Interview with Doug Liman, director of Fair Game

Doug Liman (right) has had, by his own admission, a pretty extraordinary career. He began as a director of low-budget ensemble pieces so indie they were either incredibly hip (Swingers, 1996), starred the requisite quota of cool, pretty, looking-to-break-out-of-TV actors (Go, 1999), or disappeared so fast they're now only available on VHS (Getting In, 1994). Then, after Go, he made the leap from the Independent Spirit Awards circuit to the mainstream in a heartbeat. Not only did this seem to occur overnight, he did it with a film that nobody in their right mind would ever have put their shirt on. Starring Matt Damon, who by his own admission was on the cusp of redundancy at the time, and plagued by production troubles, reshoots and general bad buzz, the resulting film, The Bourne Identity (2002), was not only a hit, it paved the way for a rejuvenated, post-9/11 Bond franchise.

Liman's films since that time, Mr And Mrs Smith (2005) and Jumper (2008) didn't exactly set him back on the blockbuster trail, so it's interesting to see that, though it, too, dabbles in the world of espionage, his latest film, Fair Game (out this week) owes more to his early films than his post-Go studio output. Based on the biography of Valerie Plame, it makes a companion piece, of sorts, to Paul Greengrass's Green Zone, since it is a largely political drama about the lead up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Played by Naomi Watts, Plame is a CIA operative, working undercover, when her congressman husband, Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), is sent to Iraq to investigate the country's nuclear weapons programme. Wilson finds no proof, and says so, but his report is ignored and the facts are twisted by government hawks. But when Wilson tries to redress this, the White House fights back with fury, exposing his wife's secret identity and painting both as traitors.

Curiously, given Liman's leftist background (his lawyer father, Arthur L Liman, took on Oliver North in the Iran-Contra trials), the film is somewhat soft on, and even dewy-eyed, about the CIA. Still, it offers an interesting perspective on one of America's most debated (and long-winded) news stories of recent years, with powerhouse performances from Watts and Penn as the beleaguered Plame/Wilsons. This interview took place in Cannes, the day after Fair Game's world premiere...

How did you get involved with Fair Game?
I think I've had, twice in my career, people take chances on me that were, in hindsight, quite astonishing. The first time was when, having done nothing but two little low-budget movies [Swingers and Go], Universal said yes to me going 6,000 miles away to make The Bourne Identity, over which they'd have no control. In hindsight, that's insane. But the other situation where someone took a chance on me was when [Fair Game producers] Janet and Jerry [Zucker] introduced me to Valerie and Joe, and they turned over their story to me, put their trust in me. When I made it clear that I wasn't gonna sugarcoat it – I was gonna tell the story how I saw it.

What attracted you?
This was sort of a continuation, for me, of a process I started on The Bourne Identity, which is this: I'm fascinated by spies. And I populated The Bourne Identity with real characters from American history, specifically characters from the Iran-Contra affair, which my father ran the investigation of. But at the heart of it was a fictional character. So this was the next step: to populate the movie 100 per cent with real characters.

Why did you cast Naomi Watts?
We cast Naomi first; she was my first choice to play the character at the centre of this – the movie starts with her and the movie ends with her. Naomi has this sort of inner beauty, in that you know that there's a good person in there. And the character has a very tough exterior. I wanted someone who would preserve that tough exterior and still have you root for her. Think about it: as a CIA officer, as a covert officer, as a NOC – a Non-Official Cover – she is lying to people throughout the entire movie. She's lying to her friends, she's lying to her husband, she's lying to the people in the fields, whose organisations she's infiltrating, and you still have to root for that person. It's sort of the same criteria that I used when casting Matt Damon as Jason Bourne. I wanted to preserve Jason Bourne's vicious past, which meant that I had to cast somebody you would still root for despite horrible things that they may have done. Naomi brought with her that inner goodness.

How did you get Sean Penn?
We sent Naomi the script, she fell in love with it. I said, “My first choice for the male lead is Sean Penn. He's on his way to winning the Academy Award – can you help us get to him?” So Naomi sent him an email saying “Read this” along with a copy of the script. And he loved it.

What do you think attracted him? The political content?
He loved the character of Joe Wilson. Sean does one film a year at most. He puts his soul into his parts. He's not one of these actors who just does one job after another, and he made that very clear to me, about what a significant decision it is when he chooses to do a role. I think it's pretty clear that Sean Penn's politics and Joe Wilson's politics share some similarities, but that's not why he chose this movie. He'd just won the Academy Award, he could have done any role he wanted. But he chose this role because Joe Wilson is such an amazing person – so outspoken and colourful. He faced down Saddam Hussein and chose to take on the incredibly powerful White House. He's the perfect anti-hero. Those are the most compelling characters to play, and they're the most compelling characters to direct.

What was he like to work with?
The thing that's amazing about Sean – and I've had incredible luck, I've worked with some of the greatest actors in the business – is that Sean is in a league by himself. He becomes that character 100 per cent. There's nothing left of Sean Penn by the time he comes on that set. He's 100 per cent Joe Wilson, he's 100 per cent Harvey Milk, he's 100 per cent Jeff Spicoli... I had never seen anything like that in my life. It was almost like he sucked the essence of Joe Wilson out and into himself. Almost like a horror movie! (Laughs) And during the rehearsal period he just was becoming more and more Joe Wilson – and Joe Wilson was right there with us! It was like Invasion Of the Body Snatchers. He just was Joe Wilson.

And what did Joe Wilson think of this?
Well, how could you not love having Sean Penn play you? (Laughs) But Joe has no objectivity about it. He turned to me after the Cannes premiere and told me that watching Naomi Watts playing Valerie Plame made him fall in love with his wife all over again.

How much was Valerie able to tell you? Is what's in the movie just the tip of the iceberg?
It's definitely the tip of the iceberg. If you look at her testimony before Congress, beyond what we show in the end credits of the movie, she goes on to talk more about what she was doing and what was compromised when she was exposed. She was at the peak of her career when she was cut down, because it takes years and years and years to develop the relationships and the experience to do what she was doing. And about 20 years in is about when you're at your peak – and that's when they cut her down.

Was there anything you couldn't show?
We definitely changed names, but we made a point of that, since it's a story about someone who actually did reveal things. But at the heart of it... The original script was, what, 350 pages? It was a very long script, and I found myself drawn to the relationship between Joe and Valerie. So the decision to focus more on their marriage and less on the spycraft really came from a storytelling place more than a national security place. And because this film does take place in recent history, and involves real-world events, what we [as filmmakers] bring to the table is sort of always present. So we tried to stay focused on the story that we were telling, because it's just very easy to let your political views drift in. We worked very hard to check them at the door and come at this as objectively as possible.

How much was Valerie able to reveal?
She signed a secrecy oath with the CIA, and she is pro-CIA to this day. You see it in the movie but you'll also see it in real life. She was not gonna cross that line. And because of the time we spent with her, I became pro-CIA! (Laughs) And I'd like to think this movie is a celebration of the CIA. So we got our information from other people at the CIA – people who were outraged at what happened to her, who spoke to us on condition of anonymity. And one of the things I learned from them is that they said, “We hope you're not going to make Valerie Plame out into some sort of superhero, because there are hundreds of Valerie Plames in the CIA.” That made me appreciate the CIA. How many people are making sacrifices every day for our safety? As we speak, there are women lying to their friends, trying to maintain a marriage where they can't tell their husband where they're going and for how long.

Is the film pro-CIA?
I know that the movie is optimistic about the CIA because I showed it to a group of Republicans early on, because I wanted to make a movie that would play to everybody. I wanted to make sure that my partisan politics hadn't seeped in too much. And one of them called me a month later, at Christmastime, because there had just been an attack on a forward-operating base in Afghanistan and a number of CIA officers were killed, including a young woman. It was on the front page of the New York Times. And this Republican, who'd seen the movie a few weeks before, called me up and said, “Y'know, normally this would have been an article where I would have just sort of read it and then turned the page. But this time I didn't. I had tears in my eyes, because, for the first time, the CIA had been humanised for me.” This guy had seen, y'know, dozens of CIA movies. But this was literally the first time he'd seen the human face of the CIA.

What about the bad guys in the movie, people like Karl Rove and Scooter Libby?
I did screen it for one of Scooter Libby's lawyers. I wanted Scooter Libby to participate – I would have like to have gotten his side of the story. But he was on trial, and we did pull all of the material about the White House from [those] trial transcripts, so he can't really object to the movie because these are facts. We are just dramatising things that were said under oath at his trial. Or even things that he said at his trial.

This story ran for months in the American press. Is it finally over yet?
As you see in the movie, we don't answer a lot of questions about – specifically – what was going on in the White House at the time. We only answer what we knew for a fact, based on the trial transcripts. So I imagine, eventually, one of the players – maybe it will be a deathbed confession – but somebody, at some point, will probably come forward and tell the public the truth, once and for all, about what happened. And specifically how it happened.

Do you think, in the wake of the success of The Hurt Locker, that the US public is now ready for these kinds of politically skewed human-interest stories?
I don't see Fair Game primarily as a political movie. It's obviously a film that has a lot of politics in it, but our interest in this was to make an emotional film about what these people went through. And based on the success of films like The Blind Side, it seems audiences do want to see films about people's efforts that are heroic but also private.

You were your own DoP on this movie. Was that an artistic choice or a financial choice?
Well, I always operate the camera, so I'm right there with the actors. But the decision to DP was not taken lightly. It is something I love to do, but our budget was very low on this movie, for what it was. Given that it's a pretty expansive spy story, across six countries, we didn't have nearly enough money. Which happened do be the case for Swingers, happened to be the case for Go and happened to be the case for The Bourne Identity. So I had no choice but to go back to my roots and put the camera on my own shoulder. This film should have cost, easily, three times its budget.

Speaking of huge budgets, have you ever thought about making a Bond movie?
(laughs) I started my career out wanting to make a James Bond movie, and I couldn't get hired! I made The Bourne Identity, and ultimately the impact of that film was that it changed the James Bond franchise. So I feel like I made a James Bond film now, because the recent Bond films have been done in a style that really pulled the best from The Bourne Identity – especially Casino Royale, which is probably the Bond film I would have made. It was a very surreal thing, to have started out wanting to make Bond film, and ultimately – inadvertently – changing the franchise.