marital relations.

What those and The Bourne Identity share are moments where someone lies to the world or to their spouse. I am not a psychiatrist, but I must be fixated on the concept of a public persona and how it’s not necessarily who you are in private. In terms of marriage specifically, Mr. and Mrs. Smith was pure allegory – it took a traditional marital drama and substituted words with weapons. Obviously Fair Game is a lot more grounded. I’m exploring how a marriage works when she can’t tell him where she’s going, or for how long. He just needs to know whether they need child care. I looked at how a marriage works when she is appearing to be more successful than he is. There’s a lot in common with Fair Game and The Bourne Identity because when I made Bourne Identity, I kept asking myself, “What is it like to date Jason Bourne?” When I was making Bourne, I had a lot of single female friends who had so much trouble finding a good-looking, straight, honest guy. So I wondered what it’d be like for them to meet guy who was those three things, but also had this crazy private life. And for Fair Game, I wondered what it would be like to be Valerie Plame, this modern, powerful woman who also had to be a mother and a wife.

Did The Bourne Identity and Mr. and Mrs. Smith prepare you for Fair Game?

They led me to this point. Fair Game is the real version of those movies, and it’s not as big a departure as people think it is for me. When I made The Bourne Identity, I took this wildly fantastical novel and turned into a story that’s really grounded. In fact, I found it got more interesting as I made it more grounded. I did this partially because my dad ran investigations into the Iran-Contra affair. Following him around DC, I got to see real spies in action, particularly when an Israeli spy infiltrated his operation. This was a case where a day in my dad’s life was more interesting than any James Bond film. With this background, it’s fairly natural I’d arrive at the doorstep of something like Fair Game.

The story is interesting, but it needs strong actors or else it would fall apart. How did Sean Penn and Naomi Watts get involved in the project?

The film came together in a very unusual way. This is an independent movie; originally it had been at Warner Brothers, and they put it into what’s called “turnaround,” which is basically them saying, “We don’t do dramas anymore.” They have said they are in the business of making tent poles – big, expensive, beautiful looking movies – and not dramas. Once the script got into turnaround I began working on it, and after eighteen months, it was in a really solid place. Naomi Watts was my first choice. Normally I’d go through an agency, but one of screenwriters knew Naomi, so he called her and asked if she’d give the script a look. She said, “I just gave birth, so I’m not really looking at anything right now.” He persisted, saying, “Would you just look at the first ten pages?” Two hours later, she called back saying she loved the whole thing, so she and I met in New York the next day. I told her Sean Penn is my first choice for Joseph Wilson, and I asked her to make the same call to him that the co-screenwriter made to her. Within a week, I was in LA having lunch with Sean. This is actually my first film since Swingers where my first choice actors said “Yes.” And in the case of Swingers, they were all out of work, so what else were they going to do?

According to IMDb, Fair Game is your first cinematography work since Go.



That’s not entirely accurate. I shot all of Bourne Identity, I just wasn’t credited. In the studio system, there’s a major political thing about a director being credited as the director of photography. Being uncredited was the path of least resistance. As long as the film looks the way I want it to look, I don’t really care who gets credit. I DP my films out of necessity because there’s a certain look I know I can do better than anyone else. I can only do that one look, but I’m really good at it. If I wanted a movie to look like Vanity Fair, which I did for Mr. and Mrs. Smith, I’d hire someone else. The look of Go, Bourne and Swingers felt right for Fair Game. It also gives me an incredible amount of control – not just over how it looks, but how day-to-day shooting goes. I know if a particular shot will be three seconds or thirty seconds, and that will affect the amount of attention I put into the lighting. A director of photography has to throw the same amount of prep into every single shot, so it’s a more inefficient way to shoot a movie. And when you’re shooting in six countries over forty-five days, you need efficiency.

Were you following the Valerie Plame story as it was happening?

Well I’m in Washington, so I’d love to say I was so outraged that I wanted to make this movie for years, but it’s just not true. Like most people, I followed the story as it was happening, but I had my own problems to worry about. I was working on Mr. and Mrs. Smith, god knows I had enough drama to deal with on THAT movie, so I didn’t get involved with Fair Game until I was presented with a rough draft of the script. The reason this movie doesn’t feel as political as other movies that have dealt with the Bush administration is my point of entry was the characters of Plame and Wilson. I made the movie because I love this marriage, not because I hate George Bush. It’s an “Odd Couple” situation because he’ll talk to anyone about anything and she won’t. I wanted to tell the story of a private person and a public person sharing the same bed. I happen to be a Democrat, but I like to think that even if I was Republican, I would have still made this movie.

Did the Rod Lurie movie Nothing But the Truth, which also deals with the Plame story, impact your approach to Fair Game?

Not really. I have a lot of confidence in some areas, but I don’t think people who see my movies care in any way about my political views. Unlike some of my peers, I never confused my movies with my political views and then set out to make movies which were dismal failures. I did the opposite – I stopped making movies and made commercials for Obama. That was my political outlet, so by the time I got to Fair Game, I was completely purged. I was the devil’s advocate in hammering out the political aspects of the movie. I argued a strong story will accomplish our political agenda. For example, we couldn’t possibly know the details of what happened in the White House. I ended up using Steven Spielberg and Jaws as a model because he lucked out when the shark malfunctioned. The less you saw of it, the scarier it was. Going into this story, there was always a black hole when it came to the White House, so it became my broken shark. It’s scary to view the White House as monolithic, knowing only that they’re hell-bent on destroying you. You know, I’m not sure how I got into that topic.

It worked for me. Thanks!

No problem.

Fair Game opens in DC-area theaters on November 5th. Check it out!