Doug Liman is probably best known as a director for Swingers, the 1996 indie starring Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau. But you're more likely to read his name in the open credits of the Bourne series - Liman optioned the Robert Ludlum books and directed the first film in 2002 before serving as Executive producer on the two Paul Greengrass-directed sequels.

In 2005 he introduced Brad to Angelina as he bought Mr & Mrs Smith to the screen and this year he's got Hayden Christensen, Rachel Bilson and Jamie Bell globetrotting in the high-concept sci-fi movie Jumper. RT caught up with Liman to find out more.

How did you first become involved with Jumper?

Doug Liman: Lucas Foster was one of the producers on Mr & Mrs Smith and he brought me the project. He knew me quite well from having done Mr & Mrs Smith and the thing that appealed to me right off the bat was that David Rice discovers he has a superpower - OK, I've seen that in a million movies - and then immediately starts robbing a bank with it. I hadn't seen that... I fell in love with that character at that moment, and I wanted to follow that guy.

The script was written by David Goyer and it was very conventional and he was kind-of redeemed and I thought, I actually liked the guy who was robbing banks. I want to pursue that character. I don't want this to become a morality tale of how he learns to become a good guy. So I bought in Simon Kinberg who'd written Mr & Mrs Smith and we pursued developing not something that's darker but for me something that's ultimately more honest.

I realised; it's not that I'm really cynical and I think that if someone had a superpower robbing banks and sleeping with women all over the globe with it would be more honest. Ultimately if you look at the characters in my films you'll see a lot of similarities going all the way back to Swingers with Vince Vaughn's character. Ultimately, Vince's character was just saying what we were all thinking.

People were like, "Oh my God, he's a horrendous guy and he should learn his lesson and he should change, he should become a better person." I'm like, "No, he's actually a great person off the bat, we need to learn to understand that actually he's the one honest person because he's willing to say the things we're all thinking."

In a way David Rice is just doing the things that we would think about doing. There's honesty to that, and I love him for being honest like that and not trying to be something he's not.



At the same time, this isn't Swingers, which is a small, indie movie. This is a big-budget studio action movie. Was there ever any pressure from Fox not to push that too far?

DL: No, in fact that was one of the emotional challenges for me on the film. Fox were basically saying to me, "We want you to do with the superhero genre - which, by the way, we specialise in making - what you did to the spy genre with Bourne." They were basically saying, "Hurt us. Make us suffer, and do whatever you did to the Universal folks which drove them nuts."

In a way that kind-of threw me for a loop. I have a rebellious nature and being told no is almost the surest way to get me to do something. Not unlike David Rice in the film, who doesn't understand being told no because he has the ability to go around every possible no there could be, except one from a woman. It was kind-of throwing me for a loop during production because almost everything I did during production that could have been considered disruptive on any other set, on this project they were like, "Are you sure you're being disruptive enough?" It's hard to be rebellious when people are expecting to be rebellious. It's like if you're a teenager and your folks say, "Are you smoking enough pot?"

So do you think the studios are a bit more tuned in to the power of rebellious filmmakers these days?

DL: I think they are. When you have films like Bourne that succeed not only does it beget sequels but it begets people taking chances. It doesn't mean they take chances with every movie; I think they try to know going into it which one they're doing and I think one of the reasons there was so much drama going into Bourne Identity was that the studio thought it was going to be one of their safe ones. They thought it was going to be a dumb action movie and they expected to be tortured on some other movie by a much more important filmmaker. I was trying to make a more significant film out of what they had written off as another dumb action movie.



In the case of Jumper they had already put this in the other category. This is the studio that made Fantastic Four, you know, they know how to churn out a dumb, cookie-cutter superhero movie. They had already put this into a different category so they were prepared for it, and I think studios are doing that with more and more frequency. Look at Alfonso Cuaron and Children of Men - there are some really bold decisions being made by studios these days.

By the way, it was pretty bold to begin with that Universal bought Bourne Identity. Here's the guy who made Swingers for $200,000 and Go for $3 million peddling The Bourne Identity to the studios going, "I want to make a $60 million movie."