Doug Liman talks Knight Rider

Crave Online:   Was more action an important mandate going to series?

Doug Liman: Well, look who we brought in. Just more eventy. This was going to be event television. Obviously I try to make my movies into event movies so event doesn't necessarily have to translate into action but making each episode feel special.

Crave Online:   How involved are you in Knight Rider day to day?

Doug Liman: I discovered when I was about to go do Bourne Identity, I was producing an independent film called Kissing Jessica Stein. It was going to go into production the same time as Bourne so I actually started working with the director and the writers very early because I knew I wasn't going to be there on the actual day to day on the set. I'm extremely proud of that film and it turns out that's actually where I can be really useful is early on, I know I can be very helpful during the editorial process. The director doesn't want to hear from me and it's too late for me to affect the kinds of changes I might be interested in affecting because I swing a pretty big knife. My notes tend not to be small things like, "I think his tie should be skinny or wide." They're going to be, "Maybe this character should be something totally different than what you have them as being." So you better be giving that note early on when they're in the writers' room and not while you're on the set and they already have the person cast.

Crave Online:   What movie are you developing for your next project?

Doug Liman: I'm spending the [past] summer on development on three scripts. By Labor Day I hope to announce which one I'm going to shoot.

Crave Online:   Is Jumper 2 one of them?

Doug Liman: That's definitely something in the works but it wouldn’t be my next directorial assignment.

Crave Online:   The Bourne films have gone so far beyond the one you started. How do you feel about how that series evolved with other filmmakers?

Doug Liman: I think Paul's an amazing director. I think the storylines have become honestly a little too thin for my tastes but Matt's a brilliant actor. Paul's a great director and obviously Jason Bourne's a character that I lovingly created over two years and they've been very faithful to stay pure to the character I created. So I'm proud of the sequels.

Crave Online:   Would you be interested in coming back and doing another one?

Doug Liman: If something outrageous happened to the storyline, but I think Bourne Identity is a film I'm incredibly proud of. I'd be more interested in a sequel in an arena like Jumper. I feel like I didn't get it exactly right and then I'd go right back in there. That's more my nature.

Crave Online:   Did you anticipate you'd be this mogul with movie franchises and TV when you started doing small films?

Doug Liman: Well, my role model was Spielberg and ironically Frank Marshall, because growing up my father was Steve Ross's lawyer, who was the head of Time Warner. So I used to spend time with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg as a kid. They were my idols. Then through Spielberg, I met Frank and Kathy. I used to get rides to California on the Time Warner jet with Frank and Kathy and watch them do their thing, reading scripts. They were my idols so it's like one day I want to grow up and be like Frank and Kathy. I'm not like Tarantino who grew up in a video store falling in love with the obscure Indian film. My upbringing as a filmmaker came from a much more mainstream place.

Crave Online:   Where might you like to go with the Jumper sequel?

Doug Liman: I'm very interested in using films as Trojan Horses, and mass media for Trojan Horses. Other than Knight Rider which clearly the mandate was none of my subversive stuff. This is trying to tap into that experience that I had as a kid watching the original which is straight ahead, the good guy always wins, the line between who's good and who's bad is very clear. But in the work that I personally direct, I'm much more interested in being more subversive. In that regard, I have this vision for using mass media as a Trojan Horse. My father ran the Iran Contra investigation. I've been for years trying to figure out how to make that into a movie but if you made a movie called The Iran Contra Affair, no one's going to watch that. Instead I made The Bourne Identity which was a retelling of Iran Contra. If there's anything I'm not happy about where the writing went in the sequels it's that the groundwork was laid to really give people a history lesson while they were having mass entertainment. That got abandoned. When Dave and I were doing The O.C., we said we have a great opportunity here to start talking about immigration reform. Hook all these teenagers, it seems like a fluffy piece of soap opera entertainment, and then let's get the maid arrested on immigration charges. Have all these kids in America fall in love with the Mexican maid and then have her facing deportation, whereas if we did a show about deportation, no one would ever watch it. Of course Fox was like, "Are you f*cking crazy? This is a $100 million investment." That was my first TV show. I thought with TV I could experiment more. Instead they're like, "No, no, it's the opposite way." There's a huge amount of money being invested in this. So I'm interested in the Jumper sequel as a way to maybe introduce time travel and explore history in a way that you could get a mass audience in and maybe they'd learn about World War II, they'd learn about the Cold War which was something I was lucky enough to live through and the average moviegoer today doesn't even understand what it was like to go behind an iron curtain.

Crave Online:   Were you not into the Bourne sequels' take on stuff like Guantanamo?

Doug Liman: Yeah because I wanted to tell Iran Contra.

Crave Online:   You mentioned not getting Jumper quite right. Are you very self critical?

Doug Liman: Yeah, I'm super insecure. Yeah, I'm very self-critical.

Crave Online:   What was supposed to underlie the Jumper story?

Doug Liman: Movies for me are a big experiment. One of the fallouts coming out of Bourne Identity which was not a simple process with Universal, it was a very combative relationship and Stacey Snider at one point said to me, "This isn't your film school" because I was just trying all these ideas out, trying to do things different than they had been done before. Just trying to reinvent. This is how it's always done, I'm going to do it a different way. The one thing about doing that is you realize why things are always done a certain way, because that way you know works. When you decide not to do it the way everyone else does it, you're in uncharted territory and it's a lot more exciting but you don't always get it right. Sometimes you have to do reshoots. I was interested with Jumper in exploring what if your protagonist isn't a good guy? They're always good guys. People get a superpower and they automatically start fighting crime. What if he's just not a good guy? How far can I go with that? I went a lot further with the movie than I ultimately put in the released version because it turns out an audience wasn't as interested in my experiments. They actually wanted their protagonist to be a good guy. They want him to be like Michael Knight.

Crave Online:   Is there an extended version of Jumper that might come out down the line?

Doug Liman: Maybe. I definitely have material where he actually leaves the finale. He's incredibly unheroic. He actually leaves. He has the ability to teleport. He just abandons Rachel Bilson and goes.

Crave Online:   How sensitive are you reviews and fan critics of things like the two hour Knight Rider movie and Jumper?

Doug Liman: I'm very sensitive. Sometimes I don't agree with them. I don't just make this for the fans. I make it for me because I'm interested in it. I think that's the kiss of death, the moment you start chasing what the fans might want but I do listen to them. I do read the reviews. Sometimes I look at it and I go, "Yeah, they're right. We could've done better." Sometimes I see it myself and I know we could do something better and the fans just corroborate it. So I do read reviews. I read fan notes and I consider myself having a relationship with the audience. I'm not like a dictator. I'm not running North Korea, here it is and you watch it. I think I can learn from the audience.

Crave Online:   Now I want to know, was there a hidden subtext to Smith and Swingers that I didn't get?

Doug Liman: Smiths was a complete rejection of Bourne Identity. It was like okay, big deal that Jason Bourne can do all that. The guy's single. James Bond can do all this stuff. I spent five years of my life on Bourne Identity and I was saying here's a way to take those five years and say, "You know what? My priorities were in the wrong place. I shouldn't be celebrating that. There's things that are more important."

Crave Online:   And Swingers was?

Doug Liman: Swingers I just loved the characters. To me it was about friendship. I genuinely love my friends and I wanted to do something that celebrated male friendship. The subversive thing about Swingers, the movie had nothing to do with the girls. That was the subversive thing. Swingers at the end of the day has nothing to do with the girl. It's all about those guys and it's ultimately a love story between Jon and Vince and Vince and Patrick Van Horn. There's a lovers' triangle that was just about friendship between the three guys.

 

Doug Liman: They seem to be really happy. It's basically as surreal for me as it probably is for somebody who had nothing to do with Mr. and Mrs. Smith. It's so much bigger than the movie. Even Jason Bourne is sort of bigger than the movies. Sometimes you're involved with something and it hits the zeitgeist and the world embraces something and it sort of no longer becomes yours. The whole world sort of takes ownership of it.

Crave Online:   Do you think there'll be more Bourne movies?

Doug Liman: There's another script in the works. Bourne was such a rebellious movie that it's going to be a challenge. If Universal decides that they want to really turn it into the Bond franchise and my grandkids are living off of residuals of this thing on and on, or who knows, ancestors long after I'm dead. Bourne came at a time in my life when I was young and rebellious and damn the system. The movie has that sort of ethic at its core. It basically has become the system.

Crave Online:   Do you see other actors taking on the role like James Bond?

Doug Liman: Yeah, I think that Jason Bourne is a movie star. I think Matt Damon is not as big a movie star as Jason Bourne is. I think Daniel Craig is a movie star but James Bond is more of a movie star.

Crave Online:   How hard do you think it will be to get Matt to do one more?

Doug Liman: There's so much money in it, that I don't think that hard.

Crave Online:   Would you want to direct a Knight Rider movie?

Doug Liman: We're working so hard just to make this a successful TV series that the notion of thinking beyond that right now is sort of inconceivable. It's like if you would have asked me at this stage of Bourne Identity plans for a sequel, I'd be like I'm just trying to make this first one good.

Crave Online:   What did you learn from The O.C. and are there any lessons that apply to Knight Rider?

Doug Liman: The O.C. was my first experience in television and it was such an overwhelmingly positive one that I said, "Hey, I actually really like television." That's why I'm here today doing this. I had so much fun having a TV show on the air and having a canvas that's as big as you have with a TV series. Movie, even Bourne with three sequels, the storylines, the canvas just isn't that big. When we look at something like this or The O.C., you're starting to plot how it might go in the second year and its third year. For someone like me who's really interested in character, the canvas of a TV series allows you to go so much further with character than a movie ever could really let you do.

Crave Online:   And the level of action on TV has gotten so much higher.

Doug Liman: Gary [Scott Thompson]'s definitely taking advantage of technology. When we sit in the writer's room and they come up with ideas, when they break a story I'm like, "Can we really do that?" They clearly don't feel at all hindered. I could imagine this show five years ago, some of the storylines that they've come up with saying, "We can't afford to do that." Today, between the ability to use where we're at with digital effects and the fact that we just have a great stunt team, because if you did it all digital effects, it would look fake. And just really great producers, Dave [Bartis] and I who suffer through the 45 minute drive with no traffic to Santa Clarita. The O.C. we shot in Manhattan Beach, it was so nice and convenient. What the hell are we doing out here? That's so that they can do the kind of action that this show demands. People like Dave and Gary and the rest of the team do this insane commute where they have a big enough playground that they can do outrageous stunts which a movie could do them closer to L.A. but a TV show, these guys made the commitment. They said, "We're going to save money wherever we can save it so the rest of it can go on the screen."