Doug Liman

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Doug Liman

Doug Liman (born 1965) is an American film director and producer.

Liman began making short films while still in junior high school and studied at International Center of Photography in New York City. While attending Brown University, he helped to co-found the student-run cable television station and served as its first station manager. Liman attended the graduate program at University of Southern California, where he was tapped to helm his first project in 1993, the comedy thriller Getting In/Student Body.

Liman became attached to direct Swingers when its screenwriter Jon Favreau turned down offers from studios who wanted to cast established actors. The director agreed to cast Favreau and his friends (Vince Vaughn, Ron Livingston, and Patrick Van Horne) in this comedy about struggling actors amid the L.A. club milieu. The result was a $250,000 dialogue-propeled film filled with energy and charm that became a sleeper hit and critical success. In addition to establishing a cult following, it jump-started the careers of the featured actors.

Liman's rapid-paced next effort, Go (1999) tracked the events of one night through three different and surprising points of view as plot lines diverged and reconverged. Doing double duty as cinematographer, Liman chose a look for the film that stylistically captured both the John August script's vivid and energetic spirit and somewhat dark subject matter. Visually arresting scenes, including an Ecstasy-fueled hallucination set in a supermarket, a terrifying car chase on the neon-lit Las Vegas strip, and a hazy rave dance floor scene. The film received overwhelmingly positive reviews, but box office returns were lackluster in comparison.

Liman enjoyed his most potent commercial and creative success when he helmed the action thriller The Bourne Identity (2002), an adaptation of author Robert Ludlum's potboiler. Liman discarded all but the premise of Ludlum's book, about an assassin suffering from amnesia. The cerebral film that Liman delivered lacked sufficient action sequences to satisfy test groups of young males, so Universal Studios required him to shoot almost twenty minutes of replacement scenes. Building on his success, he served as an executive producer and directed the pilot episode of the successful Fox melodrama The O.C. (2003—).

Liman most recently directed Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), a comedic thriller about an increasingly distant married couple, both secretly assassins, who are hired to kill each other. The film, while commercially successful, is better known for the off-screen romance between stars Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, who developed a high-profile relationship after making the film. In 2005, Liman signed on to direct the pilot episode of NBC's television series Heist, which is about a season-long attempt to rob three jewelry stores on Beverly Hills' swanky Rodeo Drive.

His next film is an adaptation of the popular science fiction novel Jumper (2007) by Steven Gould.