We asked Doug Liman to pick one favorite shot from each of his most iconic movies, as well as one from any other film. The director of Swingers, The Bourne Identity, Edge of Tomorrow, The Instigators, and many others breaks down each shot for us and explains what makes each so special to him.
Swingers (1996)
“I shot almost all of Swingers just with a camera on my shoulder. And I have a short attention span, even on a film that's dialogue-driven, like Swingers. I was constantly moving the camera and trying to just keep it as visually interesting as I possibly could when it's just people talking.
And then there's one scene in Swingers where I pulled out a tripod and locked off the camera and didn't pan or tilt or do anything, and that's when Jon Favreau's on the phone trying to call the woman he met and he keeps dialing over and over again and getting her machine. And there was no other coverage, that was it. I just said, ‘I'm going to make the audience just sit there and squirm.’ And in a movie where otherwise the camera is just loose and moving, I'm just going to force you, I'm not going to give you any distractions, it's just locked off.
Here's the thing, when you're making an independent movie you don't have a chance to cover yourself. You have to commit to how you're going to tell a particular scene and you shoot at that one way and that's all you have in the editing room. So there was no plan B for the phone call scene where I also shot it handheld and shaky. Every scene got shot one way and one way only. I had decided pretty far in advance that that would be different than everything else in the movie.”
The Bourne Identity (2002)
“Matt Damon, going into the Gare du Nord when he is thinking of leaving Franka Potente, and he is looking up at the board of where the different trains are going. I would say the reason that shot stands out is because we didn't have permission to shoot that. I didn't have the support of the studio to shoot it. I didn't have permission from Paris to shoot it. Because I'd come from making a little independent film like Swingers, I was no stranger to just stealing shots.
And in that case, I told Matt, ‘We're going to go inside the train station and we're just going to steal this.’ We've got to get in and out of there. And the thing is, because Matt had done Good Will Hunting by then and he'd done The Talented Mr. Ripley, there were some people who might recognize him. And I had a camera, so it was like we had to be really fast, so there's a kind of shaky quality to that scene. And so when people think of The Bourne Identity and they think it sort of pioneered this shaky camera aesthetic. It's really the sequels that did more shaky camera, but the aesthetic was born, no pun intended, from necessity in that shot.”
Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005)
“Movies are not shot in chronological order. There's not necessarily always even an intelligence behind the order in which things are shot. In the case of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, we were shooting in a residential neighborhood and there were some rules about how many days in a particular quarter someone could rent their house for a film. It has nothing to do with what makes sense in terms of the best practice for the movie, it's just dealing with the rules of Pasadena, California.
But it meant that three weeks into the shoot, I was shooting something earlier than I might otherwise have shot, which was Brad Pitt racing up to the house. He's doing this sort of frog march up to the front door and I'm following up to the house, and I'm looking at it going, ‘I'm making a comedy.’ I wasn't sure the tone of the movie until that shot.
If you look at early press for Mr. & Mrs. Smith during production, they were calling it a thriller. And in that moment, and luckily that moment was week three, only because of these weird rules about Pasadena, it dawned on me that I was making a comedy. And from that point on, I was making a romantic comedy. And it affected all the decisions I made after that, and it was because of that one shot. And by the way, I pivoted and was making a romantic comedy, but Angie didn't pivot with me. She was still making a psychosexual thriller and we had a lot of friction on the set because I literally pivoted right in that moment. I'll never forget watching that on the monitor and going, ‘I know the movie.’”
Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
“This one you're never going to guess because it's the most boring shot in the whole movie, which is when Tom Cruise is in Brendan Gleeson's office at the beginning of the movie. It was a very expensive set we built and we brought Brendan Gleeson in for a couple of days of shooting. It really wasn't working very well, and I could sort of tell from Brendan Gleeson's attitude, he was like, ‘Oh, these dumb American movies that come to London. And it's like you do it for the paycheck and all they care about is action,’ and I can just tell it wasn't good enough.
We got into the editing of it's not working and we're like ‘We should reshoot it’, but we didn't have the money to reshoot it because the set was like a million-dollar set. And I had this crazy idea, I said, ‘What if I just reshoot’ Because I didn't even think we'd get Brendan Gleeson back because he had such an attitude about it. Because he's like a Shakespearean actor and he's like, ‘These commercial American movies.’ Because all these big American action movies go to London. And so I could tell they have a kind of attitude about the kind of movies we go make there.
I was like, ‘But I do have Tom Cruise. What if I reshoot just Tom's side of the scene and superimpose him over his old self?’ Because I don't have the set, but he's sitting down. Brendan was moving around but Tom was sitting, and I was like, I could just film him and put him over his old self and I can't change anything Brendan says. I could script all new lines for Tom that have to work with what Brendan does. And Tom came into the editing room and I filmed him with my iPhone, and we just figured out a scene that would work with existing performances we had of Brendan and we just cut the stuff from the iPhone in. Then I went back and shot Tom with a real film camera and superimposed him over his old self. The whole thing of, ‘I'm a coward and I don't go to the front line,’ wasn't there in the original version of the scene. And it's a fantastic scene.”
American Made (2017)
“Tom is flying an airplane. He's going to go to the back to open the door to throw out the drugs. And I'm flying in a helicopter, I'm not piloting the helicopter, but I'm filming from a helicopter that's going alongside the airplane and we're filming Tom and he's alone in the airplane. He gets up and leaves the front of the airplane to go to the back and I just was like, ‘This is the frigging craziest thing.’
I'm just like, ‘This is big. This is big and exciting.’ And I want to make movies that are exciting. Visually exciting, character-wise exciting, something you haven't seen before, and I'd never seen the pilot leave the cockpit and go to the back of the airplane, and now nobody's flying the airplane and it's like 100 feet above the ground.”
The Instigators (2024)
“I'd probably say the opening shot of the movie where Matt Damon's in therapy. You know you're in the presence of a movie star when you can just put the camera on him, he's just sitting there silently for 10 seconds and you're already leaning in. Given how kinetic my movies are, you'd probably think I would've picked a wild, crazy shot where I hung the camera off of something, and instead for pretty much everything I just described to you, they're all like the very stayed locked-off shots.”
IGN: I spoke to Denis Villeneuve recently, and all his films are huge-scale stuff but all the shots he picked were very human moments. And I think that's because what are these big action stories without grounding them in some sort of human emotion, right?
“Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. Okay, now I feel better about the shots I picked.”
Any other film…. Avatar (2009)
“The opening shot of Avatar, the first Avatar, seeing that in IMAX 3D. And I'm remembering it as the opening shot, maybe it's not the opening shot, but it was with all the pods and you're floating. And I was like, ‘I'd never seen anything like that.’”
IGN: Is that from the standpoint of your watching it, thinking, ‘How has James Cameron done this?’
“Just out of jealousy.”
The Instigators is released on Apple TV+ on Friday, August 9, 2024.
