Director's Spotlight
Doug Liman
By Joshua Pasch
February 2, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
The Bourne Identity
Every now and again, a movie comes along that, while not entirely genre redefining (a la The Matrix for science fiction), can at least be described as reasonably impacting. The Bourne Identity is such a film. The spy that helped to reinvent what Bond was supposed to be, Jason Bourne defied conventions of the spy-thriller sub-genre. He was blunt where he should have been suave, confused where he should have been controlled, and he was all the more thrilling for his shortcomings. He managed to show audiences that even though a movie can feature guns and an unlikely on-the-run romance, it doesn't need to feel like tired clichés of an overplayed genre. And, in the process, he cemented Matt Damon as a bona fide action star of the 2000s – one who is arguably bigger now than his Ocean's 11 counterparts. The movie, like Liman's previous small-scale productions, moved through its two-hour runtime with all the efficiency of a Bourne assassination, with an exhilarating Mini Cooper car chase thrown in for good measure.
Liman's first big gig was met with a rapturous response, as critics and audiences alike helped the movie earn a solid $27 million opening weekend. Critical strength and strong word-of-mouth helped Bourne climb over $121 million domestically and $214 million worldwide, which it later parlayed into some of the top DVD sales for that year. The results were even more impressive given Bourne's relatively modest $60 million budget.
Despite his immediate ascendance into the upper echelon of mainstream Hollywood, Liman was barred by one studio in particular: Universal. In fact, the drama and tension onscreen in Bourne Identity might have only been rivaled by the drama taking place behind screen between Liman and the Universal brass. Universal was the studio behind the Bourne trilogy, and despite the critical accolades and the financial windfall of Liman's work, Universal executives swore never to work with the director again. Liman's sets were famous for what was eventually coined in a 2008 article in New York Magazine as "Limania," a term meant to explain the chaotic way he ran a film set. His devil-may-care attitude was a competitive advantage in the indie-world, where avoiding permits and rewriting his movie's ending posed limited consequences and unlimited potential. But that same formula caused plenty of heartaches at Universal, and with that heartache, they opted to switch to Paul Greengrass for Bourne's second and third installments.
Mr. & Mrs. Smith
Not to be undone, Liman set out to find a new studio project to prove that his filmmaking formula can work at the tent pole level, and that the success of Bourne was no fluke. Released in the bland summer of 2005, this action-packed War of the Roses-type picture rose to the top of the box office during the 16th straight down box office weekend from 2004.
Brad Pitt, a bigger tabloid star than action star, was coming off a string of underwhelming box office performers - Ocean's 12 and Troy among them. These were movies that broke $100 million domestically, but also finished below expectations. It wasn't long before Brad Pitt and Fox Studios were requesting Liman's directorial services for Mr. & Mrs. Smith (ironic because Liman had courted Pitt to star in Bourne, but Pitt opted to star in the also underperforming Spy Game at the time).
Liman managed to ride Pitt and Jolie's scandalous chemistry, solid comedic timing, taut action, and zero semblance of a plot to a career-best $50 million opening and $186 million dollar gross. The Smiths were even bigger than Bourne overseas, earning a cumulative $478 million worldwide to Bourne's $214 million.
Despite the higher opening weekend gross, Mr. & Mrs. Smith ended up pulling in a leggy-for-action 3.72 opening to final domestic take, indicating that once again, audiences enjoyed what they were seeing from Liman. His encore spy picture was light in tone; while Bourne was an intense and self-serious spy, John and Jane Smith infused their gunfire with moments of surprising wit and sexuality.
The film's action is complemented by a sexual tension that is almost palpable. By the time the movie was released, there was almost no doubt that Pitt and Jolie had something brewing on the side. In the weeks leading up Mr. & Mrs. Smith's release, tabloids and box office analysts alike were speculating the status of their off-screen romance and what that might mean for the film's reception. To many people, Pitt was the insensitive adulterer who scorned one of America's best Friends. Even worse, Jolie was the heartless home wrecker who tore them apart. Some analysts pointed to Proof Of Life's poor performance as evidence that Brangelina would turn off movie goers at least as much as they turn each other on. Proof Of Life's box office shortcomings were perhaps a result of Russell Crowe and Meg Ryan's off-screen tryst (although certainly you could blame poor quality or the fact that people only go to Russell Crowe movies that are set in the past). While opinions leading up to the release swayed both ways regarding the tabloid effect, no one foresaw weekend numbers reaching the half-century mark.
Just as the box office numbers didn't slow with Liman's second major studio project, neither did Limania. Mr. & Mrs. Smith screenwriter Simon Kinberg claimed to write "40 or 50 endings" before eventually choosing the original one. (Ironically, the ending of Mr. & Mrs. Smith is the most highly criticized part of the movie). Even still, the movie was a definitive hit for all parties involved, and despite Liman's growing reputation as a hassle for studio suits, he was proving to be worth hassling over.
Jumper
After cementing Matt Damon as an action star, and establishing with Pitt and Jolie that star wattage still means something beyond tabloid sales, Liman decided to ditch the A-list leads for his third studio feature. The film is a sci-fi adventure (a first for Liman) about a teleporting 20-something who traverses the globe, narrowly evading a ruthless organization that tries to stop these "jumpers" from enjoying their threatening talents. The leads went to wooden starlets Hayden Christianson and Rachel Bilson (of Star Wars and OC fame), with the limited star-power really coming from a supporting and scenery-chewing Samuel L. Jackson.
Despite the lower-profile leads, Jumper still opened well, matching Bourne's $27 million opening weekend (with higher ticket prices padding the gross). This time around however, word-of-mouth couldn't propel Liman back into the century club for the third straight time – the movie topped out with an underwhelming $80 million – $5 million less than its budget. The outing was cushioned, perhaps, by an impressive foreign cume of $142 million, but even still, Jumper was a notable step down both in gross and critical response for Liman.
Where Bourne and Smith were shiny and creative, Jumper proved to be mostly just shiny. Perhaps this wasn't a real surprise to Liman, who admitted himself in the same New York Magazine interview preceding the film's release that Jumper "completes my sellout trilogy" – apparently he too was becoming disillusioned with the studio products he was churning out.
Fair Game
So what's next for the often irreverent, always exciting director? For his next feature, Liman will be tackling a project with more weight and substance than any of his previous films. Fair Game will attempt to recreate the true story of former CIA agent Valerie Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson. The story focuses on the notorious 2003 scandal that unraveled as White House officials revealed Plame's CIA status after Wilson wrote a controversial New York Times editorial about Bush's agenda in Iraq.
Fair Game, interestingly, returns Liman to the spy sub-genre – not a big surprise given that Bourne and Mr. & Mrs. Smith are his two biggest commercial hits by far. That said, Fair Game has the makings of a tense drama, not of a shoot 'em up blockbluster. This is also Liman's first "true story" film, and while, like all true stories as told by Hollywood, it will including certain measures of speculation, it will nonetheless force Liman to ground his film in reality (a first since he directed Go in 1998).
Fair Game's lofty and socially relevant material automatically conjures up premature thoughts of Oscar. It should come as no surprise, then, that the Plames will be played by none other than Academy stalwarts Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman. Expect the prestige campaign to come on strong as the release date approaches.
Doug Liman has, self-admittedly, spent the last decade making a trio of easily definable and commercial studio projects – even if the first two were higher-grade, middle-brow entertainment. With just five major titles to his resume, Liman has managed to direct four very memorable post-modern films. With Fair Game, Liman is aspiring to something loftier than anything he has done before, and as audience members we can only hope he succeeds.