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.
My films have been successful, and therefore, the process has accommodated me. When the studio said 'no,' I did it anyhow. Now they don't say no to me.
What happened on 'Mr. & Mrs. Smith,' I was given a big budget and given too many choices, and I made a lot of mistakes and missteps early on until I squandered all that extra money. But then, once my back was up against the wall, I made what I consider a really good movie.
I love 'Bringing Up Baby.' Anything that Katharine Hepburn's in. I'm committed to the Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn era of filmmaking.
I started my career wanting to make a 'James Bond' movie, and I couldn't get hired! I made 'The Bourne Identity,' and ultimately the impact of that film was that it changed the 'James Bond' franchise.
When I was shooting 'The Bourne Identity,' I had a mantra: 'How come you never see James Bond pay a phone bill?' It sounds trite, but it became the foundation of that franchise.
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 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.
The audience has a level of control, when you watch 'Invisible,' that nothing in 2D can give you. The overall climax of the series will work no matter how you get there, and the climax of each episode will work no matter how you get there, but no two viewings of an episode will ever be the same.
I'm interested in the kind of anti-establishment ethos that goes with making an independent movie. I like to bring that to studio films - usually to the consternation of the studios.
More of 'The Bourne Identity's script was taken from the events of the Iran Contra, which my father investigated for the Senate, than what was taken from Robert Ludlum's novel.
What I really found was that the one similarity between 'Covert Affairs' and 'Fair Game' is a deep love and admiration and fascination with the home life of a spy.
I always wanted to make big action movies as a kid, and that was my dream. In a way, 'Swingers' was the thing I suffered through the most doing because of all that dialog, so I could eventually be allowed to do a big dumb action movie, honestly.
I had one scene in 'Invisible' with 12 actors delivering dialog at the same time.
From a production point of view, I still have one foot firmly planted in the independent film world, and much of the shooting on 'Jumper' was done 'Swingers'-style because that was the only way we could afford to do it.
I've always been interested in giving the audience a first-person experience in my movies.
I like making movies that have some of the qualities of first-person shooter games. That was very important to me for the 'Bourne' franchise.
Normally, the action is just a gratuitous thing. In the case of Bourne, he was going to learn about himself in the action scenes.
Trust me: you make a movie about time travel, and you know for a fact humans will never travel through time. The paradoxes that come up just from trying to tell a story with time travel really illuminates the fact that it's impossible. It will never happen. We can barely get through a movie that involves time travel.
I had just come off doing a lot of commercials when I did 'Go,' so a part of the fast pace and efficiency comes from the discipline I had to learn from telling stories in 25-second increments, and that type of discipline is insane.
