Doug Liman on Fair Game, Sidestepping Politics and How to Investigate the CIA

It's been a crazy seven months for director Doug Liman, who went from scrambling to finish his new film Fair Game ahead of its Cannes premiere to the whirlwind of press ahead of this month's opening in the States. In between he's taken lumps from the right, been the subject of Oscar speculation, and observed just how difficult it is to tell a story about the Central Intelligence Agency -- specifically, the true story of how agency operative Valerie Plame (played here by Naomi Watts), her husband Joseph Wilson (Sean Penn), and their marriage withstood her infamously blown cover in 2003.

Liman spoke with Movieline recently about the CIA learning curve, his family's history of exposing secret narratives, and what's in a name -- especially when it's connected to an agency official.

I was just looking at the press notes and noticed there are character's surnames redacted from the cast listing. What's that all about?

It's pulled from the credits.

For security risks or... what? Because of the CIA?

Yeah. The interesting thing is that "Jack" is actually "Mike." They made me change the first names, too. I'm like, "You have to be kidding me." They said, "Sorry, it can't be Mike." I said, "It has to be Mike. I cast Mike." This was our insurance company. As a filmmaker you get used to calling a character a certain name. You can't just change his name! Like I can't just change my name. It was an epic fight where I was like, "I'm not changing his name, I'm not changing his name." And lo and behold, I changed his name and got used to it.

When you're dealing with subject matter like this, how often do these considerations come into play? Say, during development, pre-production, post-production? Press?

Well, it comes into play from the first second you're doing it because you're investigating the CIA. That place pretty closely guards its secrets.

You're kidding.

I had an interview with a reporter from the New York Times who covers the CIA, and we were comparing notes. It turned out to be one of those interviews where I asked her more questions than she asked me. We were just bonding over how hard it is to extract information from the CIA.

Even quotidian stuff? What's an example?

Just from the first meeting with Valerie, I said, "I need some specific facts about what you were doing." And she was like, "I can't tell you. I can't tell you anything." I was that character in that scene in the film where she says, "I can't tell you anything." I asked, "Well, did you carry a gun?" "I literally can't tell you anything." So it's like, "All right. Who can tell me?" And that started a process of probably about a dozen interviews with other people in the CIA, and then cross-referencing those interviews with each other -- extracting information. Nobody thought they were giving away anything; they didn't know that somebody else had given us another piece and that we were putting it together and holding ourselves to a standard of trying to find two sources for every piece of information.

That's interesting. I mean, it is just a movie in the end -- based on "true events," as the marketing tells us, but a movie nonetheless. At what point do you just take that license of letting the movie be a movie?

I let the politics go. Some of my producers who are more liberal than I am said, "Let's be more political." I said, "I'm not going to be more political. I'm interested in these characters, and I'm interested in the politics as we know them to be facts. I'm not going to go after people just because I don't like them -- or because somewhere in my gut I feel they're guilty even though I don't actually have any facts to back it up." My goal was to create the historical record of this time, and I approached it with that level of serious.

My father ran the investigation into Iran-Contra, and in a way, it was a similar process: He had to unravel what Oliver North had done with the enterprise. It was secret CIA -- run out of the NSA -- and he had to tell that to the American people through televised hearings. People don't realize that those kinds of hearings... I mean, my father already knows the story. He's not finding it out in the room. He's bringing those people back and putting TV cameras on them and asking the questions that he already knows the answers to -- to try to create a compelling narrative of Iran-Contra for the people to watch on TV every night.

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