The first rule for making a big-studio movie during the pandemic, about the pandemic, is that there really are no rules. It's a no-adults-in-the-room amount of rules. If this gives you an idea of the sheer chaos behind shooting a movie these days, you should know how Doug Liman (director of Edge of Tomorrow and The Bourne Identity) got from his Massachusetts home to the London set of his new COVID-heist-dark-rom-com film, Locked Down. Propeller plane. When I talked to Liman before Locked Down's HBO Max premiere this Thursday, I asked him if he really did, in fact, just up and fly himself across an ocean to the set of his own movie.
"I did!" Liman says. "That first step gave me the confidence to approach the rest of the film and be like, OK, I may have pulled off the hardest part of it... I, of course, was wrong. That was not the hardest part of making the movie. Making the movie was the hardest part of making the movie."
The film's origin story began in July of 2020, when a producer approached to Liman and Locked Down's writer, Steven Knight, about making a film to shoot ASAP. By September, there was a script, Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor had signed on as leads, and started shooting the film in London. Things came together so fast the two stars had to stick notes with dialogue to each other's clothes because they didn't have enough time to learn their lines. Here's a detail to look for in the film that illustrates the COVID protocols on screen: Pay attention to the kitchen counter. There are about five bottles at the beginning. The supply dwindles throughout the film, because crew members were taking bottles home to their families when hand sanitizer was in short supply. Locked Down begins with a quarantined couple bickering themselves out of their relationship—until borderline-cosmic circ*mstances present them with the opportunity to steal an ultra-expensive diamond from the world's most famous department store.
That's just a glimpse of what it took to get Locked Down to screen. Lest you forget, too, that during all of this, Liman is preparing to go to space, flying in the SS Elon Musk to the International Space Station this October, where he'll film a movie with Tom Cruise. So, aside from question his transatlantic voyage, we asked Liman how he pulled off Locked Down, filmed video calls you'll actually want to watch, and what kind of story he'll tell in the Tom Cruise Space Movie.
ESQUIRE: Even without the pandemic material, Locked Down is such a different story. There's the seeming death of this relationship, which turns into a existential-heist-slash-moral crisis. Out of all the ways you could go about telling a pandemic story, why did you end up on this story?
Doug Liman: We were tossing around these different ideas about the experience of characters during the pandemic. We all know people having a jolly old time during the pandemic who are locked down with somebody they love, having a honeymoon. And then, there's the majority of the people who were having a pretty rough time. Steve and I were drawn to the idea of a couple of going through a pretty rough time. We also were drawn to the idea of doing a heist during the pandemic, because the world has been turned so upside down that something that might normally have been impossible might be possible. Just thinking about all the ways in which a heist would be easier and more difficult during a pandemic. And then, we stitch these two ideas together to think about what would be a really novel approach to a heist movie—the impetus to do the heist grows out of the pandemic.
ESQ: There's a character near the end of the film who says that the pandemic has liberated us all. Do you think there's any truth to that?
DL: Look at me making this film. Under normal circ*mstances, this film would never have happened. I can't begin to tell you how insane the idea is to say on July 1, let's write something, you'll shoot it in September, and finish at the end of the year. When the normal rules cease to exist, the reality is we are liberated.
ESQ: Is it true that you flew to the set via propeller plane?
DL: I did. It's surreal for me to speak to you from Massachusetts, sitting at the same desk I was sitting at [when I was] fantasizing with Steve Knight about making this movie. And fantasizing that if, in fact, we made this movie, I might get on my plane and fly myself to London, which seems even more outrageous than making the movie.
ESQ: What were you thinking about on that ride?
DL: I'm just hoping I'm going to find land! It's a long distance over water. I'm not thinking about anything but the flight, but the flight set me up in the right mindset. The fact that I pulled off that first step gave me the confidence to approach the rest of the film and be like, OK, I may have pulled off the hardest part of it. That probably is what I thought on the flight—is that this was the hardest part of making the movie. I, of course, was wrong. That was not the hardest part of making the movie. Making the movie was the hardest part of making the movie.
I can't tell you how many times during the course of this film I said, 'We have the rest of our lives to do things the normal way.'
ESQ: Tell me about that—what kinds of ridiculous things were you doing on set to maintain restrictions?
DL: Just to give you an example of what making a movie during the pandemic is like: if you notice when Anne Hathaway's at the kitchen counter early in the movie, you see there's five bottles of Purell on the counter. Over the course of the movie, there are fewer and fewer bottles of Purell on the counter, until there are none. That's not a creative choice that I, as a filmmaker made. That is because my crew is stealing the Purell and taking it home. Because, we're all living the same experience the characters on screen were living. I love that. I can't tell you how many times during the course of this film I said, “We have the rest of our lives to do things the normal way.” I was like, this is not that movie. I salute whoever on my crew took that Purell home to keep their family safe.
ESQ: You manage to film video calls in a way that is genuinely compelling to follow, but with the same miserable sense of dread as the calls that we all do for work.
DL: For sure. I particularly love the Skype ringtone because—unlike Zoom where you consciously go in—the Skype ringtone interrupts whatever you're doing. It's so frigging happy, but we're like... Just shoot me.
ESQ: And some of the choices you made there—having Anne Hathaway's character drink wine on the Zoom call, and laying people off. There's so much sadness that I think is counterbalanced by dark humor.
DL: Locked Down had no business being as good as it turned out, because this was not a movie where I said to Steve Knight, “Hey, I've got a great idea for a movie.” The origin of this movie was a producer saying to Steve and me, “Every actor is available because of lockdown. If you write something for us to shoot in September, you can literally have your pick of anybody.” That's not normally how I start my movies. I normally start my movies with an idea for a movie that I think will make the world a better place, and by entertaining people in a moving and original way. This is a pretty crass way to start up a conversation about a movie. Within 10 minutes, Steve and I were talking about the emotional toll this pandemic is taking on all of us… The more we talked about it, the more passionate we became about what the story would be. I went to Anne Hathaway with a third of the script, and said, "I want to shoot this next month."And because Annie got the spirit of what we were trying to do, she was like, “I'm in. I'm 100 percent in.”
ESQ: You can tell.
DL: Then I was like, who would be great opposite her? And I thought, what about Chiwetel [Ejiofor], and he was like, “I'm in hundred percent.” When they said they were in, they were in. One day it rained and I had to switch the order in which I was shooting things. And I went to them and said, "I got to shoot tomorrow's work today because of the rain." They would have been in their right to say to me, “It's London, you didn't anticipate it might rain? You're just throwing this at us?” They were like, we said we're in, we're in for this adventure, wherever it goes. [even] if we have to shoot tomorrow's work today. Which, by the way, Chiwetel hadn't memorized at all. And it's a nine-page scene. Annie had only half memorized it. We're like, “We'll just tape script pages wherever we can so we can glance at them while we're all acting.”
ESQ: How much do you think people want to watch films that directly grapple with the pandemic? Do you think people are ready to fully grasp what you've made?
DL: I don't know—a lot of times my films find audiences after the [premiere]. Swingers, took years to find an audience. Edge of Tomorrow, took time to find an audience. Bourne Identity, took some time to find an audience. I do feel like Locked Down occupies this special space where there's nothing else out there like it. It's a hundred percent relatable. There isn't a person on the planet who’s not going to relate to what our characters are going through. It has my kind of happy ending. I don't make traditional happy endings—like Warner Brothers wanted an ending to Edge of Tomorrow where Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt walk off into the sunset. I was like, “I'm interested in ending where she doesn't know who he is.” And they were like, “How the hell is that a happy ending?” That's my version of a happy ending. Locked Down is that. They're still locked down, but there's hope and it's a promise for the future.
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When I was making Swingers, I was in my twenties, all my friends were going through a heartache. Every one of my friends was suffering from some kind of breakup. I kept saying to them, I've got the perfect film for you to watch. This will make you feel better about what you're going through. In the same way, I feel like Locked Down has the opportunity not to give people pure escapism. You can go watch Marvel or Star Wars and just get pure escapism for what we're going through. But Locked Down has the opportunity to give people hope about what they're going through. I do hope that it finds an audience because I think that it would give us an opportunity to smile and laugh—and God knows the world needs that.
ESQ: It's really interesting you're going from telling this story of isolation while you're preparing to shoot a movie in space, which I’m imagining already has isolation baked into it.
DL: The connection between the movies is that, the [Locked Down producer who said] “every actor is available,” is the same producer a year before said to me, "Why don't we come up with a movie to shoot in outer space?" Cut to Tom Cruise is signed on, SpaceX is signed on, NASA has signed on. So, when that same producer said, “Let's make a movie this September in two months,” I was open to listening because the last time he said something crazy, NASA and SpaceX committed. When I finish the space film, when I look back, I'm not sure which of the movies will ultimately have been more audacious. But certainly Locked Down will give me the confidence going forward to just disregard the word impossible—which I already know that Tom Cruise has. That's part of his magic as a filmmaker. He just doesn't hear the word “impossible.”
ESQ: I know you're limited in what you can share about that movie—but what kind of story are you maybe hoping to tell in the film?
DL: I think that humans successfully launching ourselves into space and into the moon and soon beyond—it's such an incredible human accomplishment. So, I'm eager to give people the real experience of what it means to go into outer space. At the same time, I make contrarian movies. I have a take on how to do a film that takes place in outer space that's unlike any film that's ever been done that deals with space. That's really what Tom fell in love with. We're going into space because that is in fact the best way to tell the story. But the reason we're telling the story is because of the story we're going to tell.
Because I've been working with Tom on the space film, I was very aware of what he was doing to get Mission: Impossible 7 back into production at a time when the rest of us in the film business had resigned to waiting for a vaccine before we could go back into production. Because, let's be honest, there's no socially distant way to make a movie. I resigned myself to that, and suddenly Tom is finding a way to get Mission Impossible back into production. And I'm thinking, maybe I don't have to sit idle. I think it's really important for movies like Locked Down to get made during the pandemic, because the only other movie shooting in London while we were there were giant franchises. They weren't shooting. but they were planning to start shooting. Whereas smaller movies don't have those resources. I think it's really important for films like Locked Down to get made because otherwise we're going to find ourselves a year from now with nothing but tentpoles.
ESQ: One, it shows in the lack of pandemic-set movies like yours that we've seen. And two, about the space film—it must be so exciting just to look at the manifest and you see your name.
DL: It's terrifying, it's exciting, it's insane. Everything about this is sort of insane. The fact that, I'm somebody who very much lives here on planet Earth, and I'm not jaded to the really unique opportunities that I have been afforded by my career. The fact that I get to work with such amazing stars is not lost on me ever.
ESQ: Is there anything you wish I had asked you?
DL: I treat making films like I'm going on an adventure. Oftentimes that drives a studio mad. Obviously, I'm planning to go into outer space with Tom Cruise—the question that I think of making films is going on an adventure into the unknown. That's part of why I got so excited about what we were doing with Locked Down, because it was an adventure into the unknown… What was incredible about my experience making Locked Down, in a similar way that Tom Cruise is going to strap himself in that rocket alongside me to go into space and go make that movie is that Anne Hathaway, Chiwetel Ejiofor, my producers, and the crew, everybody signed up for the adventure. Everybody. I never had that level of comradery on the set of a movie. When we wrapped, we all were crying. We couldn't hug because of the pandemic, but God knows we were crying because we all knew that we had just worked on something that was so special that each and every one of us.
