Director Doug Liman talks to us about reuniting with Matt Damon for his latest comedy thriller, The Instigators, his earlier work on Go and The Bourne Identity, and his uniquely ‘unstructured’ approach to filmmaking.
This article first appeared in Film Stories issue #51.
The last time Matt Damon and Doug Liman worked together, the result was 2002’s The Bourne Identity – a spy thriller that not only launched a franchise with four sequels, but also arguably changed action cinema for years afterwards. Certainly, director Martin Campbell and his collaborators took note of Bourne’s scrappy realism before making 2006’s Casino Royale.
Liman and Damon’s latest collaboration is The Instigators, a crime caper that sees Damon’s depressed ex-soldier Rory partner up with ex-con Cobby and attempt to rob the safe of a corrupt Boston mayor (Ron Perlman). The heist doesn’t go entirely to plan, forcing Rory and Cobby to go on the run – with Rory’s straight-talking psychiatrist (Hong Chau) swept up in the whole debacle.
From a sharp script (credited to Chuck MacLean and Affleck), Liman directs with the same handheld urgency he brought to his breakthrough indie films, Swingers (1996) and Go (1999), and also finds space for a couple of kinetic car chases that recall his work on The Bourne Identity.
Fortunately for all involved, The Instigators sounds as though it was relatively free from the kind of conflict between director and studio that emerged during the making of Liman’s earlier films. Liman famously clashed with executives at Universal during the making of Bourne; his 2014 sci-fi thriller Edge Of Tomorrow (aka Live Die Repeat) overran its schedule almost immediately, with an action scene intended to be shot in two weeks instead taking three months.
Talking to Film Stories on a video call from his base in New York, Doug Liman is quite open about the challenges of making those earlier films, and how his loose, improvisational approach to filmmaking can sometimes cause tension as well as flashes of magic.
As Liman says himself: “I’m very comfortable in an unstructured environment…”
Congratulations on The Instigators. Did having such a sharp script as a basis help you as a director?
Well, it helped having such an extraordinary cast. This was my re-teaming with Matt [Damon] – our first time since The Bourne Identity, and the pressure is high, because the last time we worked together spawned a billion-dollar franchise.
We had a very simple mantra, a North Star for The Instigators. There’s a million choices when you make a movie, so I’m gonna use a very simple criteria: I’m going to make the most fun choice every step on the way.
We had a really good template for that – a really good structure for a movie, because I love action comedies, I grew up watching action comedies. Instigators gave me the opportunity to do my own version of an action comedy where you get two of the worst thieves imaginable; they botch a robbery and then end up on the run with the psychiatrist of one of them.
You know, it’s such a simple, strong premise. People talk about Instigators like it’s a Boston movie, but it’s not a Boston movie. It’s a Quincy movie, which is a suburb of Boston. It’s about outsiders who go into the city to commit a heist and it goes horribly awry.
The other thing is, I don’t live in Hollywood, I live in New York. And part of that is because it makes me feel closer to events going on in the real world. Somehow when I’m in Hollywood, I feel isolated from that. I let that percolate into my movies in different ways. So in this case, every time you turn on the news, all you want to do is turn it off immediately.
I wanted to make a good, old-fashioned yarn. Something that was fun, and funny and entertaining, and smart and inviting and, because it’s for Apple – it will be in theatres, but it will be mostly seen streaming – something that you would want to turn on your TV to see.
So how did the script come about? [Screenwriter] Chuck MacLean is from Quincy, but then you’ve got Casey Affleck, who’s also credited as co-writer.
Matt brought me an earlier draft of the script and said he was planning on doing the movie with Casey and would I take a look. Like, ‘Fuck, yeah, I’ll read that. An opportunity to work with you and Casey?’
I was in once I saw them on the run with his psychiatrist. And I thought that was both exciting and terrifying. Terrifying in that I was gonna have to try to make that believable. Because I like high concept movies, but I always need to find a way for the characters to act honestly. Like, no matter how outrageous Edge Of Tomorrow is, Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt’s characters are still acting honestly to what one would do in those situations.
Matt didn’t just bring me a script, he brought me a family. Because Matt and Ben [Affleck] were going to be producing it. Casey’s Ben’s brother, he was going to star in it with Matt, Matt and I go back to Bourne. Everybody was working on the script: Ben was doing passes, Matt was doing passes, Casey did the most of all of us. And Chuck, obviously. In a way, it felt like going back to my roots.
When Matt and I were sitting around figuring out The Bourne Identity, I was like, ‘I want to break the mould and do something different’. I was an unproven director, and he was an unproven actor, and nobody was paying any attention to us. And we would just sit around, figuring out how to do original things on Bourne Identity and push each other.
There were things I promised Matt I was going to try to do that would be original on Bourne Identity, and then certain points I’d be like, ‘I can’t figure it out, I’m gonna go conventional.’
And Matt would be like, ‘You promised me we were going to not do the conventional.’ I’d be like: ‘Fuck, I’ll get back in there and figure it out.’
Instigators was a chance to get right back in there with Matt. We spent a lot of time sitting in the conference room of my office, because Matt and I both live in New York, with the whiteboard. With one of the producers, Alison Winter, figuring out the movie, like the old days. The difference being, the last time we were doing this, I was an unproven director, and he was an untested actor.
In this case, I have a track record, Matt has a track record. So the studio attitude towards us was way more supportive than it was on Bourne Identity. But Matt and I push each other. We push each other every step of the way in developing the script, we push each other on the set. We push each other in the editing of the movie.
Ron Perlman, who plays the mayor [see boxout overleaf] is great in this. He’s a sort of Trumpian figure, isn’t he?
He’s actually based on the mayor of Providence when I was at Brown University, named Buddy Cianci. There have been plays made about Buddy, and I think they even made a movie about him. But he was a really colourful and corrupt mayor of Providence. Like, corrupt, but you loved him, and people loved him – everyone knew he was corrupt, and they loved him.
Part of my filmmaking process is, I’m sort of a collector of characters as I travel. Like Julia Stiles’s character in The Bourne Identity is based on a woman I met when I was living in Paris. And Chris Cooper’s playing a character based on Oliver North, who was my dad’s nemesis on the Iran-Contra hearings [Doug’s father, Arthur L Liman, was the chief counsel for the Senate’s investigation of the Iran-Contra Affair, a famous scandal that hit Ronald Reagan’s administration and dominated US political life in 1986 and 1987].
So I pay attention. When there’s a colourful character out there, I put it in the bank and wait for a moment where I might put it up on screen. I’ve been to Ukraine three times now and there’s a number of characters that I’ve met there who one day will end up on screen in a totally unrelated movie because they made an impression on me.
Buddy Cianci made a huge impression on me when I was at Brown University, and I was like, ‘one day I want to put a character like that on screen’ and Instigators gave me the opportunity to do that. And Ron Perlman hit it out of the park.
It feels like in your films, certainly this one and things like American Made, that you’re fascinated by outlaw characters. I wonder if that’s because you feel like you’re a bit of a rebel yourself as a filmmaker?
I do feel like a rebel, which I wrestle with. Like, at a certain point, are you too old to be a rebel? Are you too much part of the establishment? That was very much in the front of my mind making Instigators, because the last time Matt and I sat around a table with a whiteboard, figuring out a movie and trying to figure out how to do something original and unexpected, that was Bourne Identity. And we were viewed as rebels by the studio and not in a positive way. And here we are 20 years later, and suddenly Matt is the studio, Matt and Ben are the studio, and we’re like, ‘okay, we’re kind of rebels, but we’re also the adults in the room’. It was very surreal, because we’re like, ‘what happened?’ How did we become the people in charge? Our MO is to take on the man, and we kind of are the man now.
There’s some great car chases in this. How did filming those contrast with the ones that you did with Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity?
It definitely was intimidating starting Instigators and collaborating with Matt again, knowing that the bar was going to be very high. [The Bourne franchise] was driven by the car chases. They’re what put Bourne on the map in some ways, and I had this idea that I wanted to change how action was done. And I wanted Bourne to be a messy Bond, and obviously, I succeeded.
Doing Instigators, I was, like, ‘I want to get even messier.’ Because, whereas Jason Bourne is known for his competence, we’re following with Casey and Matt, two of the most incompetent robbers on the run from the cops. Like the Bad News Bears of thieves. And my goal was to do a car chase where what was happening inside the car – because it’s Matt and Casey, and Matt’s therapist, played by Hong Chau – who’s trying to conduct a therapy session. Because Matt’s character has some desire to hurt himself, which is not necessarily a quality you want in the driver when you’re in a high-speed car chase being chased by the police.
My goal was to make the car chases as dynamic as I could possibly afford to make it, but still have what was happening inside the car be even more compelling. To set a very high bar with the chase itself, and then see if I can top it with a really fun scene that’s happening inside the car during the chase.
I was really lucky, given how phenomenal the car chases were. I had Simon Crane who did Edge Of Tomorrow with me and is one of the top stunt people. So given how extraordinary the car chase is, and given how much audiences love car chases, can I make what is being spoken about inside the car even more compelling?
I was lucky to have Matt, Casey and Hong in the car. That’s how you know you’re in the presence of movie stars when you’d rather watch them talking inside the car than watch what’s happening outside with helicopters and hundreds of police cars chasing them.
What’s your approach to filmmaking now? Do you plan your shots a lot in advance? Or do you shoot very guerrilla-style?
I always have a plan, but it pretty much goes out the window the moment we start shooting. I’m very open to chasing a better idea whenever it happens.
So there is a looseness to my filmmaking. Because again, I’m very interested in characters. And until you get those actors on the set, I don’t want to handcuff them. And it doesn’t really matter when you rehearse the day before, because they had a good night’s rest the night before or they had a bad night’s rest. They’re gonna bring something to the set that, if you have an open mind to look for it, you might get something even more special than what you intended.
So I don’t like giving actors marks that they have to stand on. Probably one of the hardest jobs on my set is to be the assistant camera person, the focus puller. But I’m very comfortable in an unstructured environment. So I’m willing to let the actors bring to their character whatever’s happening.
To me, it’s a collaboration with my actors. It’s not like I have it set in stone exactly how I want the performance to go, I have an idea of how I want it to go. But then I want to collaborate with my actors and create something together that’s unique to that actor. Someone other than Casey delivering those lines, the scene would be different. The blocking would be different. I’m gonna embrace what makes Casey Casey and what makes Matt Matt, and what makes Matt Matt on that particular day.
On Bourne Identity, there was a moment early on where I was operating the camera, and it’s a close-up of Matt, and he gave me this look. We were in between takes, but the camera was still rolling. And I was directing him, but looking through the lens just talking to him. And Matt gave me this look, that was a reaction to me.
I was like: ‘Oh, my God, that’s it. That’s the character right there. What you just did.’
And he was like: ‘I don’t know what I just did. I was just listening to you’.
And I was like: ‘We have to find that again. That thing. Jason Bourne is going to have that look when he snaps and gets violent.’
We found that together on the set and, because I’ve had experiences like that, I look for them. I look for that lightning in the bottle. Maybe it’ll happen once, and once only on set, and as long as the camera’s rolling when that one time happens, that’s what I’m chasing with my movies.
You said recently [in a Total Film interview] that you rewatched Edge Of Tomorrow with Tom Cruise. And while you were watching, you said that you’re not that filmmaker any more. I wondered what you meant by that?
Well, that was ten years ago – I’m just not the same person. I don’t know if this is unique to me or whether other people, when they look back on where they were ten years ago, they’re like, ‘That person feels a little bit like a stranger.’ Because I’ve evolved as a person and I care about different things now than I cared about [then]. Not just as a filmmaker, but just as a human being. And so when I look at a film I made a long time ago, it’s almost like I’m watching someone else’s movie.
But do you think your style has changed or your approach has changed?
There are seminal movies in my life. Obviously, Swingers launched me. Go was seminal because, after making a hit indie movie, the conventional wisdom and the pressure put on me was to go make a studio film – and since Swingers was a comedy, go make studio comedy. I was being offered studio comedies. Instead, I chose to make Go, which was a very risky move, to make another independent movie after you’ve had a hit indie movie. Everybody was telling me that’s a mistake, don’t do that. There were times where Go shut down because it ran out of money and people were like, ‘we told you so – that’s why you should have taken the studio film. And now you’re gonna be back to square one.’
Go is seminal because I’m very proud of myself for making that unconventional choice. The Bourne Identity was obviously another seminal moment in my life in terms of a lot of studio pressure to make something that looked conventional, and I didn’t back down, I stuck to my guns, and I’m really proud of that filmmaker. That with all that pressure on me to just conform, I didn’t. But again, that almost feels like another human being that I’m talking about.
And then Live Die Repeat, or Edge Of Tomorrow, was a seminal moment for me… It was a really tricky script. When you’ve got time travel, it’s very hard to figure out how to make a story work. It’s hard to have stakes when the whole thing can just repeat.
There was a script meeting in my office and Emily Blunt proposed an idea that didn’t work. I guess I snapped a little bit at her because we’re about to start shooting in a couple of weeks. We have script issues that aren’t worked out yet and I’m under a lot of pressure.
Emily was like: ‘Whoa, go easy. I’ve never made a movie like this before’.
I fired back: ‘Well, I’ve never made a movie like this before.’
My producer, Erwin Stoff, who’s in the meeting, said: ‘Oh my God, you can never say that out loud again. The studio’s giving us a ton of money to make this movie. You cannot say out loud that you don’t know how to make this movie.’
Tom Cruise was in the meeting, and he goes: ‘No. I’m excited that Doug doesn’t know how to make this movie yet. And I want to go on the journey as he figures out how to make this movie.’
That was a defining moment for me. Whereas on Bourne Identity, Stacey Snider, who was running Universal, would yell at me that Bourne was not my $50 million film school. Because I was obviously trying to figure out how to make Bourne Identity as I was making it. She was making me feel self-conscious about that. I always felt self-conscious after the fact that like, why didn’t I just have all the answers on day one?
Tom Cruise gave me the space and the confidence to say when I didn’t know something, and I didn’t have the answer, that it’s okay – you’ll watch me figure it out. People don’t necessarily want that quality in their director, they may want their directors to either have all the answers or lie and say they have all the answers. After Live Die Repeat, I was liberated to be able to be honest about when I didn’t have the answers, and that it was okay and there was nothing wrong with me for not having the answers. If people give me the space then I’ll figure something out that’s smart and clever.
Tom knew that before I did. He had more confidence in me making Live Die Repeat than I had in me making Live Die Repeat.
Which is obviously why he’s the biggest movie star in the world. He knows how to pick movies and the right people, even when the people themselves don’t know they’re the right people.
And then Instigators is a seminal movie for me, because after all of those experiences, re-teaming with Matt and looking at him and seeing how he’s evolved and really become just the most extraordinary human being. Like, it’s too limiting to say what an extraordinary actor and movie star he’s become. Because it’s more than that. It’s his whole approach to filmmaking and to life.
I could compare where we were on Bourne Identity and I felt pretty good about us during Bourne Identity. I thought that was Matt at his best, but no, he had 20 years of growth still in him. And looking at Matt and realising how much he grew as a filmmaker made me realise that I’ve probably also grown as a filmmaker. I don’t know if it’s true, and Matt and I have never talked about this.
I’d kind of rather not know, because maybe he’ll be like: ‘No, you’re still the same.’ But I’d like to believe that I have also grown!
The Instigators is streaming on Apple TV+ now.
