A biography for Doug Limanhasn’t been written yet.
“I always wanted to make a 'James Bond' film, and they only seemed to hire British directors, and I'd made 'Swingers' - they were never going to hire me for a 'James Bond' film off 'Swingers.'”
“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 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'm really attracted to anti-heroes, and I'm a little bit of a troublemaker myself, and a little bit of a rule-breaker, and I like spies.”
“My older brother took me to Woody Allen double features when I was still teething.”
“I go into a movie sort of saying what it's not going to be.”
“Sometimes there are films like 'Mr. and Mrs. Smith' which turned out better than it deserved to be, but in the case of 'Edge of Tomorrow,' there was just such enthusiasm from fans.”
“I'm really anxious not to repeat what I've done before, to keep pushing and learning.”
“With 'Invisible,' I didn't want to create something that requires you to watch it more than once; I don't even expect people to watch it more than once per se. I just wanted you to have the experience and knowing that if you watch it a second time, it would be different because you would see different things.”
“'North by Northwest' was a big influence for 'The Bourne Identity.'”
“I went to USC film school, briefly, which is a very traditional film school.”
“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.”
“Antiheroes who are sort of honest to themselves are the ones you root for. Like, Barry Seal isn't trying to be anything other than he is. He isn't fooling anybody per se.”
“It turns out that it's easier to do politics in a movie. People really don't want it in their TV.”
“I really love the movies of Katherine Hepburn, movies like 'The African Queen.' I love 'Midnight Run' and I suppose, to pick something out of a different genre, I love 'Aliens.'”
“My dad couldn't connect to my wanting to be a filmmaker. He was very connected in entertainment, and through him I met Steven Spielberg and got rides on his private plane to California. I'd see Spielberg's people reading scripts. I was like, 'That's what I want to be when I grow up.'”
“Casting is everything. I put a huge amount of work into casting, and consistently across my career, I am most proud of my bold choices I made in casting.”
“Aaron Taylor-Johnson and John Cena, in 'The Wall,' are superheroes. They're very grounded, but the amount of training and stuff that soldiers bring to the field, they're like Iron Man.”
“The reality is, the movies that were most impactful to me growing up, when I decided I wanted to make movies, I was going to see Woody Allen double features with my brother, back when they had double features.”
“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.”