The Press Box - Doug Liman on ‘The Wall’ and Making Movies His Way (Ep. 305)

Episode Date: May 15, 2017

Ringer editor-in-chief Sean Fennessey chats with BuzzFeed’s Alison Wilmore about Doug Liman’s career and his notable films, including 'The Bourne Identity' and 'Edge of Tomorrow' (0:01). Then Liman joins the podcast to discuss making his new war film, ‘The Wall,’ and why he changed the ending six months after finishing production(6:50). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hello and welcome to a special still unnamed Channel 33 Movies podcast. My name is Sean Fennessey. I'm the editor of The Ringer. Today I'll be talking with film director Doug Lyman, who has a new film called The Wall coming out soon. But first, I'm happy to be and very excited to be chatting with Allison Wilmore. Allison is the film critic for BuzzFeed and also the co-host of,

I can honestly say, my favorite movies podcast, which is Film Spotting SVA. Allison, that's a true story. How are you doing today? That's amazing. I'm great. Well, after hearing that, I'm really great. Okay, I greased the wheels. I greased the wheels. So Allison, like I said, I spoke to Doug and he's had quite an interesting career. And, you know, given your experience, I was wondering if you could kind of put him in context for us. What kind of filmmakers, Doug Lyman, and, you know, what kind of movies does he make? Well, he's kind of all over the place. I think a filmmaker whose work I've really enjoyed, but it's hard to say that he specializes in what. particular thing. You know, the first thing I ever saw from him was Swingers, which, you know, L.A. Classic that set John Favreau's career into motion. But then he followed that up with Go, which was that kind of rave movie.

He's done Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which is, you know, one of the great meta Hollywood movies in terms of reading someone's relationship into what's on the screen. Has a newfound resonance now, too, huh? Seriously. You know, I think he did, one of my favorites of his is Edge of Tomorrow, the Tom Cruise sci-fi movie, which I think, you know, had a lot of critics love it, maybe more than actually turned out to see it. But this movie, I think, is tremendous.

Yeah. And now The Wall. Yeah, so he's an interesting character to me because when we chatted, he kept characterizing himself as an independent filmmaker working inside of a Hollywood system. There's a lot of, there's been a lot of reporting around the style that he, employs, the sort of lymania is what it's called, which is sort of unpredictable. Is that the sort of thing that you, Vince, when you're watching his movies, that you can see that he is kind of playing with a different kind of deck, even though he's inside the Hollywood system?

Or does he still just seem sort of like a traditional Hollywood filmmaker to you? Well, that's hard to say because even when he was working in independent film, he made movies that I think were pretty crowd-pleasing. And I say that in a good way. But, you know, I don't think he's someone who had such a distinctive sensibility that had to kind of be snuck into Hollywood. I think he makes movies that are fun to watch. You know, I don't think that he is necessarily someone that I would say, is, I don't know that I would be able to pick a movie as his without knowing.

But he is still someone who I think is very talented. Yeah, that's an interesting point. He doesn't have a particular Tarantino-esque style or anything like that, where the dialogue is always just this way or he always shoots in just this fashion. You know, with the wall, it's kind of an interesting movie because I agree that he tends to make these sort of

funny, rye, but also intense kind of action movies. The wall is less so that. It's a little bit more serious, but it does have kind of touches of that. I don't know, what did you make of that movie and, you know, what do you think of him doing something kind of that small,

which is different for him? I went into it without having a lot of expectations. And it's really, it's, well, like a three-man show and one of those people is mostly a voice and a kind of presence out in the wilderness. I, you know, I appreciated the experimentation behind it. And also something that I think is is not always something you see in as films, which is there's a lot of doubt. It's all downtime. You know, it's a lot of weighting and a lot of tension that builds up just from trying to decide when to actually act. Yeah, it's like an inverted born identity, right? Like it's very

static. It's a lot of conversation. It is an interesting experiment. I agree. I was thinking about a lot with respect to movies about our recent wars. And I was thinking of Billy Lynn's long halftime walk as well about sort of a sideways entrance into a war movie. How do you feel filmmakers are kind of grappling with, you know, the recent conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and what we're seeing on screen? Well, it's definitely a lot more morally ambiguous. And I think that you see that in all of them where you're like, you can't make a rah-rah movie about a present-day conflict like that. It just doesn't, that just doesn't fit in any way.

You know, even something like American sniper, which gets held up as like maybe a more conservative leaning, more black and white in terms of how I was criticized for that in terms of how it's treated. It still is a kind of, it portrays war as difficult. and something that chips away at you. And so many of these movies also focus on what it's like to go home, including, you know, Billy Lynn. There's so much about how you leave war behind or don't.

That seems as much of the story as being there. Yeah, what do you think that's a reflection of just the sort of complicated relationship that we have with war post-70s films of that nature? Yeah, and just also when you have conflicts that never have a clean ending, I feel like the idea that you can come home and then decide to go back, that it's just something that's always there. You know, there's a lot of that sense in these movies. This idea that you don't have an end goal that you can necessarily ever accomplish.

You're just there. Yeah, you know, that's something that is echoed a bit in the wall even where the, you know, the disembodied voice that you talked about sort of taunts Aaron Taylor Johnson's character at one point about returning to the battlefield and this notion of, you know, never being able to kind of escape this cycle. It's an interesting thing. So, you know, there's one more Doug Lyman movie coming out later this year. I don't know if you're familiar with it at all called American Made.

It is about a different kind of war, essentially, like a drug war. I'm curious if you read anything about that. I haven't, but it's got Tom Cruise in it, right? It does. Landry Jones. Yes. It's got quite a cast. Yeah.

I don't know. I think I liked the way. the way Lyman worked with Tom Cruise. And, you know, I think, I'd be curious to see how that goes, especially in this kind of context. Yeah, we're really looking forward to it. Allison, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it and read Allison's work on BuzzFeed

and listen to FilmSpotting Us for you guys. Thanks, Allison. Thank you. Okay, and now on to my interview with Doug Lyman. Doug, thanks for being here today. Thanks for having me. Doug, let's start here. The wall is a little bit smaller than some of the movies you've made recently,

and it's a little bit of a smaller budget. but it's arguably the most intense movie that you've ever made. And I'm kind of curious where this came from, how it came to you, and why you decided to do it. Well, I actually first read the script to the wall a few years ago. I was sent as a writing sample for a bigger project I was developing. And I love the script.

I said, well, what about this movie? I can't even remember the movie I was reading the script for as a reading sample to have this writer then go write because I fell in love with the story of the wall. And again, it was a script you just couldn't put down. It was a blacklisted script. It was just the story of the screenwriter, Dwayne Worrell, who wrote it, who won a script writing contest from Amazon. And it's just extraordinary piece of writing. It was such a compelling story and an exciting take on war. You know, I hate to say it that way. because war such a horrible thing.

But, you know, for my generation of filmmakers, I look back on sort of the movies that were set during World War II, and there's such simple heroism. And, you know, the war movies that were sort of being made, the Oliver Stone-type war movies, didn't necessarily have that sort of clarity of heroism that was present in so many World War II movies. And what I saw in Dwayne's script was sort of a return back to the simple,

Simple heroism of ordinary soldiers. And I make movies about people. And I make movies about people in extraordinary situations. You know, that's a lot of times why you see me do these kind of bigger or more outrageous stories like Mr. Mrs. Smith, you know, where I create a crazy outrageous situation of two assassins who don't know their spouse is an assassin or Jason Bourne having amnesia. You know, like I come up with these outlandish situations because I'm interested in how people act under those conditions.

And what I realized, when I read the script of the wall was that, like, actually, ordinary soldiers face these outrageous situations every single day. Was Dwayne's script purely invented or was it based on some experience that he had heard about

or read about or anything like that? No, Dwayne's script was invented. I mean, it's obviously drawn from a lot of, you know, from the headlines and real experiences and the villain of the movie, the Iraqi sniper that Aaron Taylor Johnson and John Sina are up against, is based on real lore of this incredible Iraqi sniper who had, you know, over 100 kills,

killed over 100 Americans named Juba. And we don't know if we killed Juba. We don't know if there was a Juba, if Juba was actually 10 people. that's part of dealing with snipers is you you never see them. We had an amazing military advisor, Nick Irvine. It's an Army Ranger sniper. The Reaper.

That's what he's known as. He's known as the Reaper. And he really like, you know, if you look at my phone, you'll see photos of my, I have a small farm, my different animals, like goats and pigs and chickens. You look on his phone and he's got photos of all the people he's killed. Oh, my gosh. And Nick told us, you know, this sniper saying of from a place you will not see comes a sound you will not hear.

That's what happens when a sniper shoots you. I mean, they're so far away. And by the time the sound gets to you, because the bullet travels faster than the speed of sound, you're already dead. I mean, that could be the tagline for the movie in a lot of ways. And you really do a good job in the film of giving us that experience of, you know, you don't quite hear it until it's too late in certain cases. Yeah, I love doing that.

I mean, I kind of, I grew up as a physics geek. So I really, I'm glad you picked up on that. I hadn't ever seen that before in a movie where like the bullet hits first and then you hear the sound about a second and a half later. But that's, we actually put the sound where it really belonged based on the distances. And it sounded too fake. So I actually moved it, I didn't, I moved it closer to to when the bullet impacts just so it would feel, you know, in your gut it would feel more real.

But the reality is you've been dead for about two or three seconds by the time the sound gets to you. That's incredible. I mean, it is the first time the first bullet strike hits. It's completely disorienting. You don't totally understand what's happened. Did you want to take this on because, you know, it's essentially a two-hander, John and Aaron. And even though it's a war movie that there's less complexity maybe in the storytelling than there was, say, and Edge of Tomorrow, which is, you know, this metroche Godal of storytelling?

My movies sort of happen on a spectrum. Their reactions sometimes to not just the material, but sort of where I am in my life. You know, when I did Mr. Mrs. Smith, it came right off of Born Identity. And when I read Simon Kimberg's first draft of Mr. Mrs. Smith, what struck me was that I just created this franchise that was going to celebrate this action hero, Jason Bourne. And suddenly I'm reading the script that's sort of giving me a different perspective, which is maybe it's easy to be an action hero and harder to maintain a marriage. And I started thinking about James Bond, love. And I thought, you know, if you think about it,

that guy can't hold down a relationship, right? It's a different woman every movie. I said, we're celebrating the wrong guy. Like, it's actually pretty easy to be James Bond. Like, we should be celebrating someone who maybe keeps a marriage fresh after seven years or ten years. That's a way more impressive accomplishment. And that was sort of the mindset that got me to do Mr. Mrs. Smith. If I had never done, or an identity, I probably wouldn't have done Mr. Mrs. Smith. I wouldn't have had that personal connection to the material.

in the same way when I did live die repeat or edge of tomorrow I part of what I loved about doing a war movie where the enemy was an alien was it was a return to sort of simpler World War II type movies you know where the enemy's wearing a uniform they're on the other side of the border you know it's it's the there's a lot of moral clarity of who's good and who's good bad. Although I learned, you know, when I promoted lived, I repeat in Japan, because they were allied with the Germans, that that moral clarity of who's good and who's bad, you know, isn't fully an international concept because when I was in a little off topic, but I was in Japan and I was going to talk about, on the press store for Live Di Repeat, I was like, hey, when I talk about this movie, I talk about World War II and it's obvious who's bad.

And obviously, you know, I talk about Hitler. And I'm like, you know, sort of there's no moral ambiguity about the war. And I was like, so, but I don't know, maybe, how do you guys feel about World War II in Japan? And I was like, like, what comes to mind when I say Adolf Hitler? And they're like, nothing, not much. Wow. And I'm like, okay, well, Adolf Hitler, good or bad. And they're like, neither good nor bad.

So I'm like, all right, I'm going to have to not do that line of, of, of, I'm not going to try a different way to promote the movie in Japan. Yeah, just redefine it as like a robot alien that kills everybody. But when I talk about moral clarity, you know, and I looked at the wall and looked at what war looks like, really at ground level from a soldier's point of view. And, you know, my movies very much are kind of first-person movies. The difference in James Bond and my Jason Bourne franchise is that Jason Bourne kind of puts you in the car with him and puts you in shoes. And the amnesia really helped ground you into his experience. You know, the wall sort of

combines my interest in really putting you in the trenches, which is an expression I used all the time promoting foreign identity. And now I literally am, so now I'm actually doing a war movie. I'm putting you actually, it's not a, it's not a figurative statement. It's a literal statement. You're in the trenches with the soldiers. And at the same time, there's no moral ambiguity when you're a soldier fighting. Like, there can be plenty of moral ambiguity if you're sitting on a college campus or if you're in New York City where I live, you can debate the war all day long. If you're a soldier out in the field, something's trying to shoot you. There's no moral ambiguity about that. That person is the enemy. And, like, you better kill them before they kill you. And it's as

simple as that. There's nothing else to be debated. So I found in the wall so many of the elements that I had been interested in my whole career and been bringing to all these different genres of movies that had aliens and time travel and assassins with amnesia. And it was like, actually, you find these stories every day with American soldiers and probably soldiers from other countries as well, but I had way more experience talking to American soldiers. This is definitely one of your most grounded in reality movies in a while. But was it harder to make this one personal for you? My movies at the end of they are always personal.

There's a piece of me in every movie. And in the wall, the personal aspect of it, and it's hard to talk about, it's hard to be like a Hollywood filmmaker and talk about the experiences of soldiers and not kind of sound like an a-hole, like I have any idea what it's really like to be out there and what these people go through.

So I just got to qualify it that way. but it's the thing that's extraordinary about Aaron Taylor Johnson's experience and John Cena's experience, you know, their character's experience in the movie is like, these guys are put through hell and they keep picking themselves up. They keep getting knocked out and they keep picking themselves up. And just when you think like it's too much, they just pick themselves up again and they keep trying and they just keep trying. And that to me, you know, has been my experience, certainly in Hollywood. You know, there's a expression about, you know, that they sort of taught us

in the brief time I was in film school before I dropped out, that it's not about getting knocked down. You get knocked down a lot. It's about getting back up. And that God knows when I was trying to start my career and get Swingers made, how many rejections I got. And I just pick myself up and try it again and pick myself up and try it again. Every step along the way, even when Swingers was done. And we had time the whole thing. And part of how I got the deal done was that we were going to get the film done in time to submit it to Sundance. And then we didn't get into Sundance. And you're like, all right, it's done. You know, no one's ever going to see this movie because that's, Sundance isn't going to take you.

You're never going to sell it. It'll never see the light of day. And went through like two days of total depression. And then I like picked myself back up and I'm going to figure I how to sell it. Obviously, I really sound like an Ahold. I try to compare my experience selling an independent movie to the experience of a soldier pinned down by an Iraqi sniper. But that aspect of just picking yourself back up, there's few things in life more personal to me

than that. Is that something that occurs to you when you're first reading the script? Or do you have to really turn it over? And then once you start making the movie, you see how you're personally bound to it. You don't sound like an A-hole, by the way. I think that's totally reasonable to, you know, connect their resilience. Yeah, it's just tough because these, you know, soldiers are,

and I've had the good fortune of meeting so many now, you know, it's it's extraordinary what they go through what we put our young men and women to it and that they do it and they they do it with such bravery and valor is is extraordinary uh so i just i i don't want in any way you know try to compare anything in my life to that level of bravery and valor but the i do have the resilience uh maybe not against physical violence but um I think that my main quality that I bring to the film business is resilience, is that I don't always get it right first. In fact, you know, I'm sort of notorious for maybe not getting it right,

but I stick with it. I don't quit and I keep at it and I keep editing whatever it takes until I get it right. Let me ask you about that. So obviously there have been stories written in the past about some of your methods and sometimes there's some unplanned elements on set, unpredictable elements. This movie is very contained and very specific. It's really like a tight knot.

Did you also have a little bit of unsettled planning before you started this one as well? It seems like it would be hard to pull that off in this case. Now, on the wall I had to, because of the budget constraints and because the kind of movie it was, I had to sort of break the script apart before I started shooting, which I did. you know, in the weeks before we started shooting. So, you know, that wreaks havoc because people like everything to be set in stone. But I got it set back in stone before the first day of shooting. And then I don't want to spoil the movie for anyone,

but I went and reshot the ending six months after I shot the movie and changed the ending radically. And it was one of those situations where it was such a radical idea. But once I had it, I was like, oh my God, this is obviously how the film needs to end. And I think that's what, you know, sometimes can, you know, infuriate the people I work with is once I hear a better idea, it has to be in the movie. You know, in the case of the wall, I had done a friends and family screening, and we were pretty close to locking picture. And a friend John Freeman Gill, who actually has a novel out right now called The Gargoyal Hunters that's like getting rave, rave reviews.

But he's also just a good friend. and he was at the, he's obviously creative and smart and was at the screening. And he said to me, you know, I think you should change the ending and do, and I don't want to say what we did. And I was like, oh my God, that, that is a great idea. And I just mentioned it to my producer, Dave Bardist. He was like, don't talk to John anymore. He's like, we're not rocking the boat like that. I mean, that's a constant refrain of my career has been, don't rock the boat.

Like, we're in good shape. I said, I know, we're in good shape. This will make the movie great. This is exactly what the movie needs. So the funny thing is we did a screening of the movie two weeks ago. And we screened it for about 500 military members of the military. And the writer was up there with me. And somebody asked the question.

I said that ending was extraordinary. How did you come up with it? And I was like, he and I hadn't even talked about it. Like, you know, things were happening so fast. I wasn't that long ago I shot the new ending and just put it on the movie. Yeah. And what did he say? So it was fun to see him, you know, he just fessed up.

He was like, it was news to him too. I mean, he was, you know, that's kind of how I work that, you know, Swingers, actually, the film was set in stone, everything except the ending. Something about the ending wasn't right. And in that case, about two weeks before we started shooting the movie, I was determined to fix it. John Favre and I came up with a new way to end the film, which is how Swingers ends. So in that case, we did it before we started shooting. But I've obviously had experiences where I've made way more changes than just, you know, one day of shooting at the end of it.

You know, I had on Live, Die Repeat, we were trying to figure out the script. If you do time travel, here's the thing about doing time travel is that any filmmaker or novelist who's ever done, you know, a fictional piece about time travel will confirm that humans will never travel through time, right? The paradoxes are so great. I mean, they derail basically any attempt to try to tell a coherent story because it just doesn't make sense. So, you know, once you've done a time travel movie, you're like, okay, humans are never going to travel through time. So that film, we were having script problems in about a month before we started shooting, and Emily Blunt made a suggestion about, you know, maybe we could solve it this way. And it was so much pressure. Everyone's so tense because we started shooting in a month. And the producers are coming down in you and the studio is coming down in you.

And I snapped at her. And I was like, that's not going to work. And Emily was like, easy. I've never made a film like this before. And I fired right back. Well, I've never made a film like this before either. And my producer was like sort of flabbergasted because, you know, it's like a $150 million movie.

He's like the directors just admitted he doesn't know what he's doing. And Tom Cruise, who was amazing, said, that's why I'm so excited to make this movie with you. Because you don't know how to make it yet. And I'm excited to watch you figure out how to make this movie. And I'm excited to see you problem solved and to see what solutions you come up with. And I'm confident they're going to be original. But I love that right now you don't have the answers.

I'm not sure I would have figured out, lived I repeat, if Tom hadn't sort of given me that confidence. And that is really how I approach movies. you're right. The wall isn't like anything I've ever done before, but I had to figure it out. And like, I didn't get the ending right until five months after we finished shooting the movie. But here's the thing. I have resilience. I have persistence. I went back and changed it and made it work. I literally have a question written down here about the ending because I don't want to oversell it, but the ending is quite good. It's like one of the best movie endings I've seen in a long time.

I probably have now oversold it. But is that an important? important thing to you on every movie that, because you do have a lot of sort of like whiz bang, hard snap, exciting endings where the second you go to credits, you get a little bit of a chill. I just watched live die repeat last night. It has a very similar feeling. Do you obsess over those things before you start the movie, or is it common that it will find itself throughout? Like, is that, well, has that happened on every experience, or are you often said? Well, like, live, I repeat, that wasn't the ending. at all. I mean, now when we really were having trouble for you, I had to end the movie. And in fact,

that's a, that's a manufactured ending. I live, I repeat. What do you mean by that? That's, if you remember, it ends with Tom Cruise laughing. He's laughing at me. Like, I'm, I'm talking to him. Emily Blunt's not even there. And we were struggling with how to end the movie. And we just were playing around and we're like, and we just grab that. And we, mocked. I was like, just used it as something to mock it up and be like, what if he laughed and she said that? And then we went from that being like, it actually, that actually works pretty well. And then we thought, well, let's, if we're going to do that, let's shoot it for real. So we went back and had had Emily Blunt prompt Tom and had him actually performed to Emily.

And we ended up using the original one where he was just laughing at me. There was something honest about that that, that, you know, we just couldn't get back to. A little bit of Verity. that's a great metaphor for maybe the whole process of making the movie. It is a pretty good metaphor for my process, where there's things I want to find. There's other filmmakers like Hitchcock who, you know, they'll have the whole film mapped out before they start.

They know every shot, every moment, every, like, I want to find things. I want to find moments. Like that's my favorite thing when you find a moment. And find a moment that can never be replicated. Like literally, I mean, Tom Cruise is, you know, it's a brilliant actor, giant movie star. Whatever was happening in that moment with me

couldn't be replicated. So with the wall, when you decide to remake the ending there, do you have to go back and ask for more money? What is that experience like for you as a filmmaker when you want to change something and you know that there's a machine that you have to respond to? I have to say, I've never made a film for Amazon before. and I went to Ted Hope and Bob Bernie, who run the film division, and said, I want to change the ending.

I know this is really bold and outrageous. I recognize that this is not how a studio would think of ending a film. So I'll pay for it. I want to go shoot it. But I just recognize that this is going to be so far outside your comfort zone. I'm going to pay for it. And let me shoot it and put it on the movie. and then we can talk about it.

But let me, I have to go do this. And Ted and Bob said, that is a way cooler ending. They said it may not be as commercial as the original ending, but we think it's a better movie. And we want you to make the better movie, even if it doesn't make as much money. So we'll pay for that. Is that considerably different from a different studio experience?

There's no studio in the world that would have, have said that to me. What else was different about working with Amazon on this? You know, the thing about the team that was put together at Amazon is they're filmmakers. Like Bob and Ted. I mean, they made movies before they went over to Amazon. Like they actually made the movies. And so the people they've put in place really get the process of making movies. They're not executives. And so, you know, you know, for a giant corporation, it was a really friendly place to work. The sort of joke of it all was, you know, when you make an independent movie, you need to get some favors.

And it's a little harder to ask for favors when the largest corporation in the world is funding your independent movie. And you're like, people are like, I got to do this for free. Why? Yeah. It's like, it's an independent movie. It's like, but Amazon's paying for it. I mean, when I, we had sort of a kickoff meeting at Amazon to talk about, you know, before they sent us off to go make the movie a few weeks before we started shooting. And I was in a conference room with about 50 people from Amazon.

I mean, just the legal department of Amazon, they had 10 people in the room. And then I finished the meeting that was in their offices in Santa Monica. And I went to our production office, which was in the valley. And I got to our production office and there's like seven of us there making the movie. So there's like 50 people. people supervising seven. And that's kind of, was the experience. But obviously, it's hard to talk about it before the film comes out about the ending.

But honestly, no, the fact that you could say the studio, I want to change the ending to this. And they say it's, the movie might not make as much money, but it's a better ending. And we're going to support you. That's novel. It's extraordinary. Like, I think it's a reason why they're Amazon's films are, you know, for a startup film studio. And for me, the whole thing of returning to independent films, like, I never really left it. Yeah, born identity was made for Universal, which is my first studio film. But, you know, people look at

the style of that movie and they see all that shaky handheld camera work, you know, that sort of started to define the franchise. Like, that camera work is shaky and handheld because Matt Damon and I were stealing stuff on the weekends because the studio, you know, was really kind of trying to corral us and tell us all the things we couldn't do. And I'd come from making independent movies where I'm like, you sort of do it first and ask for permission later or ask for forgiveness later. Yeah, it was literally running gun. So, I mean, like so much of the stuff where, and it was,

and I'm used to running and gunning and stealing stuff. I mean, I, swingers, we, you know, there's seen in a golf course, we had to sneak onto the golf course to shoot. And with the sort of manager of the golf course sort of skeptics, sort of skeptically looking at me and one of my producers, Avram Ludwig, with our giant mountaineering backpacks because we had all our camera equipment in it, having to golf to a whole far away from where the clubhouse was, and then we would set up and shoot. Like, I'm used to stealing stuff.

And, you know, when I got to Born Identity and suddenly I have big studio and they put this line producer on this guy, Pat Crawley, and it's my first time having like a line producer like that. And all Pat would do it all day long is tell me all the things we couldn't afford to do. I'd be like, really glad we didn't have you on swingers. I'm glad we couldn't afford you. We didn't have any, we couldn't afford the person to tell us what we couldn't do. So we just did everything. And so I wasn't going to be stopped. So, you know, there's a lot of born identity that's just Matt and I stealing stuff and shooting stuff, you know, stuff the studios told me they're going to fire me if I shoot and we just go and steal and shoot. But the end result is the camera

kind of handheld because that's what it took to do it. I'm operating the camera and I'm doing the light. I'm doing everything. That's always sort of stayed with me. Mr. Mrs. Smith, there's a scene where a robot drops a bomb into the basement. That's something I wanted to shoot. I shot that in post-production. I rebuilt a piece of the basement of my mom's barn in Westchester.

I got the people from I Robot to bring one of their war robots down for free. And I shot it with that same friend Avram, the one who went on the golf course on swingers. You know, originally it was a hand that threw the grenade down, and we shot a whole scene with a robot and put it in Mr. Mrs. Smith. And I just paid for it and did it myself. And the whole opening of Live DiRate Pete or Edge of Tomorrow's got where Tom Cruise is doing those news interviews, that's me filming Tom in the editing room. We were just mocking that up to see what would the opening look like if I did that. And that's actually what's in the movie.

Has there been a moment where you've done that and it has been not helpful or it has hurt something? because obviously the ingenuity and the creativity and the willingness to kind of blow it up, seems like it's mostly helpful. It improves the movies that you're working on. Have you made a choice where you've been like, let's blow this up and you haven't felt good about it? No, but I've gotten very lucky that no one's gotten hurt and no one's gotten arrested. Even on the wall, as independent as it is when we're editing in New York City, there's a sequence where I thought it'd be good if he grabbed a piece from one radio and it brought it to the

radio and I want to mock that up. And I asked all the stuff was out here in L.A. And I asked them to ship everything to New York to the editing room. And it was like February in New York. And suddenly it was a sunny day. And I was like, let's run out to the playground. And I dressed up my assistant editor in Aaron Telle Johnson's work stuff. And literally went into the playground. It was a warm day in February. It was a weird winter in New York. so the playground was actually pretty packed. They were like, kids get out of the way. And I shot in the sand of the playground.

And, you know, it's illegal to be in a playground in New York without a kid. And one of the producers on the film is English. And I'm like, oh, she's applying for a green card. I'm like, she gets arrested. I'm like, I'm really pushing it here. Like, we could all get like, you know, get some kind of sex crime. I mean, we're in the playground. with military stuff and a movie camera.

But, and it's, it's in the movie and it came out great. And it's, so I think, and I'm not doing it on purpose. I mean, I really,

it's in the movie, and the movie's better for it, you know, but I'm sure I'm getting some kind of thrill from breaking the law. That's what I was going to ask you, is do you get a creative jolt or like some sort of emotional jolt

just from trying this stuff? I think it ends up in the tension of the photography. I mean, I think part of the tension of born identity and scenes like Gard-Norred where it's totally stolen when Jason Bourne goes in there

is the fact that we're genuinely worried we're going to get caught. And because we are. The people are, both people who recognize Matt Damon are going to screw up the shot or converging on us and the police are converging us

because we're in there with a movie camera. So I do think in the case of the wall, like how that photography worked out, has a little more tension that it wouldn't have, say, if I had permission and could be there all day, as opposed to I'm nervously looking around. There's no cops. Let's just do this. Get this done and get out of here. And that, you know, obviously the wall, the whole movie has a, is a very tense movie. So I think me being in some personal jeopardy myself while I'm shooting shows up on screen a little bit. Yeah, I can sense that. Are you excited now to be doing something bigger again, or do you not

think of things that way? There's rumors about a lot of different kind of IP franchises you might be doing. Well, even when I do bigger, I'm really, I'm always bringing the small stuff to it. I mean, I like to think about myself as making sort of independent films within the studio system. So even when I'm looking at the bigger projects, they're a little bit of, they're a little bit, you know, people bring me material where they're like, we want you to sort of shake it up or change it, which is what independent films do so well. So I'm not often presented with something where they're like, we want this to be like down the middle. And in fact, a lot of times, you know, I'll propose an idea for a film or, you know, within a movie, I'll be like, what if we do

it this way? And someone will say, that doesn't seem Doug Lyman enough. Well, I thought of it's my eye how can you say it's not me and they're like no because we think of you you know really like shaking it up and doing something really unexpected that seems just too ordinary so even i am looking at you know bigger things but they are they still have the same heart that the wall has you know and it's putting that camera on my shoulder and just going out and shooting it's just never that far from me no matter what i'm doing well let's wrap up with this one is there a dream movie that you've been wanting to make that you have not been able to make? Yeah, I have a project about ordinary people going into space that I've been working on

basically my entire adult filmmaking career in different forms. I'm really interested in when the future starts. Like occasionally you have it, you get into Tesla and you put it on autonomous drive and you're like, oh my God, I'm in the Jetsons. Like, the future's here. So we have little tastes of, like, the future being here, but nothing would really do that as us going into space. And especially because I'm so interested in adventures that are available now.

I mean, it's part of what's so compelling for me about the wall is that it, like, it's this extraordinary adventure story. But, you know, you're not going to Middle Earth. You're not in a galaxy far, far away. Like, it's happening every day in the Middle East. Like, it's, there's, you know, it's probably why, you know, obviously when you look at these ads from the military, why, you know, a lot of what they're promising is, you know,

you can have this extraordinary adventure that will test your heroism and your bravery and your, in your metal and your, you know, resilient. you know, American soldiers face that every day. I mean, it's, as we sit here in this comfortable studio speaking, there's an American soldier somewhere fighting for his or her life, somewhere on this planet, you know. So it's that I'm really interested in extraordinary adventures that are,

that any of us could go on. You don't have to be born, you know, in another century or in another planet. That is definitely what the wall is. Doug, thank you very much for being here today. I appreciate it. Thank you.