Doug Liman’s History of Unsafe Sets (Continued)
Note to Readers: This is the second installment of a series. You can read the first here, which discusses the films Swingers (1996), Go (1999), The Bourne Identity (2002), Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), and Jumper (2008).
Despite Tom Rothman’s words of support, neither he nor anyone else in Hollywood was clamoring to work with Doug Liman after Jumper. Even if executives were to overlook the on-set death of David Ritchie — although they shouldn’t — the film itself didn’t do well, which finally put Liman’s unearned reputation as a hit moviemaker into question.
With his name in the gutter once more, Liman was approached for his next project only because the producers struggled to get anyone else. But as we’ve seen from Mr. & Mrs. Smith, all it takes is one opportunity for Liman to get his foot back in the door and continue his trail of destruction.
And continue he did, starting with hurting Naomi Watts on purpose.
Fair Game (2010): Hurting a Postpartum Actress to Toughen Her Up, and Reenacting Psychological Warfare for “Authenticity”
One would think that filming a political drama would involve less pain than a stunt-heavy action-adventure movie like Jumper. Not so for a Doug Liman production, where the infliction of pain — physical or psychological — seems to be the point. Liman’s team of enablers for this project would include producers Akiva Goldsman from Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Kim Winther from Smith and Jumper, Avram Ludwig, and David Bartis, Liman’s partner and co-founder of their production company, Hypnotic.
Another adaptation, Fair Game is based on a memoir by Valerie Plame, a covert CIA officer whose identity was leaked by President George W. Bush’s administration in retaliation for her husband — U.S. diplomat Joseph Wilson — revealing that the administration lied about nuclear weapons to justify the invasion of Iraq.
The story rights to Plame’s memoir were originally acquired by Warner Brothers. Curiously, they dropped the project after reading the finished script. The screenwriters, Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth, say studios were hesitant about the politics of the story, but given that Liman’s input on scripts is consistently detrimental and he was involved from the beginning, there may be other reasons. Regardless, the creative team knew they needed to boost the film’s chances after losing the backing of a major studio. So, they sought to attach big actor names to play Wilson and Plame: Sean Penn — who vocally opposed the Iraq invasion and is one of the only actors to visit pre-war Iraq — and Naomi Watts.
When Watts was sent the script and read it on December 28, 2008, she initially declined the project because she had just given birth to her baby two weeks before, on December 13. The screenwriters persuaded her, and by the end of February, she was filming.
Yet, rather than accommodating the vulnerabilities of her postpartum state, Liman thought she was too soft and maternal. So, he dumped her off at a CIA paramilitary bootcamp to toughen her up, where the first thing they did was hurt her — on purpose.
“After Doug left, I was alone,” Watts recalled. “I was allowed to have my baby every few hours, to feed him. But as Doug walked out, they sort of threw me to the ground and kicked me in the shins and I went, ‘Owww!’ and (the trainer) said, ‘OK, don’t say ow again unless you need to go to the hospital.’”
Liman was satisfied with the harshness of the training — which left Watts with bruises — saying it “stripped [her] of everything that cloaked her in specialness.”
Watts describes it differently. “The whole process was so demanding,” she said. “I’d done the CIA training when I was at the height of my maternal state. It was difficult even getting to read the script, much less learn how to be a bad ass, but I was ramming into cars at full speed with no helmet or safety belts.”
That’s right, no helmets. Liman hadn’t learned any kind of lesson from David Ritchie’s death being directly attributed to not wearing a safety helmet on the set of Jumper.
Watts would try to laugh off the dangers of doing car stunts without safety gear by saying “seatbelts and helmets are for wimps.” Except it’s a sentiment that almost assuredly did not originate with a mother who was still nursing, and would have the safety of her child and herself at the forefront of her mind. (Indeed, the word “wimp” gets repeated in Liman’s other projects, suggesting it’s one he uses frequently to pressure people into stunts.)
The CIA bootcamp was only the start of Watt’s suffering. Like Angelina Jolie and other female leads before her, Watts clashed with Liman over their vision for Plame’s character, in what has been described as a “titanic artistic struggle.” This was in part because Liman was mystified by the real-life Valerie Plame — who was a consultant for the film — and her demeanor, which Liman deemed impenetrable. “I’m a filmmaker. I’m used to manipulating people. That’s one of the main criteria of making it as a director in Hollywood,” said Liman. “You have to be a con artist… Valerie was a stone wall. I would be so frustrated.”
Was she a total stone wall, though? Interviews with Plame show an impassioned, animated figure, one who is more than happy to discuss the challenges and politics of her job. Granted, she was — and still is — bound to an oath of secrecy that prevents her from divulging many of the details of her work at the CIA. However, Liman acknowledged that. He said his team relied on journalists, other CIA operatives, and declassified documents to fill in the gaps. Still, within the constraints of her oath, Plame provided whatever she could. Even when Liman turned the film into a marital drama that emphasized the collapse of Plame and Wilson’s relationship rather than the political events of the story, Plame was forthcoming about those intimate details of her life.
Yet Liman was convinced that, because Plame was at the top of her game as an undercover operative, “she can’t ever reveal her inner emotions.” He described Plame as “not emoting,” which is demonstrably false. (Curiously, his view of her shifted only in relation to her husband. In that context, Liman described her as a “beautiful blonde trophy wife.”) Was his assessment wrong because he doesn’t understand women, doesn’t understand spies, or simply made up his mind for the purposes of the film? Who knows.
Meanwhile, Watts also worked closely with Plame, and wanted to use what she learned to infuse nuance into her portrayal of Plame on-screen — specifically by showing more emotional range. Yet, as usual, Liman resisted input from his female lead, sticking to his assessment that Plame was too stoic to show any cracks. “I fought with Doug about that and most of the time he won,” said Watts.
Unsurprisingly, the film would later be criticized for its one-dimensional portrayal of Plame.
The chaos of dealing with Liman and her newborn infant pushed Watts to the brink. “My baby was waking up through the night three or four times,” she said. “I remember nearly having a breakdown on the set.”
Sean Penn also had conflict with Liman, but unlike Watts, it permanently severed their relationship. Liman “pissed off” Penn so much that Penn refused to do any press for the movie when it was released, and has never spoken about it since. Not one interview, one article, one mention — it’s as if the film never happened. Penn only recently alluded to it by saying that the last time he had a pleasant experience on a set was on 2008’s Milk, and he’s been “miserable” on sets for 15 years since. (Game was the film that followed Milk.)
Once again, Liman used the media as a cudgel, leveraging Penn’s silence to paint the actor as the problem. “Sean had things going on in his personal life when we were making the film, impacting his performance,” said Liman when he released a new cut of the film in 2018, eight years after the original release. “What he considered a genius performance and what I considered a genius performance were not necessarily the same.”
While Penn has a history of violent and abusive behavior that suggests he’s not a pleasant or easy person to work with, he’s also been recognized for his acting skills, making Liman’s statement absurd on its face. Not only that, but just like how Watts worked closely with Plame to inform her performance, Penn worked closely with Joseph Wilson, whose memoir also became a part of the film’s story to help flesh out the details. So, it seems unlikely Penn was going rogue with his creative decisions. In fact, Liman himself complimented Penn as a “true actor” during the promotional tour of the original release, saying it was “extraordinary” to watch Penn “absorb [Wilson’s] mannerisms and his demeanor.”
No, the more likely explanation for their on-set conflict is the one that has followed Liman throughout his career: he’s an incompetent director, and infuriates those whose time he wastes.
If needless creative tussles and deliberately harming Watts during her postpartum recovery period weren’t enough, Liman upped the ante with an even worse decision: bringing his film crew into an active war zone.
Despite the studio forbidding him from doing so, Liman snuck into Iraq with a small crew to shoot exterior scenes for the sake of “authenticity.” “This is a real spy story, and it hopefully will be as exciting and successful as Bourne was — it is 100 percent real, and part of chasing that reality involved coming here to Baghdad and filming,” said Liman.
Liman would later admit he and his crew snuck in during “a period of major hostilities.” The day before they arrived, there had been 36 attacks. His crew had to wear bulletproof vests, be escorted by private security, and couldn’t stay in one location for longer than 20 minutes because of how much attention they were attracting from local crowds. “With Avram, we went into Baghdad, and it was insane,” Liman said. “It was not safe at all.”
Which, of course, was a thrill for Liman.
“He operates well in controlled chaos,” said second-unit director of photographer, Robby Baumgartner. “He likes everybody to be in this heightened state all the time. It’s total guerilla filmmaking. We had guerilla units, rogue units, and finally, we went terrorist.”
Terrorist, indeed. To make Baghdad look like it did prior to the U.S. invasion, Liman wanted to decorate the city streets with posters of Iraq’s former ruler, Saddam Hussein. Unlike Americans, Iraqis have much more complicated feelings about Hussein, who view him as a terrifying tyrant, but also believe that the post-invasion instability caused by U.S. violence and occupational rule isn’t any better. (Indeed, some Iraqis say that American rule has brought the country to “the Dark Ages.”) Neither his regime nor the methods used to topple it are happy memories.
Thankfully, someone managed to dissuade Liman. “We thought about doing some of the work here [in Iraq], but I don’t think the Iraqi people are ready for an American film crew to come in and start putting Saddam’s image all over the sides of buildings again — there’s not enough distance yet,” said Liman.
Which is correct. At the time of filming in 2009, it had only been six years since U.S.-led coalition forces invaded the country and began occupying it. The wounds — mental and physical — were still raw. Liman had no business even entertaining the idea of these posters.
Ultimately, the dangers of Baghdad were insurmountable, and forced Liman’s team to keep their time there short. Thankfully, Liman at least had the sense to not bother trying to film the actors there; the Baghdad trip was just for exterior shots. But the production team hit another snag when trying to film with the actors in Egypt. Liman had cast an Israeli actress to play an Iraqi doctor for the film, and failed to understand why the Egyptian government took offense to this and didn’t want her to film in their country. (As Israel’s neighbor, Egypt is constantly impacted by Israel’s aggression and violence in the region, particularly against Palestine.) It wouldn’t have been hard to cast an Iraqi, but instead, the team decided to keep the actress and relocate filming to Amman, Jordan.
There, Liman would concoct an even worse idea than the Hussein posters: replicating a form of psychological warfare called a leaflet drop.
Slightly larger than a dollar bill, each leaflet is a printed message from the U.S. military containing a mixture of instructions and threats to Iraqis. U.S. military members would load rolls containing thousands of these paper leaflets into modified bomb canisters, and fly over targeted areas to disperse them from the sky. The U.S. unloaded millions of these leaflets in Iraq for more than a year before the official invasion began, with the goal of terrorizing and demoralizing the local populace so they would surrender without a fight.
Originally written and distributed in Arabic, the leaflets have been archived and translated into English. Although there are dozens of different themes across the leaflets, the central message is always the same: resist, and you will be destroyed; we are stronger than you. (But also, we are your liberators, so be nice to us, and please protect your oil fields until we get there.)
Liman wanted to replicate this type of leaflet drop for Game, using 100,000 real leaflets that were used during the war in Iraq. “We were able to procure a Black Hawk helicopter and we were able to shut down downtown Amman… and we had a leaflet drop,” said Liman.
Thankfully, the Jordanian government put a limit on his nonsense. They vetoed using the real leaflets; Liman was only allowed to drop blank pieces of paper. “People would have been freaking out, wondering, ‘Is the United States government attacking Amman?’ even though they were talking about Saddam Hussein,” said Liman.
Indeed, they likely would have. While it’s unknown which leaflet he intended on using, there are several options. For instance, one archived leaflet features an image of Hussein holding a map of Iraq that says, “The coalition is here to put an end to the oppression caused by Saddam and his regime.” Another reads, “For your safety, do not interfere with Coalition Forces. Coalition Special Operation Forces are here to end the oppressive rule of Saddam’s regime and liberate the people of Iraq.”
In both cases, the wording implies an active invasion. That’s more than insensitive, it’s dangerous. It’s entirely possible that the leaflets could escape the designated drop zone and accidentally send an unsuspecting local into a panic, given that the U.S. is well-known to bomb Middle Eastern countries whenever it feels like it. And panic spreads fast, a contagious fear that can rip through crowds and travel far beyond the origin point.
All of that, for a shot in the film that lasted barely a second.
The irony is that Liman only seems to apply this need for so-called authenticity when it involves suffering. Any other time, and facts go out the window. For instance, journalist Tom A. Peter recalls how he was cast as a background extra for filming in Jordan. He and a female friend were told to show up wearing what they usually do — him, as a reporter who travels to the Middle East frequently, and her, as a Peace Corps volunteer.
“The night before she’d been ordered to wear something colorful, maybe a flowing skirt, but in the morning she was deemed to not be Peace Corps enough, so had to change into a form-fitting shirt and skirt that she says would have caused scandal in her old Peace Corps village,” he recounted. “My plaid shirt was also apparently too bland. I was ordered to change into a Hawaiian shirt that I would have been embarrassed to wear on any other occasion. In Iraq it would have made me stand out so much so that I would have considered it a safety hazard.”
A safety hazard indeed. By some miracle, no one suffered permanent physical injuries or died during Game, despite Liman’s insistence on filming in a literal war zone. But the invisible wounds were many. And, in the end, the suffering amounted to little, as the film was a resounding flop.
Perhaps this time, with two flops in a row — Jumper and Game — and no more box office buzz, Liman’s glaring safety issues could no longer be ignored, and his career would quietly disappear on its own.
Alas.
Edge of Tomorrow (2014): A Match Made in Hell with Doug Liman and Tom Cruise
If Brad Pitt was responsible for salvaging Doug Liman’s career the first time, producer Erwin Stoff at Warner Brothers was responsible for doing it a second time.
In addition to Jumper and Fair Game being flops, Liman was also fresh off the heels of a failed project in development called “Luna” about a space-heist trip to the moon. Paramount scrapped it after the financier, Skydance, bailed on the project once the budget surpassed $100 million. These three financial failures were more than sufficient justification for Hollywood to close the door for good on Liman’s career; he wasn’t the hitmaker they wanted to believe he was.
Yet for some reason, Stoff decided to hire Liman to direct Edge of Tomorrow. Another sci-fi book adaptation, it’s about a soldier fighting against an alien invasion who keeps reliving the same day every time he dies in battle. Several of Liman’s enablers returned: David Bartis as executive producer, Kim Winther as co-producer, and Simon Crane as second unit director and stunt coordinator. Warner Brothers pitched the project to Pitt, who turned it down. (Perhaps he knew better than to sign on to another round of Limania.) The movie went to Tom Cruise instead, who then hand-picked Emily Blunt to join him.
At the time, Cruise was in a career low, having damaged his reputation with his zealous and disturbing advocacy for Scientology, and his highly publicized divorce from then-wife Katie Holmes, who left him to protect their daughter from being indoctrinated into the cult. (Cruise would later learn to use heavy PR tactics to conceal his high-ranking membership in Scientology to avoid repulsing audiences, which has proven to be a successful strategy.)
But Liman would find a fast friend and new long-term creative collaborator in Cruise. The two felt an immediate kinship based on their shared interest in high-risk hobbies like aviation. And, on Tomorrow, they shared the same goal that Matt Damon did on The Bourne Identity: to make a hit movie that would restore their standing in Hollywood.
The script began with Dante Harper. He was commissioned by Warner Brothers to write a book-faithful adaptation, which ended up being named as one of the Black List’s best unproduced scripts of the year. Once Cruise and Blunt were cast, the studio brought on a few more screenwriters to adjust the story to fit the actors, and filming was ready to begin — which meant it was the perfect moment for Liman to launch his strategy of chaos. He threw out the lauded script, and brought on Jez and John-Henry Butterworth (Fair Game) to re-write it. Then he did it again by replacing them with Simon Kinberg (Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Jumper).
While Cruise enjoyed collaborating on the script with Liman, he was less than impressed with Liman’s choice in screenwriters. That was for good reason; not only did Kinberg write a disastrous treatment for Jumper, but he was also accused of plagiarizing Smith. Meanwhile, Cruise had found his “creative brother” and right-hand man in screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie from working together on Jack Reacher. As it turns out, Cruise was sending McQuarrie the Tomorrow script and getting feedback on it the entire time it was going through other hands. Cruise then pushed to bring McQuarrie onto Tomorrow as the official (and final) screenwriter, and the studio agreed. Kinberg was out.
Unfortunately for Liman, that meant he was no longer working with one of his yes-man screenwriters. This hindered his usual strategy; Liman would later admit that he spent six hours in a “creative screaming match” with McQuarrie over the script. With Cruise’s backing, McQuarrie didn’t have to cave to Liman like other screenwriters would. No matter, for there were other ways for Liman to assert control: repeat, wasteful takes. As soon as he was behind a camera, it’d be hard for anyone to tell him no.
Which is exactly what happened. To no one’s surprise, “stories of turmoil on the set” started to circulate on the first day of filming. Much of that turmoil was because Liman was once again in charge of replicating a historical war event and, like Game, he wanted authentic suffering.
Inspired by World War II France, many of Tomorrow’s major time-looped fight sequences take place on a beach that’s meant to mimic the “D-Day” Normandy invasion by U.S. troops. Instead of a location shoot, production built a massive set from scratch, complete with 1,300 tons of sand that took four months to ship there. With 300 square feet of open space and walls of green screens in the distance, they could freely fire off pyrotechnic prop missiles and explosions that would leave craters, fill the air with smoke, and spray sand and water everywhere while actors playing soldiers bobbed and weaved. In keeping with this historical Normandy reference, Liman went so far as to use traditional film instead of digital cameras to shoot Tomorrow, since that’s how real-life footage of D-Day was once shot.
Ironically, this led to chaos striking on the first day of filming in a way Liman didn’t expect. The cinematographer, Dion Beebe, hadn’t used film in so long that he unthinkingly shot everything using the principles of digital camerawork, not film. When Beebe reviewed the dailies, he realized he’d made a huge error: he’d used the wrong exposure and the footage was too dark to see. They had to throw it all out and start over.
While Beebe was mortified over his rookie mistake — he’d won an Oscar for his work on Memoirs of a Geisha — Liman (and Cruise) let it go easily. The reason? It was a perfect excuse for what Liman intended to do anyway. The beach shoot was scheduled to last two weeks, yet Liman turned into a twelve-week torturous slog with his endless takes, transforming fiction into reality as the cast and crew were forced to relive the same scenes over and over again the way Cruise’s character does in the story. While Liman was able to wear waterproof attire during those three months, the cast was slicked in mud and sand every day during grueling, stunt-heavy takes, and had to be hosed down at the end of the day. The filming experience was so universally awful that the beach got nicknamed “The Bitch.”
Liman, of course, didn’t care. As far as he was concerned, the more exhaustion and despair, the better, as it would mirror the war-weary reality of D-Day like he wanted. Filming on the beach began on October 1, 2012 and continued all the way until late December, with production shooting seven days a week with two crews. The only reason Liman stopped filming at the Normandy set is because the changing of the seasons forced him to. “We showed up and our beach was covered in snow,” Liman explained. “Jeff Silver, our incredible line producer, turned to me and said, ‘Maybe Mother Nature is telling us it’s time to move on from the beach.’”
If the prolonged schedule and conditions of the set weren’t already miserable, the character wardrobes only made it worse. As soldiers in a sci-fi alien war, the actors wore a proprietary version of exoskeleton battlesuit armor, or exosuits. This was thanks to Liman and Cruise’s mutual obsession with “authenticity,” and how they both insisted on using practical suits instead of visual effects. Which wouldn’t be a problem, except that the suits were made with metal because the production team ran out of time to explore lighter weight materials before filming began.
This gave the cast a nasty surprise when they first tried on the exosuits. Emily Blunt had diligently trained for three months with a 60-pound weighted vest in anticipation of wearing some kind of armor, but that wasn’t enough. The exosuit was more than she bargained for at a whopping 85 pounds — almost the weight of another person. Cruise said that, with all the attachments added, his exosuit weighed 120 pounds. Blunt’s exosuit also had attachments, but the extra weight made it impossible for her to move, so production was forced to ditch them. Still, the weight of the base exosuit was plenty.
“Nothing prepares you for the sheer weight of the suit,” said Blunt. “It feels like you’re being strapped into a coffin that you’re carrying around on your back.”
Except there was one person who was prepared: Cruise. Unlike the rest of the cast, he had advance warning for how tough the suits would be because he and Liman spent five months working closely with the prop and costume departments to develop the suit to their liking. Cruise not only got to provide input in the design, but was there when the final prototype was built. He knew firsthand exactly how difficult and flawed the suits were, and how training was needed to get used to them. When Cruise first tested the exosuit, it took thirty minutes to get into it, and another thirty to get out — with the help of four handlers. He pushed his team to speed up the process, until he could get in and out in less than a minute. He also practiced wearing the exosuit for an hour and half every for day for nine weeks before filming began.
None of the rest of the cast got that kind of input or insight. That’s why, when Blunt first tried on the exosuit, she broke down in tears. The shock of the unexpected weight overwhelmed her, which she described as “suffocatingly heavy.” As she wept, she spoke honestly to Cruise, telling him the exosuit made her feel “panicky about the whole shoot.” To get her to stop crying, Cruise replied, “Come on, stop being such a pussy, okay?”
Understandably, Blunt considered quitting the project. Unlike Cruise, who had done dozens of actions films prior, this was her first, and she couldn’t have landed a worse one. “I remember signing onto this and Tom said, ‘This is the most physically challenging thing I’ve ever done,’” said Blunt. “And I thought ‘Great, I’m in the deep-end of action movies.’”
She was. Because of the exosuits’ extraordinary weight, the actors couldn’t casually walk around in them. Their radius of movement was limited, and they required cables and cranes to help them move across larger distances or do so with speed. (The photo of Cruise escaping the flames has been edited to remove the cables.) The sheer act of wearing the exosuit constituted a stunt, increasing both actor fatigue and risk.
“If something was even off by a fraction, it would be really painful to wear it,” said Blunt. “They try to form it so the whole weight of the suit was taken into the legs, but if it’s off for a second, there’s such pressure in your shoulders, in your arms — You just have to get really strong.”
Bill Paxton agreed with this sentiment, saying that when he first put on exosuit, he immediately wished he’d been working out for six months prior to filming. He also said the actors had to be hooked up to special A-frames during breaks to take the weight of the exosuits off their shoulders. Still, these measures weren’t enough to compensate for how draining the exosuits were. Not only that, but production pushed Blunt and the other actors to wear the exosuit as much as possible, to get used to it and create the illusion that it was effortless.
Cruise was at the forefront of that pressure. Because he had such a huge hand in the R&D process of the exosuit, his ego was on the line. He was on a one-man mission to justify his creation, and refused to admit that the exosuits were painful — even to himself. In one anecdote, Blunt recounted how, even during one of the worst moments of wearing the suits, Cruise resisted commiserating with her.
“We were in this drop ship and I’d kind of had it,” Blunt explained. “It was very hot in there. My suit weighed 80 pounds, and I’m in a harness being lifted up. So, the entire weight of my body and 85 pounds is on my nether regions, and I’m not feeling great about it, wondering if I’ll be able to have children one day.”
The drop ship, a sci-fi transport vehicle in the film meant to carry soldiers and release them from the sky like an airdrop of supplies, was intentionally designed to be awful. “Doug wanted a kind of sardine can, a dehumanized environment,” Beebe explained. “He wanted these people reduced to weapons, basically, that are jammed into this vehicle that is meant to deposit them.”
Dehumanized they were, crammed together in tight rows and suspended in the air by their exosuits, feet dangling beneath them. Blunt noted that in that moment, Cruise was “pouring with sweat,” looking just as miserable as she felt.
“We’re swinging there and I could see Tom, the enthusiasm was starting to unravel a little bit. So I knew I had an in, you know?” she continued. “He was getting a bit frustrated with how long things were taking to shoot, and yelling, ‘Please roll!’ I just looked at him and I went, ‘This fucking sucks.’ And he looked at me and he went, ‘…It’s a challenge.’”
A challenge, sure. But that’s an understatement, and Cruise knew it. It wasn’t until filming was over and he was on the promotional tour for Tomorrow that Cruise would finally admit the exosuits were “physically grueling.” Yet he would never admit that Liman’s poor filming discipline — which was the reason they were hanging in the drop ship for hours, and why Cruise all but begged for the cameras to turn on — made it worse.
Even the author of the book, Hiroshi Sakurazaka, got a taste of the suffering caused by the weight of the exosuits — and Liman’s wasteful takes — when he visited the set and got to try one on. “I didn’t really have the physique or the stamina to carry the suit on my back,” said Sakurazaka. “I could barely walk in it, let alone act or do anything else. Doug Liman put me in a scene as an extra, wearing the exosuit, and after just standing there for ten takes I was exhausted.”
And that was just wearing the exosuits. Even though Blunt and the other actors were already in a perpetual state of pain and risk just from standing still, Liman and Cruise — along with second unit director and stunt coordinator, Simon Crane — pressured them to do more. “Tom, myself, and Simon believe in doing stunts for real,” said Liman. “Part of the magic of movies is seeing people do extraordinary things. And Tom prides himself on doing all of his own stunts.”
Which meant they expected Blunt and the others to keep up. They did assign Blunt a stuntperson, but mostly for the purpose of demonstrating how to perform the aerial, martial arts-based stunts that she herself would end up doing. Ironically, Blunt revealed that her exosuit was so heavy, her stuntperson was a man. Yet the all-male production team was indifferent, failing to realize that if they couldn’t find a female double for Blunt, then she shouldn’t be wearing the exosuit either, let alone performing high-risk stunts in it. In the end, the stuntman got to wear a lighter, safer, and more comfortable version of the suit made of rubber and foam to perform the stunts Blunt couldn’t do, while Blunt had to perform the majority of her stunts in the painful, much riskier metal suit. Inevitably, she suffered injuries.
While practicing an aerial fight scene, Blunt nearly broke her nose. She was suspended in wires and holding the weapon her character wields, which is a large broadsword prop made to look like a modified helicopter propeller blade. The sword got caught in the wires, and while trying to remove it, she whacked herself in the face with the sword’s base. The on-set medical team had to stick two fingers up her nose to press the cartilage back into place.
Blunt was, understandably, in a lot of pain from her nose injury. Instead of offering sympathy, Cruise told her to embrace the pain as a normal and expected part of making action flicks. Later, in a behind-the-scenes featurette for the film, Cruise would bring up the incident as if it were a charming anecdote. “The first day, you thought you broke your nose. Do you remember?” Cruise asked Blunt.
“I almost did break my nose,” Blunt responded.
Meanwhile, Liman thought it was fantastic that Cruise not only indulged Liman’s long hours of filming and repeat takes, but took the reins on pressuring the cast into doing their own stunts. “To have an actor, your star, working that hard — and that committed to giving you the most material possible to have in the editing room, and the most choices — is a massive luxury,” Liman gushed. “And because Tom was doing it, Emily did it, and then all the other actors did it. It just set a tone for the day.”
When Liman says set the tone, what he really means is that everyone is too afraid to defy Cruise and his outsized industry power. On Tomorrow, they certainly didn’t feel they could; even casual interactions with Cruise show him literally shoving Blunt unprompted, and her accepting it. Under immense pressure on her to perform her own stunts, she continued to rack up injuries. She ended up popping out two ribs and dislocating her thumb. “I still sort of have this injury that’s sustained from it,” Blunt said. “My ribs and my collarbone are still a bit dodge. Thanks, Tom Cruise.”
The irony of Liman and Cruise insisting on wearing these exosuits is that much of the film is made with VFX anyway. The aliens, the background environments, the vehicles and the extras were all made with computers. Liman didn’t bother with any kind of on-set authenticity with the aliens, which are called Mimics, and instead played them himself. He would simply yell the words “Mimic! Mimic!” at the actors, or even run around on set to get a reaction out of them. (As we will see in future projects, he has a habit of inserting himself into scenes like this, to the detriment of the actors’ performance.)
The constant threat of injuries from the exosuits wasn’t the only close call on set, either. Just like Naomi Watts in Game, Blunt was pressured into doing car stunts without training or safety gear. She was asked to drive a minivan with a large RV trailer attached to it in a high-speed chase scene — while wearing the exosuit, no less. Cruise was originally going to be the driver, but his exosuit was too large to fit the driver’s seat, so they asked Blunt to do it instead, with Cruise as the passenger.
“I was driving this very old car, with a huge trailer swinging behind it,” Blunt recounted. “I went really fast down this dirt road, and I had to take a turn. And the stunt coordinator [Simon Crane] was like, ‘I want you to go really fast, and swing that trailer out behind you. Like you can take it really fast.’”
Unaccustomed to stunt driving, Blunt crashed into a tree. Thankfully, both actors were unharmed. This is a particular relief given that they were both encased in metal from the neck down instead of wearing safety gear.
Unfortunately for Blunt, Liman and Cruise were just too like-minded, too willing to thrust others into danger for the sake of their own vanity and thrill-seeking, and expected her to comply without complaint. “I was bleeding — I got slashed by the metal,” Cruise said about hurting himself from falling out of the car during the scene. “But that stuff happens. The thing with Em was, we never compared bruises. Making an action movie everyone’s in pain, so you just don’t mention it.”
It’s not as though Blunt didn’t attempt to advocate for herself; she did. But, just like his previous films, Liman’s invitation for the lead actors to collaborate is one he only genuinely extends to the men. During one of their many meetings to work on the script, Liman aggressively shut down Blunt’s contribution. “I was a little under pressure and I snapped,” Liman recalled. “And Emily said, ‘Easy, I’ve never made a movie like this before!’ I fired back, ‘Well, neither have I!’”
Liman would later admit that it had nothing to do with pressure. “It was an incident where… she made a suggestion that I didn’t like,” he said.
Indeed, although Liman insists he’s “as collaborative as they come,” he picks his favorites, and they’re consistently male. Blunt hinted that, as a woman, she had to convey her feedback differently in their nightly script workshops. “You can get your point across, but you got to dance around a bit more,” she said.
Truth be told, Blunt never stood a chance of having her feedback heard, whether it was run-of-the-mill script suggestions or serious safety concerns about stunts. Even if Liman were to listen, there was still Cruise to deal with. Old interviews reveal that Cruise has a long history of pressuring his co-stars into unsafe stunts, and, when safety personnel tell him a stunt is too dangerous to perform, he fires them instead of heeding their advice.
This is the reason Liman and Cruise work so well together. They both treat movie sets like their own personal playgrounds for high-risk thrills and will gleefully abuse their Hollywood power to get their way. A case in point is how Cruise insisted on flying an enormous Puma military helicopter from the UK’s Royal Air Force and landing it right in the middle of the tourist hotspot, Trafalgar Square, in London — just for the bragging rights.
“Tom said: ‘Wouldn’t it be a cool way to open the film with a helicopter flying over the Thames and landing in Trafalgar Square?’” said producer Erwin Stoff. “At that point, I looked over to our Location Manager, Sue Quinn, who had gone pale.”
Liman, of course, “got excited” at the suggestion, but Quinn shot it down. Still, Cruise wasn’t going to let up. “[Tom] just gives one of his smiles,” said Liman. “Next thing you know, Sue Quinn comes back and says, ‘We may be able to land a helicopter in Trafalgar Square.’” (Blunt has repeatedly hinted that Cruise uses “enthusiasm” as a way of pushing for high-risk stunts.)
There’s a reason a stunt like that had never been done before; it caused massive disruptions to the city pull it off safely. The production team brought in several tanks, two additional helicopters, and 14 cameras to get the footage. To accommodate this, the city had to close 36 roads and divert 122 bus routes, impacting 8,000 local business owners within a half-mile radius. It took 14 weeks of planning to prepare — two weeks longer than the Normandy beach shoot. Although production assured the city they would not damage historic cricket grounds where they needed to land the other helicopters, they did.
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All for an opening sequence that is… well, you can be the judge of whether watching twenty seconds of a helicopter touching down to spit out a strutting Tom Cruise adds anything to a story about aliens invading the planet.
If Liman and Cruise were being honest, they’d admit it had nothing to do with improving the story, and everything to do with their own personal interests as pilots. “Shutting Trafalgar Square down and landing a massive Royal Air Force helicopter was one of those moments where you’re like a kid again,” said Liman.
Yes, a spoiled kid. This marked Liman’s second unnecessary helicopter stunt after Game. And, as it turns out, they narrowly avoided disaster. “I was just glad we landed [Tom] safely, as the helicopter actually broke down after we finished filming,” said location manager Georgette Turner.
While Liman and Cruise ultimately had the time of their lives during Tomorrow, everyone else suffered. “We were shells of our former selves by the end of it,” said Blunt. But again, for Liman, making the filmmaking process unnecessarily dangerous and miserable for others is the point. “Can I make a film that’s just as original and maybe leave fewer bodies on the battlefield? Can there be fewer fatalities?” Liman pondered. “Does originality necessarily have to involve suffering? For me, so far, it has.”
Whether his mention of fatalities is meant to be a hypothetical scenario, or a shockingly tone-deaf reference to David Ritchie’s death on Jumper, is up to interpretation. Yet Blunt and the other cast and crew were lucky. Although many of them suffered injuries with lasting effects, they walked away with their lives.
The same can’t be said for those who became involved on the next Liman-Cruise project.
American Made (2017): Two Deaths, One Permanent Paralysis, and Half a Dozen Lawsuits
There are three things that Doug Liman and Tom Cruise love: 1) flying their own aircraft, 2) flouting the rules to take big, dramatic risks that no one asked them to take — and would prefer they didn’t — and 3) being celebrated as cool and courageous heroes for doing so. So, naturally, when they teamed up again on another film, they picked a story that would allow them to do all three at once.
Granted, they likely would’ve been happy with any film project as long as it allowed for high-risk, showboating stunts. Even though Edge of Tomorrow was a box-office disappointment when it first released, Liman and Cruise were eager to work together again so they could repeat the dynamic they forged. They got lucky and happened to find the perfect project in American Made.
Originally called Mena, the story revolves around Barry Seal, a real-life American pilot who used his plane to smuggle drugs for the Medellín cartel in Colombia while simultaneously working as an informant for the CIA and DEA. “It’s not a felony if you’re doing it for the good guys,” says the film’s tagline.
A spec-script by Gary Spinelli, Made is a departure from Liman’s usual book-adaptation fare where he exploits preexisting material. Yet the leap wasn’t too far, since the script received a rigorous amount of industry vetting prior to Liman getting it. Like Tomorrow, it was named as one of the best unproduced scripts of the year. More importantly, it had gone through an intense bidding war before being bought by Universal Pictures for $1 million in February 2014, with director Ron Howard attached. Howard later stepped down — presumably to focus on his film, Inferno, which was being developed at the same time — and Liman jumped at the opportunity to take over as director. Not only did the subject matter interest him, but Howard’s production company, Imagine, was still attached, which lent a layer of prestige and resources. (Notably, Liman’s usual enablers weren’t as numerous in this project, as he inherited the existing producer team.) As an added bonus, this marked the first time that Liman would work with Universal since The Bourne Identity, giving him the opportunity to rebuild a burnt bridge.
All he had to do with such a promising project was to show up and direct. But, of course, it wouldn’t be a Liman production without deliberately ruining a good thing. And to do that, he’d need a powerful co-conspirator to help him defy the studio: Cruise.
By January 2015, it was announced that Cruise was officially in talks to play Seal. Despite the script being highly lauded, Liman overhauled it anyway. He had Spinelli re-write it for five weeks before Cruise came onboard. Then, at Liman’s suggestion, the three of them decided to live together once principal photography began in Atlanta in May 2015. The house they chose was not only their temporary residence, but doubled as one of the sets for the film as well. This arrangement made it easier for Liman and Cruise to make daily updates to the script, with Cruise waking up Spinelli at two in the morning if he wanted to change a line of dialogue.
“We were living American Made 20 hours a day,” said Liman. “Tom and I, we would commute to work together in the morning, commute home at night, have dinner at night, talk about the movie. It was a really intense experience.”
If that sounds like a recipe for disaster, apparently, it was. Even though the house was actually a mansion — complete with a tennis court, basketball court, and swimming pool — and each man lived on a different floor, early reports suggested that there were conflicts over the use of the kitchen, as all classic roommate conflicts tend to begin.
“The way that we made the movie, we actually had to live together when we’re going through it, because the work load was so intense,” said Cruise in a joint interview with Liman.
“Yeah, as long as you could have your own separate kitchen,” said Liman.
“Yeah, no, not separate kitchen. Separate portion of the refrigerator, because I didn’t want your junk contaminating all of my food,” Cruise retorted, emphasizing his words. “You can see in the fridge there was my side — which you could tell because there were things that were edible — and then his side, with things that would just kill anything. It’s amazing this man’s still alive.”
The three men also had a chore chart divvying up their duties, but Liman did everything he could to skimp when it was his turn. Both Liman and Cruise accused Spinelli of also dodging his duties, dubbing him “Princess Gary,” but it’s hard to say if it’s a fair accusation given that his reason was that he ate less than them, and needed time to work on the script (which they both kept asking him to perpetually revise). We don’t have Spinelli’s side of the story, but what we do have is Liman and Cruise bickering like an old couple.
“We didn’t have a housekeeper,” Liman explained. (Apparently they had trouble hiring one.)
“It’s a house, we can do our own chores, man,” Cruise responded.
“I’m a little messy, and you’re a little OCD.”
“That’s not true,” Cruise said firmly. “You are a lot messy, and I’m just more organized than you. So anyone who’s more organized — ”
“You believe that a pot after it’s been cooked with should look like it’s brand new,” Liman interjected.
“You did not know how to clean properly. I had to teach you.”
“I used to see you coming, and I’d quickly take the dishes and hide them so I wouldn’t have to clean them, but you would always find them.”
If Cruise had to teach Liman how to do basic cleaning, Liman had to teach Cruise how to live like a basic human. Liman recounted how when the two of them played tennis together, Cruise didn’t understand that he shot his ball out of bounds. “No one’s ever said no to that guy,” said Liman. “I said, ‘Your shot was out, that’s my point,’ and I realized no one had ever told him his shots were out. I was like, ‘It’s not your fault. You’ve been a movie star for so long that no one ever probably pointed out to you that your ball has to land within the white lines.’”
One would think that the enmeshment of Liman’s chaos and Cruise’s hyper-control would clash to the point of ruining their relationship for good. Surprisingly, it didn’t. Instead, they decided to live together again — sans Spinelli — in an even more intimate setting: a tent.
After the first half of filming wrapped in the U.S. and production shifted to Colombia, Liman and Cruise decided to arrive in the country early so Liman could get location shots from deep within the jungle. They decided to camp out on a remote air strip, where the nearest road was three hours away. There, they’d wake up before sunrise, eat breakfast, and spend all day flying over the jungle to capture footage of it. The producers tried to dissuade them from going to such an isolated spot, but the two ignored it, thrilled at the prospect of encountering dangers from their unfamiliar surroundings.
“Tom’s security person rattled off the top the things that could kill us out there. Our line producer sent Tom and me a photo with a note: ‘Gentlemen, I’d like to introduce you to the apex predator of your jungle: the Colombian jaguar.’ Tom wrote back: ‘Can’t wait to meet him.’ And they let us go,” said Liman.
It’s a silly boasting point, as jaguars avoid conflict with humans, and attacks are incredibly rare. No, the real danger came from Liman and Cruise stirring up trouble with other humans. “Those shots of soldiers pointing their guns at us? Those are real soldiers we found out there,” Liman said about footage that ended up in the film. “With real ammunition. That wasn’t in the script. There were no producers around. They were a little concerned when they found out.”
Ironically, it wasn’t until Liman and Cruise rejoined the rest of production — and ditched the tent for luxury hotels — that their true recklessness was unleashed.
Liman and Cruise want audiences to know that all the flying they did in Colombia is real. No strategic camerawork, no visual effects — it’s them, piloting their own aircraft. “Filming with airplanes is a whole caliber of difficulty that Tom Cruise and I had set up from the beginning. Saying, ‘We’re gonna do these for real,’” said Liman.
“We wanted to shoot all the flying practically,” said Cruise. “And that really was the only way we could do it, because we didn’t have the budget for visual effects.”
For the record, that’s a lie. Not only is Liman is notorious for blowing through budgets with no remorse — which is why Skydance dropped his “Luna” project — but so is Cruise. Liman and Cruise’s decision to fly their own planes had nothing to do with monetary concerns, and everything to do with the fact that they had free rein to film dangerous flying stunts on foreign soil, where they were less likely to get in trouble.
But why stop at stunts? Not only did they fly their own planes for filming purposes, but they flew around just for the fun of it, too. Liman, Cruise, and other pilots in production used their planes and helicopters like taxis, flying 20 minutes twice a day between their hotel in Medellin and the film set in Santa Fe de Antioquia. Once on set, they spent all day filming flying scenes over and over again.
“I will always treasure American Made as the only film I’ll ever make where I was not only allowed to pilot myself during production, but it was also part of our daily existence,” said Liman.
Even the film’s zero-gravity sex scene with Sarah Wright was inspired by Cruise playing a prank on Liman while flying during their off-hours. “I’m lying in the back of the airplane with a book, it’s like a three-hour flight, and at some point I fell asleep,” Liman recalled. “And Tom, for a joke, put the airplane into a parabolic arc, and I woke up as I was being slammed into the ceiling of this airplane. I was pinned up against the ceiling, which I did find funny. It hurt, but I found it funny. From there, Tom and I were like, wouldn’t it be fun to do that in the movie?”
This isn’t the first time Cruise has tried to pass off risky flying maneuvers as “pranks.” In one infamous interview from 2004, Cruise laughed incessantly about how he purposely cut off the oxygen to his backseat passenger — leaving the man unconscious and with his hands tingling when he woke up — so that Cruise didn’t have to lower the plane’s altitude.
Cruise would have a similar sense of humor in a scene in Made involving Domhnall Gleeson. Gleeson was asked to stand in a field where Cruise would fly over him with a plane, going as low as he could go. “They showed me a video of what they wanted to happen, with Tom doing it, with the plane flying over his head,” said Gleeson. “And then they told me that I was going to do it. You know, in that very positive, Tom Cruise way.”
Just like Emily Blunt felt pressured to cave to Cruise’s “insatiable positivity” on Tomorrow, Gleeson reluctantly agreed to the stunt. As Gleeson instinctively cowers under the loud roar of the aircraft, Cruise’s faces splits into the widest grin, as if making others uncomfortable with his risk-taking is his favorite thing ever.
Which it probably is. Several of the cast members have hinted at the intentional infliction of discomfort by both Liman and Cruise. Jayma Mays said Liman liked to “vary up the direction every now and then, just to keep you fluid” and “wants things to feel real.” Sarah Wright said “things are always changing.” Gleeson said it outright: “It could be very stressful working with the pair of them, because they change everything.”
He went on to describe working with Liman and Cruise as “strange” and “into the madness.” (A sentiment likely shared by Blunt, who described Liman as “off his rocker” before trying to couch it as a positive quality.) In one interview, Gleeson — who plays Cruise’s CIA handler in the film — was asked if he would take that job in real life. “Handling Tom Cruise? I don’t think anyone can handle Tom Cruise,” he answered. “Tom is his own beast, so that’s not a job I would take on. I prefer doing it in a fake role in the movies.”
It would normally be Liman’s job to wrangle Cruise, but instead, the two of them only encouraged each other’s worst impulses. Wright noted the strength of their bond, saying, “Watching the two of them together, they almost finish each other’s sentences at times.” Wright, who plays Barry Seal’s wife — and was chosen by Cruise the same way Blunt was in Tomorrow — was likely subjected to the worst of the Liman-Cruise partnership, since she had to film both sex scenes and flying scenes with Cruise. Was she eased into any of it? Of course not.
“Doug, our director, did this thing where he put all of our — like, the montage of our sex scenes that we have in the beginning of the movie — they all were on the first day,” said Wright. “So we’re smash-cut, day one, and I’m looking at the prelim and I’m like ‘What? We’re shooting all of those in the morning?’ I couldn’t believe it. Straight away, action, and we’re making out, and we’re doing some scene where he’s throwing me against a wall. Or, you know, on a sink or in the shower.”
Readers may recall that Liman is incapable of directing intimate scenes, and has relied on cast members to either take charge, or drink alcohol to get through the scenes. Here, it sounds like Cruise took the lead, improvised heavily, and Wright had to roll with whatever was thrown at her, with little to no protection from her director.
This first-day filming experience left Wright dreading what was planned for the end of the shoot: the newly added zero-gravity sex scene with Cruise in a plane. Even though the scene would thankfully be filmed on the ground, the actors would nonetheless be attached to harnesses in a rotating gimbal machine that would pull and tug them through the air to stimulate weightlessness. With Wright hinting throughout her interviews — albeit subtly — that Liman and Cruise’s focus was more on keeping her surprised rather than comfortable and safe, it’s no wonder she said she worried she would vomit during the scene. She had no way of knowing if they were going to stick to the plan or improvise once she was strapped in.
Yet Liman’s failure to meet the basic requirements of his job as a director went beyond intimate scenes. He revealed that whenever Cruise was performing poorly in his scenes, Liman was unable to tell Cruise, instead hoping the actor would figure it out on his own and ask to re-do scenes himself. This approach resulted in the first cut of the film being so low quality that it shocked Cruise. “It’s just not possible that we sucked this bad,” he reportedly said after seeing it.
But of course it’s possible. A director who fails the literal definition of directing is going to get stuck with bad performances. Instead of behaving as a director, Liman behaved as Cruise’s biggest yes-man throughout production, rubber-stamping every impulse and idea no matter how dangerous or unnecessary. “People don’t say no to Tom Cruise,” noted Liman, indirectly including himself. (It would seem that teaching Cruise the rules of tennis was by accident, not an intentional correction of Cruise’s entitlement.)
Tragically, it was this lack of “no” that ultimately proved fatal.
One late afternoon on September 11, 2015, three pilots from production boarded a plane: Alan Purwin, Carlos Berl, and Jimmy Lee Garland. They were headed back to their hotel after a long day of filming, doing one of their twice-daily commutes through the air. But only ten minutes into the twenty-minute flight, disaster struck. The pilot accidentally clipped the plane’s wing into the lush green hills of the countryside, lost control, hit a tree, and plunged into the ground.
The three men inside were severely injured but alive when locals from a nearby village discovered them. But the pilots didn’t last long. While the locals went to fetch rescue workers, Purwin and Berl died. Garland survived, but with a long list of injuries that suggests the other men’s injuries and subsequent deaths were equally as unpleasant: a collapsed lung, a herniated diaphragm, 10 broken teeth, broken ribs, a broken jawbone, a dislodged eye socket, and a cracked skull on both sides. The plane hit the ground so hard that Garland’s organs were pushed up into his body cavity, and doctors had to re-position them. The shattering of his T12 vertebra left him permanently paralyzed in the lower half of his body, and he needed a piece of metal to keep his skull intact.
It was a commute they had completed dozens of times before. What happened?
The answer doesn’t come easy. Immediately following the crash, nearly every party involved filed one or more lawsuits against the others to get ahead of the narrative, point fingers, and dodge the blame: the Purwin family; the Berl family; one of the production companies, Cross Creek Pictures; and the insurance company, Great American Insurance. More than half a dozen lawsuits piled up. Every party went so far with their game of accountability musical chairs that, at first, it wasn’t even clear who was physically piloting the plane when it crashed. Was it Purwin, Berl, or Garland?
Two investigations launched: one from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in the U.S., and another from the Colombian equivalent. It’s only through their combined findings that the truth emerged: Carlos Berl piloted the plane that crashed, yet he’s the only one who seems to be the actual victim of the collective bad decisions that led to the fatal accident.
A Venezuelan-born pilot with Austrian heritage, Berl took flight safety seriously. It’s important to note that pilot licenses are not a catch-all permission for flying; every category of aircraft is unique and requires its own training and licensing. As proven by his FAA record, Berl regularly and even voluntarily pursued additional training and licenses for the types of aircraft he flew, becoming an expert in many of them. The production team wanted him not only because he was familiar with South American regulations and spoke Spanish, but for his reliability and skill.
Purwin was a different story. Unlike Berl, who was a veteran pilot but completely new to filmmaking, Purwin was a well-known Hollywood stunt pilot who’d worked on famous blockbuster franchises like Transformers and Pirates of the Caribbean. (When news of the crash broke, Ben Stiller tweeted about the loss, mentioning their work on Tropic Thunder together.) But Purwin wasn’t just famous for being in the business; he had a decades-long reputation for ignoring safety rules to do splashy stunts — with deadly consequences. As detailed in the FAA investigation, he had dozens of complaints against him over the years and had already lost a co-pilot in a previous helicopter accident on a Michael Bay commercial. He had also been put in a “death pool” by several of his veteran aviation peers in Hollywood, meaning they believed he was most likely to perish next in a crash. One such peer said Purwin was, “frankly, a terrible pilot, and it was his incompetence that killed his partner” on the Bay set.
So, it was no surprise to discover that on Made, Purwin violated an important restriction on his piloting license that said he wasn’t allowed to travel with passengers or at night for more than 50 nautical miles. More importantly, his highest rated license applied to helicopters — not airplanes.
Garland, the third pilot, didn’t turn up any major safety issues in his record. As a skilled mechanic and aviator — with no Hollywood background, just like Berl — Garland was hired to teach Cruise how to fly a specific type of plane called a Cessna 414, one of the two that was used in the film. Production liked him so much that they brought him onto the set to do maintenance for all the aircraft and to act as Cruise’s flying double. (So much for Liman and Cruise’s claim that Cruise always does his own stunts no matter what.) On the fatal journey, Garland would become Berl’s mentor for the flight, like he had been to Cruise.
Except it wasn’t a Cessna they were flying. The plane that crashed, a Piper Smith Aerostar 600, is a particularly risky one, even for pilots who are skilled with other plane types. It’s sleek and fast, but has a reputation for safety issues and being difficult to fly. Thanks to its unusually high accident and fatality rate, it’s earned the nicknames “widow-maker” and “the Death Star.” Despite its infamy, it happened to be Cruise’s plane of choice for the film. When he first arrived in Colombia, he did so while piloting the Aerostar — specifically the one that ended up crashing, identified by the tail number N164HH. Not only did Cruise fly the Aerostar frequently on set and in the daily commutes, but he did so with ease; he has the distinction of being highly skilled in piloting the tricky aircraft.
That’s not the case for everyone. The Made investigations showed that, similar to how Garland was asked to fly the Cessna to double for Cruise, production wanted Berl to fly the Aerostar. Yet Berl informed them that he was neither trained nor comfortable flying the aircraft. He agreed to fly it eventually, but only once he was ready. Records show that he formally requested training materials and sufficient time to prepare before taking the wheel.
But, as usual on a Liman and Cruise set, Berl’s safety concerns were ignored. He was pressured to pilot the Aerostar without the preparation he requested. Multiple crew members said that just prior to takeoff on the fatal journey, there had been a quarrel involving the pilots and other production members. The argument had a sense of urgency to it. Cruise was originally on the Aerostar moments before it took off. He got out, Berl replaced him, and Cruise switched to a helicopter, arriving safely in Medellin.
The reason for the urgency? Production was horribly behind schedule thanks to Liman’s poor set management and Cruise’s ego-driven stunt decisions. “The demands of filming in Colombia, together with Cruise’s and director Doug Liman’s enthusiasm for multiple takes of lavish flying sequences, added hours to every filming day and added days to the schedule,” reads the Berl’s family’s lawsuit.
These avoidable delays put pressure on the rest of the team to make up for lost time. As it turns out, the quarrel happened because they’d just wrapped twelve hours of filming, and some of the team members wanted the chance to rest in their hotel before returning to set the next day — no matter what it cost to get there. “Apparently there was an argument about needing to leave immediately, even though they had some information about the weather that they should have stayed behind,” said a source about the FAA investigation. “But it was the jungle, and they wanted to get out of there. I was just told there was intense pressure to get out as soon as possible. That causes shortcuts.”
Indeed, production didn’t just pressure Berl to take his first Aerostar flight when he wasn’t ready. They pressured him to do so in bad weather, through terrain that they all knew was challenging even in the best of circumstances. This particular flight path has been called a “bungee jump” or a “roller coaster,” with pilots needing to go high to clear the mountains, then descending quickly and deeply to drop into the valley to land. A difficult feat, and the reason why the airport is closed a night. The Colombian investigation confirmed that Berl lacked familiarity with the rugged, mountainous landscape. An experienced Colombian pilot said that, despite his own familiarity with the terrain, he would not have flown in such weather, with fog rolling in to obscure visibility.
The red flags were numerous: An unusually risky plane. Exhaustion from a long day of filming. Difficult and unfamiliar terrain. Bad weather. Intense time pressure. An untrained pilot on his virgin flight for a new aircraft. Who on earth insisted that Berl — of all people — should pilot the plane in these circumstances?
That question will likely never get answered. Cruise’s involvement in the crash has been so ruthlessly minimized that it’s suppressed the full picture of what happened. Even though he was on the Aerostar and switched places with Berl, there is very little information on the quarrel that led to that decision. The FAA investigation is even hush-hush on the identities of those involved in the dispute. One of the missing details is that of Fred North, a famous stunt pilot like Purwin who served as the film’s aerial coordinator and was responsible for choosing the pilots for each flight during production. It would’ve been his duty to stop anyone from pressuring Berl into service for a flight he wasn’t qualified for. (Yet a quick glance at North’s portfolio suggests his appetite for risk is as high or even higher than Purwin’s.)
Indeed, it’s the conspicuous absence of both North and Cruise’s names in the dispute that suggests their involvement is far greater than what’s been disclosed. After all, the same report had no qualms about naming Purwin and condemning his safety record with extensive detail — and that’s an easy finger to point, since the dead can’t talk and no longer have a career to protect. The silence around Cruise, in contrast, is too loud.
Which begs the question: Was Berl made to feel like a “pussy” for refusing to fly the Aerostar before he was ready? A “wimp?”
While we may never know what words were said to convince Berl to sit in the pilot’s seat, what we do know is that his death is a direct consequence of Liman and Cruise creating an on-set culture of taking obscene, unnecessary risks to satisfy their own egos, and pressuring everyone else to join in. We know this because Purwin — who, as we now understand, was known for his own excessive risk-taking — emailed one of the film’s executive producers during filming out of concern for how far Liman and Cruise were taking things.
“You have no idea the exposure [Cruise] and the entire Aerial Team is realizing every time we get in the air. There’s a very ‘thin line’ between keeping all aerial activities safe and having an accident. Trust me on this,” Purwin wrote. In that same email, he described Made as “the most dangerous project I’ve ever encountered.”
It speaks volumes that Purwin, with his own history of safety violations and accidents, was alarmed by the risks that Liman and Cruise were taking to the point where he felt compelled to report it. After receiving Purwin’s warning, the executive producer then sent a formal complaint to the insurance company. “Liman and Cruise are adding entire scenes and aerial shots on the fly. Had to bring in Uni Safety to help wrangle them. In the last 48 hours this has become the most insane shit I’ve ever dealt with,” they wrote.
That’s right, Liman and Cruise weren’t just doing extremely high-risk flying stunts. They were doing extremely high-risk flying stunts and improvising them. No wonder Purwin spoke up. “Insane shit” is an understatement.
“We’re doing outrageous chase sequences,” Liman boasted in one interview. “You know, we’re treating airplanes like cars. No one’s ever done that before.”
Yes, there’s a reason for that — it’s reckless to the point of stupidity. Yet Liman continued to posit this as an impressive feat worthy of praise. “You’ve got a helicopter that isn’t a fast as the Aerostar that isn’t as fast as the jet, and it isn’t easy to see each other until you’re relatively close. And if you’re relatively close, you have the danger of hitting each other. There’s no road marks out there,” he said. “But it was exciting, and again, I’ve always believed in focusing on the details when it comes to action.”
Instagram posts from Purwin and North — taken during production while they worked on the film — reveal the horror of what Liman and Cruise were pushing the pilots to do on set. In some of the photos where the aircraft are almost on top of each other, one can see the tail number of the ill-fated Aerostar, N164HH.
Liman and Cruise’s excuse for doing these “exciting” stunts? Well, it’s what Barry Seal did in real life. On the run thanks to his dangerous dealings with both the Colombian cartel and American law enforcement, Seal was often forced to take extreme maneuvers with his planes in order to avoid detection or even getting gunned down.
“There’s this wish fulfillment,” Cruise said about Seal’s lawless lifestyle. “Someone who lived beyond the rules, in a way that was very unique to that time period.”
That wish fulfillment wasn’t hypothetical. Liman and Cruise ensured that whatever Seal did, Cruise would try to replicate it. If Seal landed a plane at night on a remote airstrip lit only by the headlights of a pickup truck, Cruise would do it too. If Seal put his plane on autopilot and abandoned the cockpit to go to the back and dump drugs out of the hold, Cruise would do it too. If Seal had to escape radar detection by flying “prop wash” — i.e. flying so close to the surface of the ocean or rivers that the plane’s propellers would splash water onto the windshield — Cruise would do it too.
For Seal, these maneuvers were a matter of life and death. But for Cruise, it was a matter of vanity. Yet Cruise didn’t do these harebrained stunts alone; he forced the other pilots to join him as either his co-pilots, or to follow closely in another aircraft to film him. He pushed them to the limit of their abilities, toying with their lives — and they knew it. In Purwin’s whistleblower email to the executive producer, Purwin noted that it required tremendous skill to ensure “[Tom Cruise], Caesar, and I wouldn’t be coming home in a box.” (Caesar referring to César Charlone, director of photography.)
Except, of course, Purwin tragically did come home in a box.
Meanwhile, Cruise came home unscathed. It’s important to note that during filming in Colombia in September 2015, Cruise was no longer in the Hollywood doghouse, but had regained his standing. Although Tomorrow didn’t do well at the box office, it started to gain a cult following after it transitioned to home video formats in October 2014. Cruise’s partnership with screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie was also paying off, delivering a much-needed box office hit in August 2015 with the Misson: Impossible franchise. Then, two days before the crash, Liman and Cruise announced they’d be working on a third film together: the “Luna” project (now “Luna Park”) that Liman had been trying to get off the ground for years. Cruise was back in a power position, riding high.
Until it all came crashing down.
Production tried to keep media coverage of the fatal crash, multiple lawsuits, and egregious safety issues caused by Liman and Cruise to a minimum. The film was originally called Mena — based on the name of an Arkansas town where some of the events took place — but the film was quietly renamed and the release date pushed back by nine months. A clever move, as most of the headlines about the crash mentioned Mena as the film title, and now, with the change to American Made, it became much harder to connect the events to the film. Liman would also later reveal that he was banned from flying during the rest of production. (Too little, too late.)
Still, the truth of what happened eventually emerged in the courts. While the Berl lawsuit didn’t name Liman or Cruise as defendants, it described them as “negligent.” (Purwin’s family, for some reason, decided to absolve Cruise and only blamed Liman and the studios.) The production companies Imagine, Quadrant, and Cross Creek Pictures were forced to admit that they had representatives on set who were responsible for enforcing safety standards and didn’t. They, along with the film’s insurance company, settled with the Berl family and paid them an undisclosed amount for Carlos Berl’s death.
But it took two years for that truth to emerge, and by the time it did, the crash had mostly faded from public memory. Not only that, but as followers of the Lively v. Wayfarer Studios case are now well aware, it was all too easy for Cruise to spin the story in the media knowing that the public had little familiarity with court filings to find out the truth. Indeed, one month before the settlement, Good Morning America aired a segment about the lawsuits featuring their chief legal analyst, Dan Abrams, and the former editor-in-chief of People magazine, Larry Hackett, to downplay Cruise’s involvement and villainize the Berl family’s wrongful death lawsuit.
“The question becomes, did they need to include [Liman and Cruise] in the context of the lawsuit, or is this an effort to draw Tom Cruise’s name into the lawsuit?” asked Abrams. He went on to hint that the family was being dramatic in using the legal term negligent, and that the lawsuit’s claim that Cruise should’ve been piloting the Aerostar instead of Berl — because Cruise knew how to pilot the Aerostar and Berl didn’t — was nothing more than “a personal attack against Tom Cruise.”
Hackett then bolstered the narrative that Liman and Cruise were being unfairly blamed. “The fact of the matter is, I don’t think Doug Liman or Tom Cruise knew exactly how dangerous it may have been,” said Hackett. He suggested the timing of the lawsuit had more to do with affecting the marketing of the film than a genuine complaint. “It’s no coincidence that the lawsuit’s being filed now, and the movie opens next Friday. This is a conscious effort.”
Which is a bald-faced lie. The lawsuits were filed more than a year prior, with Purwin’s family filing first in April 2016, and Berl’s family filing in September 2016. The segment aired in September 2017.
Another lie is that Liman was unaware of the risks. “We knew it every day filming that these airplanes are dangerous, and then we’re doing dangerous things with the airplanes,” said Liman in an interview, five days before the GMA segment.
Aside from Liman’s accidental foot-in-mouth confession, the aggressive shield of PR spin ultimately minimized Liman and Cruise’s culpability and allowed them to remain unrepentant about the fatal crash. Neither provided a comment on the article detailing the results of the FAA and Colombian investigations despite requests. Cruise has stay committed to silence, never once speaking about the incident. In contrast, Liman eventually provided a comment.
“Just that I’m a pilot and Tom Cruise is a pilot. I don’t know anything specific about the accident, because it didn’t happen during the filming. They were just moving one of the airplanes. I was just going to say that it’s just a reminder — something all pilots know — which is that flying is really dangerous.”
Unsurprisingly, it’s an arms-length statement that not only shows no empathy for Berl, Purwin, Garland, or their grieving families, but subtly yet intentionally mischaracterizes what happened.
But the truly ghoulish revelation is that Liman learned nothing from this tragedy. Before Liman and Cruise got their hands on it, the original film script focused more on Barry Seal’s relationship to the small town of Mena, Arkansas for which the script was named. Liman and Cruise filmed some of those scenes before deciding to pivot with their rewrites and improvisations. In a behind-the-scenes featurette, Liman discussed one such deleted scene, where Seal meets the sheriff of Mena by crashing his plane into the sheriff’s office.
“We obviously put a fair amount of effort into doing [the] crash. I mean, not that much effort, we’re a lower budget movie. We didn’t actually crash an airplane out there in any form. It may even been part of why the sequence didn’t make the final cut — it was the only time we cheated and Tom didn’t actually fly an airplane,” said Liman. “I think the moment we weren’t going to have the real flying and the real crash to set the scene up, I think that’s what doomed [it].”
That’s right. Liman thought a real plane crash would’ve made the scene worthy of staying in the film. And he expressed this belief long after the fatal crash in Colombia happened.
It’s unfortunately clear that despite multiple deaths on his sets, Liman continues to view those sets as his personal playground where the cast and crew are nothing more than his toys. This view would not be shaken in future projects either, where he would go on to describe his lead actors as “my little action figures.” So it’s no surprise that, when asked about his reputation for risk-taking and rule-breaking during the Made promotional tour, Liman again showed no remorse.
“Here I am all these years later with a career I’m really proud of,” he said. “I guess if you can get away with it, it’s okay. That’s how I relate to Barry Seal — That’s how he made it.”
Liman did get away with it. As did Cruise. Although it seems it was Cruise’s PR machine and not Liman’s that buried the truth about the egregious safety issues they caused that led to the crash, Liman indirectly benefited from the tactics, as it kept both their names out of the media. Still, the two were forced to part ways and put a pause on their creative partnership, quietly shelving “Luna Park.” But only for three years. As soon as they felt the coast was clear, they reunited, announcing in May 2020 their intent to make a movie in space together.
Three years of laying low was a small price to pay. After all, the ones who paid the ultimate price were Carlos Berl and Alan Purwin. After the crash, the two pilots boarded one final flight, leaving Colombia to return home to their families.
Except this time, they went in body bags.
TO BE CONTINUED
