At Tribeca: Alec Baldwin and Doug Liman Discuss Stealing Shots and the Problem With Studios

When he finally got to direct The Bourne Identity, Liman ran into some trouble with Universal.

It's no secret that Liman had some major clashes with Universal executives while making The Bourne Identity. Here's the story of just one! "It was a very, very tough shoot. For the first time I actually had a fancy studio line producer, and the first thing he did was tell me all the things we couldn't do," said Liman. "It would get really ugly on the set. I wanted to reshoot a scene we had done the day before. I said, 'Before we move on, I don't have this scene, I want to re-do it.' They were like, 'You can't re-do it.' I was like, 'Yeah, just give me an hour at the beginning of the morning, and we'll just do it.' [...] But it was just always about the no."

Liman decided to take matters into his own hands, and he re-shot the scene -- which happened to be when Clive Owen's character dies in the film -- without the approval of Universal. "There's 400 feet of film in the camera -- that's four minutes -- and the scene is a minute-and-a-half. I said, 'I'm going to shoot Matt Damon's side first, and instead of calling cut -- because if I call cut, they're going to take the camera away from me -- I'm going to call reset, and Clive will come back alive, and I'm going to quickly run around with the camera, point it at Clive and re-do the scene. With the last minute of film, I'm going to jump back, and you guys are going to do the beginning of the scene and the end of the scene.'"

"And that's the scene that's in the film -- it's like my most proud piece of dailies, because it's a four-minute piece of film that's the entire scene in the final film. It was all done in one take."

Said Baldwin after the story of deceit: "Stealing footage from studios! He's got to steal another take."

Sex scenes aren't fun for anyone.

Directing a sex scene is sometimes just as awkward as watching one. "I'm always envious of the actors because at least you have the other actor, whereas the director, you just feel like a pervert," said Liman. Though as Baldwin retorted, that isn't necessarily true. "Sometimes you don't have the other actor either."

Liman wasn't a big fan of the Groupon ticket deal for The Lincoln Lawyer in March.

Asked what he finds different about working on television (where he's had success as a producer on The O.C., and more recently Covert Affairs), Liman didn't hold back with his contempt of how things are marketed. "The thing about TV is it's a meritocracy. I love that aspect of it -- and I've had shows that have gone on the air and been canceled. I've seen the good and the bad of it. On a film, you can basically buy an opening weekend. In fact, this spring, one studio did a deal with Groupon and literally bought the opening weekend. Sold the tickets for a dollar and they paid the $9 themselves."

Don't expect to see Warner Bros. release a Doug Liman-directed drama anytime soon.

While talking about the success of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Liman took a moment to bemoan the lack of non-blockbusters released by studios here in 2011. "What they don't make are serious dramas. Almost every drama today is made by an independent company. I heard a story that Leonardo DiCaprio was pitching a film at Warner Bros. -- and, y'know, he's a big deal at Warner Bros. -- and they cut him off halfway through the pitch and said, 'Is this a drama? Because we don't make dramas anymore. You might as well just save your breath.'"

That story stirred up a memory for Baldwin: "When I was going to do the movie The Fugitive, they came to me years ago -- a million years ago, when I was younger. I'll never forget, this really wonderful executive. He was great, he was a great guy. This guy Bob Brassel. He was a lovely guy, a young guy. He was funny, because he was up front about how studio-esque he was. We were talking about the Gerard character, and the Richard Kimble character. He says, 'Well, I don't want the movie to just be, hide, seek, hide, seek. We gotta get the female character. We want him to have a love interest. We want him to be hide, fuck, seek. Hide, fuck, seek.' The director and I sat there and we were like, 'Wow, man.' That was Warner Bros."

[Top photo: Getty Images; middle photo: Universal]

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