The films of Doug Liman are half-siblings: they have a lot in common underneath, but don’t always look alike. Swingers, the likable low-budget 1996 comedy that also launched the careers of Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn, was the movie that first made his name, but the big break was the 2002 blockbuster The Bourne Identity, starring Matt Damon as a deadly amnesiac. Since then, he’s developed a reputation as a dependable, protean Hollywood director, sometimes mischaracterized as an action journeyman.
Even when he changes up his style, as in last year’s mile-a-minute American Made, he can’t seem to get away from his preoccupations: skulduggery (often involving the CIA); military-industrial flim-flam; characters who find themselves in plots beyond their control or are forced to start over. His best film, the darkly comic sci-fi action flick Edge Of Tomorrow, makes it all very literal. In that movie, Tom Cruise plays a pusillanimous military spokesman who gets sucked into the frontlines of an alien invasion in a time loop that restarts whenever he meets a gruesome end.
Then there’s Fair Game, his drama about the real-life Plame affair – scripted, like Edge Of Tomorrow, by the playwright Jez Butterworth and his brother, John-Henry. When Fair Game hit American theaters in 2010, the story of Valerie Plame and her husband, Joe Wilson, seemed like a relic of an earlier era – those years of bunco, spin tactics, Mission Accomplished, and semantic arguments about “weapons of mass destruction”. A large part of the American populace was still in the post-Nobel, pre-Snowden honeymoon period of the Obama presidency; the machinations of the George W Bush administration were in the past, the Iraq war was over, and the liberal opposition to both had become passé.
Now, Liman has reshaped the film into a new director’s cut, released at a far different time.
“When the film came out and Obama was in the White House, nobody really wanted to deal with Iraq,” says Liman. “As a country, we thought it was an anomaly. But we’re still dealing with it today: Isis, Yemen. All of this can be traced back to the decision to go to war in Iraq. We’ve had a reckoning with Vietnam. We should have an honest conversation about the war.”
The Plame affair began in the summer of 2003, when Wilson, a former diplomat, wrote a New York Times op-ed that accused the Bush administration of lying about the reputed nuclear weapons program that had been part of the US and the UK’s rationale for invading Iraq. The year before, he had been asked by the CIA to travel to Niger and investigate a rumored sale of yellowcake uranium to the Iraqi government, and found nothing. His piece ran in the Sunday edition, just after the Fourth Of July. A week later, a popular conservative columnist revealed that Wilson’s wife was herself a CIA agent, blowing her cover and effectively torpedoing her career. The leak was widely seen as a retaliation for her husband’s criticism.
Fair Game, which starred Naomi Watts as Plame and Sean Penn as Wilson, didn’t make much of a splash. But Liman has never really let the film go. Three years ago, he began toying with the idea of a re-editing the movie – and that was before Donald Trump was elected president. In the current manic news cycle, its subject matter has found new currency. This past spring, Trump pardoned Scooter Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice-President Dick Cheney, who had been convicted of lying to FBI agents and a grand jury during the investigation into the leak.
“Scooter Libby, I love as a character,” says Liman. He’s on the phone from a studio number, and Plame is on the line, too. “I understand where he’s coming from,” she says, laughing. What Plame really thinks of Libby, the only person convicted as a result of the scandal, she keeps to herself. “His life is fine.”
“To this day, Valerie can’t really talk to us about what she did at the CIA,” says Liman, teasingly. “Even on this phone call, she won’t tell me when she started at the CIA. She can’t admit she was working at the CIA before 2001.”
Liman worked on the cut in between shooting American Made and the Iraq war thriller The Wall. He says he didn’t think of mentioning the new version to the distributor, Lionsgate, until recently. The first public screening of the new cut was this summer, on the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard, where Liman has a home. “I’m very much act first and …’”
“Ask forgiveness later,” finishes Plame. They both laugh.
The director’s cut doesn’t represent a revelatory, radical new version of the film; it’s still very much the same movie. But Liman is a tinkerer. He originally set out to recut the film because he thought he could get more out of Watts’s and Penn’s performances and the core of the film: “What it did to that relationship – this massive international event playing out in a home.” “Neither of us had any idea of the political hell it would unleash,” says Plame. “I have no way of evaluating if [Naomi Watts] did a good job of being me. But Sean captures Joe’s intensity. Joe and I were very apprehensive in the beginning of the process. You give up a great deal of control.”
“And then Sean Penn shows up at your house,” jokes Liman. Later, he brings up Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who publicly accused the supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, and of the public indignities often endured by whistleblowers in a media landscape where reporters get cozy with the political elite. The climax of Fair Game depicts the cable-news smear campaign against Wilson and Plame, as network pundits imply that the former might be motivated by money troubles and that latter was more a glorified secretary than a covert operative. “Suddenly, with Trump in the White House, these themes are terrifyingly relevant.”
But perhaps more than anything, the revised Fair Game speaks to Liman’s own process. Given the choice, he’d says he’d never let a film go. “Who said that a movie can’t be a living breathing object? The idea that a movie is done and never changes may be connected to the time when films were on film. You cut the negative, and that was it. Now in the digital world, this may be the start of a trend of other film-makers saying: ‘Actually, films can live and breathe and change.’ Especially a film like Fair Game, that’s so much about events that happened.”
Fair Game is out on Netflix in the US on 1 November
