A love for touch football sparked director Doug Liman’s success in movies.
Liman, the director of the popular movies “Swingers” and “Go,” told approximately 200 students in McCormick Auditorium Wednesday night that when he moved to Los Angeles he picked roommates who would attract potential football teammates.
“To fill the missing components of my life I moved into an apartment with cute roommates,” Liman said. “I figured the guys would come flocking.”
Liman’s theory was proven true his first weekend in L.A. when he took his roommates to a party and almost immediately guys hit on them.
“I’m thinking, ‘This is great, we haven’t been at this party 60 seconds and I already have a teammate for touch football in the backyard,'” he said.
Liman found more than a teammate in John Favreau, a man who struck out with his roommate but had written a screenplay for “Swingers” that was a perfect match for the aspiring director.
Favreau wrote “Swingers” based on five years of night life with his friends, and during the next six months of watching the group, Liman saw potential in the script.
“I had seen the movie,” he said. “I had seen (Favreau) crash and burn with a dozen women in a night.”
Liman scraped together a shoestring budget and shot “Swingers” in 21 days in public places throughout Los Angeles and in Las Vegas. He said he expected to get a “resume film” out of his effort, and even by making the movie he risked his reputation.
“Making a film for $200,000 in L.A. is admitting no one trusts you with more money,” he said. “It’s embarrassing.
“I was running into people I know with a camera on my shoulder lighting it with lights I bought at Home Depot. The town had written me off. It was like, ‘He thinks he’s making a feature film.'”
Swingers became a cult classic after its release in 1996, making $4.5 million at the box office and earning Liman a 1997 MTV award for Best New Filmmaker.
Liman called meeting Favreau “a fluke,” and said he has benefitted from others in his career.
Coming off his second major movie, “Go,” he agreed to swallow his pride and shoot second unit on a Nike commercial starring Tiger Woods. But during the lunch break on the set, he was handed a camera and asked if he would like to make his own Tiger Woods commercial.
Liman said he had seen Woods juggling a ball with his club between shoots earlier in the day and asked him to do the same on camera. The result, Woods juggling the ball between his legs before launching it into the horizon, was the No. 1 commercial for Nike that year.
“The most important thing you can do is get in the game,” Liman said. “Put yourself out there and you’ll get breaks like that.”
He told students one of the best ways to get exposure is with the Internet and generating “content to take advantage of the technology.”
His new Internet company, Nibblebox.com, solicits entertainment ideas from students. Those with the best ideas are given film equipment and paired with a Hollywood professional who serves as a mentor.
“It’s an amazing time to be a student,” he said. “Studios are gambling on students for what people will watch on the Internet.”
