Quotes from Doug Liman

I don't think I'm all that twisted in my life. I'm not like some tattooed filmmaker who, you know, hangs out on the Lower East Side and is part of some satanic cult or something.

I realize I am contradictory: I have an independent filmmaker's sensibility and a Hollywood director's short-attention span.

I've got a short attention span, so it makes sense that I like movies because, for the most part, they immerse you in lots of action.

My films are very rooted in specific people's point of view. Some film-makers give a more global point of view, like God looking down at the characters.

I chose 'Mr. & Mrs. Smith' specifically 'cause I had just made 'The Bourne Identity' and made a film that glamorized being an action hero, and I wanted to make the exact opposite. I wanted to make a movie that glamorized maintaining a marriage, and that made the action hero part seem easy and made the marriage part seem hard.

I populated 'The Bourne Identity' with real characters from American history, specifically characters from the Iran-Contra affair, which my father ran the investigation of. But at the heart of it was a fictional character.

A movie like 'Edge of Tomorrow' is so huge and complex - the spectacle and action is all-consuming - and that on its own is enough of a reason for a lot of people to see it.

When I was making 'Bourne Identity,' I wasn't making a dumb action movie like they were expecting it to be.

The 'Bourne' franchise means the world to me. I love that Universal wants to put one out every two years. Because it is a safe investment, I benefit from that on many levels.

The more real I got on 'The Bourne Identity,' the more interesting it got. So 'Fair Game' was the chance to go a few more steps in that direction. In fact, I discovered this whole other world that I had ignored in the 'Bourne' franchise, which is the domestic life of a spy, and how you make the two halves of your life coexist.

I'm really drawn to adventure, and characters being plucked from normal life and sent on extraordinary adventures.

Normally, the action is just a gratuitous thing. In the case of Bourne, he was going to learn about himself in the action scenes.

'North by Northwest' was a big influence for 'The Bourne Identity.'

All of my fellow directors, I think, would agree that in whatever medium you are working, the challenges and obstacles push them to be more creative. That's the case with VR.

'Mr. and Mrs. Smith' - every scene is from those characters' point of view. They're in literally every scene, very unusual in a big studio film.

I can't impress people with the pedigree of obscure French filmmakers that got me into film. It was Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg. I really thought I wanted to make dumb action movies.

VR should be more emotionally involving, but that doesn't happen automatically by just taking a VR camera and sticking it onto what would be a traditionally blocked scene for 2D.

I didn't grow up like Quentin Tarantino, watching esoteric art films at the video store. I'd go to the multiplex and see big, mainstream movies, and I'd go, 'I want to make one of those one day.'

VR should offer an experience that's more exciting than watching in 2D, and we're pretty good at 2D storytelling, so the bar's already pretty high.

I really have thought about immersive storytelling my whole career, so when I first heard about VR, I was like, 'Oh, this sounds like it's for me.'

I got in trouble in film school at USC because one of my Super-8 movies there, in the first semester, involved a snowmobile chase scene. I made an action scene, and they were like, 'That wasn't what you were supposed to be doing.'

I went to USC film school, briefly, which is a very traditional film school.

My family went to the Hamptons, so I understand what happens when a slice of perfect utopia gets overdeveloped, when one way of living is replaced by another.

If you do something that's really original, you discover why everybody else does it the other way, usually. There's a reason cliches exist, 'cause they work.