After the footage was screened, Doug Liman took some questions from the audience. Check out what he had to say below.
You’ve made such an eclectic mix of films so far, what was it about this story that you wanted to get your teeth into?
Doug Liman: It’s so rare these days to find a film that both fulfills a big studio appetite and at the same time is wholly original. You tend to see a lot of either very big movies that you feel like you’ve seen before – usually because you have- or you see eclectic and original movies, but they’re much smaller. Occasionally, a project comes along that has the scope of Edge of Tomorrow but at the same time is 100 percent original.
I live in New York, I don’t live in Hollywood. I hang out with a more sort of eclectic, artsy crowd. So if I talk about the film I’m really going to push Emily Blunt a little bit more than Tom Cruise, just because they’re more of a snooty crowd. They’re very judgmental.
SPOILER ALERT
In fact, I was at a party over Christmas in Brooklyn and this woman was like “Oh Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt in a Hollywood movie: He’s older than her, I bet they live happily ever after at the end of the film.” And I was like “Actually, at the end of my film, she doesn’t know who he is.” And I left this woman with her jaw dropped, because people expect such a formulaic thing from Hollywood.
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When I got my first studio film, which was The Bourne Identity, I was terrified of selling out and every step along the way I was being as contrary as I possibly could and changing things for no reason other than people had done it a certain way. I went into the film thinking “It’s just not going to be like other movies,” but I didn’t necessarily know what it was going to be, so there were stories of turmoil on the set as a result. But the end result of saying “I’m not going to make a cookie-cutter movie” and just fighting the system every step of the way resulted in a film that I was extremely proud of and actually spawned a whole franchise.
It put me in this unique place where people expect me to break the mold a little bit, so occasionally a project like Edge of Tomorrow comes along where people want me to change it up. There was no pressure from Warner Bros. to make this look like a standard studio film, they were really like “We want to do something fresh.” Occasionally I’d pitch an idea and they’d be like “I don’t know… It’s not Doug Liman enough.”
I didn’t plan it, but I’m in a place where the people around me push me to shake it up and make something you haven’t seen before.
The tone of [the film] must have been very important to get right.
DL: Of course. Everyone knows that Emily is a great comedic actress,and Tom is a brilliant comedic actor – and I mean truly brilliant. He’s really the gutsiest, most courageous actor I’ve ever worked with because he will try anything. Working with him, it’s not like working with someone like Brad Pitt, who has made a lot of movies, but many of them the mass audience haven’t seen. It’s unusual for Brad to make a big commercial movie like Mr. and Mrs. Smith, he chooses artsier things, whereas with Tom, the world has seen every single movie he’s ever done. Here, he is a total coward. The amount of times he squeals in this movie, he’s an amazing squealer! Other movie stars – in my experience – would have been more hesitant about being that vulnerable.
We have something for everybody though. If you love Tom Cruise you see him giving a genius performance, and if you hate Tom Cruise he dies like 200 times in the movie.