The beating heart of your story… that’s not what shows up in a trailer. The other stuff is what shows up in a trailer, because that’s what gets people in to the seats, and that’s how studios make their money. – Doug Liman
Casting is everything. I put a huge amount of work into casting, and consistently across my career, I am most proud of my bold choices I made in casting. – Doug Liman
My films are very rooted in specific people’s point of view. Some film-makers give a more global point of view, like God looking down at the characters. – Doug Liman
What I really found was that the one similarity between ‘Covert Affairs’ and ‘Fair Game’ is a deep love and admiration and fascination with the home life of a spy. – Doug Liman
When I was shooting ‘The Bourne Identity,’ I had a mantra: ‘How come you never see James Bond pay a phone bill?’ It sounds trite, but it became the foundation of that franchise. – Doug Liman
To be a lone filmmaker thousands of miles from home with nobody believing in me, that seems romantic. – Doug Liman
In particular, I’m drawn to the stories that have big, high concepts and real characters at their heart. And I love where those two worlds meet, and ‘Edge of Tomorrow’ is the perfect canvas to explore that. – Doug Liman
It turns out that it’s easier to do politics in a movie. People really don’t want it in their TV. – Doug Liman
I never want to repeat myself. I can’t imagine anything else as upsetting as realizing I’m redoing something I did before. For some reason, when it comes to film, I’m very good at not repeating myself. Even though in the rest of my life, I’m constantly repeating my mistakes. – Doug Liman
My dad couldn’t connect to my wanting to be a filmmaker. He was very connected in entertainment, and through him I met Steven Spielberg and got rides on his private plane to California. I’d see Spielberg’s people reading scripts. I was like, ‘That’s what I want to be when I grow up.’ – Doug Liman
It’s no secret that my process is a little bit loose and can be a little bit infuriating to a studio if they don’t know what they’re signing up for. – Doug Liman
When I’m working on a film, I think about how it will play with a tiny audience of friends whose opinions I respect – basically, a 40-bloc radius from my apartment in Manhattan. – Doug Liman
I realize I am contradictory: I have an independent filmmaker’s sensibility and a Hollywood director’s short-attention span. – Doug Liman
Finding original source material is not easy, but when something special like ‘Edge of Tomorrow’ comes along, everybody recognized it. I wasn’t swimming against the stream. Warner Brothers immediately supported it, Tom Cruise signed on instantly; Emily Blunt, who was our first choice, signed on immediately. – Doug Liman
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. – Doug Liman
A part of me is a liberal New Yorker involved in politics and certain attitudes about movies. I kind of lost my indie credibility over ‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith.’ I know I haven’t lost it. I just have to go make an independent movie. I just have to do it. Just for me. – Doug Liman
The more real I got on ‘The Bourne Identity,’ the more interesting it got. So ‘Fair Game’ was the chance to go a few more steps in that direction. In fact, I discovered this whole other world that I had ignored in the ‘Bourne’ franchise, which is the domestic life of a spy, and how you make the two halves of your life coexist. – Doug Liman
‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’ – every scene is from those characters’ point of view. They’re in literally every scene, very unusual in a big studio film. – Doug Liman
I think making a great action movie is one of the hardest cinematic endeavors. By definition, smart characters avoid action. Smart people don’t go down dark alleys, but if you’re making an action movie and you want to have an action sequence, somehow you have to get that character into that dangerous situation. – Doug Liman
I probably shouldn’t treat interviews as therapy sessions, but I don’t keep a diary, so these end up being my way of keeping track of where I’m at and letting it all out. – Doug Liman
I started my career 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. – Doug Liman
I don’t really analyze my process. I do know that if it’s not right, I won’t move on. I’m tenacious to a fault about that. – Doug Liman
