Doug Liman (born July 24, 1965) is an American film director and producer best known for The Bourne Identity (2002) and Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005).
Liman is the son of Arthur L. Liman, a New York lawyer well known for his public service, which included serving as chief counsel for the Senate Iran-Contra hearings.
Liman began making short films while still in junior high school and studied at International Center of Photography in New York City. While attending Brown University, he helped to co-found the student-run cable television station and served as its first station manager. Liman attended the graduate program at University of Southern California, where he was tapped to helm his first project in 1993, the comedy thriller Getting In/Student Body.
Liman became attached to direct Swingers when its screenwriter Jon Favreau turned down offers from studios who wanted to cast established actors. The director agreed to cast Favreau and his friends (Vince Vaughn, Ron Livingston, and Patrick Van Horn) in this comedy about struggling actors amid the L.A. club milieu. The result was a $250,000 dialogue-propeled film that became a sleeper hit and critical success. In addition to establishing a cult following, it jump-started the careers of the featured actors.
Liman's next effort, Go (1999) tracked the events of one night through three different and points of view as plot lines diverged and reconverged; doing double duty as cinematographer. The film made a profit at the box office grossing $28.4 million worldwide against a $6.5 million budget.
In 1999 Liman shot a commercial for Nike in which Tiger Woods, without letting the ball touch the ground, repeatedly bounced a ball on his club and then drove it into the distance.
Liman enjoyed further commercial success when he helmed the action thriller The Bourne Identity (2002), an adaptation of author Robert Ludlum's novel. The film that Liman delivered lacked sufficient action sequences to satisfy test groups of young males, so Universal Studios required him to shoot almost twenty minutes of replacement scenes. Liman remained with the Bourne franchise through its next two installments (2004's The Bourne Supremacy and 2007's The Bourne Ultimatum), but served instead as an executive producer while Paul Greengrass took over directing duties on both films. Building on his success, Liman executive produced and directed the pilot episode (Premiere) as well as the second episode (The Model Home) of the successful Fox prime time drama The O.C. (2003–2007). Liman produced and directed a series of comedy shorts for the Chrysler and Cannes Film Festivals, entitled Indie Is Great.
Liman also directed Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), a comedic thriller about an increasingly distant married couple, both secretly assassins, who are hired to kill each other. The film, his most commercially-successful to date, is also well known for the off-screen romance between stars Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, who developed a high-profile relationship after making the film. In 2005, Liman signed on to direct the pilot episode of NBC's television series Heist, which is about a season-long attempt to rob three jewelry stores on Beverly Hills' swanky Rodeo Drive.
His film adaptation of Steven Gould's science fiction novel Jumper was released in 2008.
