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The COVID heist film began with a challenge: writing a script, funding a plot, and rushing into production, all on lockdown.
Photo: Susie Allnutt
For Doug Liman, the process of making a film called Locked during the coronavirus-induced lockdown – a movie that in all likelihood will be watched by people still stranded – began with what he calls “a crazy idea”. At a Zoom reunion in July, the filmmaker behind hits like Edge of tomorrow and Bourne identity worked out a plan with writer-producer Steven Knight (Peaky blinders, Eastern Promises) to write a screenplay, land finance and rush into physical production no later than September 2020.
Despite a quasi-industrial shutdown of filming (the titles of mega-budgetary events Mission: impossible 7 and Jurassic World: Dominion being rare exceptions at the time), besides the almost “totally uninsurable” nature of their project, Liman and Knight felt confident they could pull it off. The final result? Locked was filmed at lightning speed this year and will arrive on HBO Max on January 14. In the serial-comic feature, Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor play a London couple on the verge of breaking up; Suffering from a forced cohabitation in quarantine, they hatch a plan to do a daring jewelry heist at Harrods, the world’s most glamorous (and fortified) department store.
“The script and our experience of making the film are almost the same story,” Liman tells Vulture via the Zoom conference link. “Because Steve and I are locked in and we’re like, ‘Let’s run away and try this crazy thing. When there is nothing in production, every actor is available. We would be the first independent film. It is totally unknown territory.
“And the story we’re going to tell is this couple trying this daring thing to steal Harrods,” he continues. “I don’t know which was more risky: the theft of the diamond or the attempt to make a film under those circumstances.”
Liman, of course, is no stranger to blowing the boundaries of conventional cinema to meet his whims. Over a rich quarter-century career that encompassed his independent breakthrough in 1996 Swingers, the biopic nominated for the Palme d’Or Fair game, and action comedy Mr. and Mrs. Smith (the crucible in which the tabloid entity known as Brangelina was forged in 2005), he has repeatedly infuriated collaborators, ignored studio “notes”, and worked overtime and tens of millions of dollars. dollars on the budget in search of its own subjective variety of cinematic excellence – a process that detractors and admirers have come to know as “Limania.”
Directing Tom Cruise in the 2014 sci-fi action thriller Edge of tomorrow, a planned two-week shoot involving an alien invasion on the beach at Normandy in France extended into three months of grueling and mock fighting thanks to the “workshop-y” style described by the director. While filming on Bourne in 2001, the director kept his production crew working overtime to light up a forest outside of prague so that Liman could play paintball. Then, when production delays, general chaos on set, and bitter arguments with producers over this film resulted in a $ 10 million over budget, Liman reportedly considered selling his director’s credit on eBay ( with Universal Chairman Stacey Snider threatening that he was “never to work again”). Perhaps most notoriously, when 20th Century Fox attempted to impose tighter financial limits on the filmmaker after Mr. and Mrs. Smith went over budget by $ 26 million, Liman dove into his own savings account to build a set in his mother’s garage in upstate New York – then ruthlessly destroyed it with a hand grenade.
For a filmmaker who has shown little qualms about flying by the seat of his pants (besides repeatedly stealing in the face of the film convention while actually stealing … more on that in a minute), Liman has established a certain number of hard-and-fast rules governing production on Locked. Before a single word of the script was written, he and Knight tried to do something that could be shot “safely,” in which the leads could exist in a quarantine bubble and almost anyone could. be filmed remotely. The cast were chosen based on some real-life parallels: Ben Stiller, for his part, landed the role of Hathaway’s smarmy boss in part because he, like the character, had a teenage son living with him. under the rules of the refuge on site. Anticipating that the pandemic would worsen during the filming, they would film quickly. And it would all be done on the ultracheap – although Liman declined to reveal how much Locked cost, he dismissed a report that the film was shot for $ 10 million, insisting that its actual budget “started with three.”
“The idea was that I would do it to spec, Steve Knight would do it to spec,” says Liman, using industry jargon for “on speculation” – that is, unsolicited by a studio, without any commission from any backer and therefore much more risky for the creative team. “I was like, ‘As long as we keep our production budget… we can go in without COVID insurance.’ The approach was this: we’re going to do this as cheaply as possible because we don’t know if it will be possible to finish this movie.
The entire cast, which also includes Ben Kingsley, Mindy Kaling, Stephen Merchant, and Lucy Boynton, signed on without reading a finished script. The deal was that there would be no covers, and the dialogue they established would effectively be the “first draft” of Knight’s script.
For Ejiofor and Hathaway, the frenetic pace of making principal photography in London in just 18 days required unusual shortcuts for the actors as well as a new tolerance for Limania. “One day it started to rain when it wasn’t supposed to and I needed to change the order of the scenes,” recalls the director. “I turned to Annie and Chiwetel and I was like, ‘I have to shoot tomorrow’s job today.’ And Chiwetel says, “I haven’t even looked at it yet. And Annie said, ‘I started to memorize it but I never memorized it.’
The week before, Liman recalls, he and his cast made fun of a photo of The Godfather, in which Marlon Brando has his lines recorded in another actor’s jacket. A few days later, it was acceptable practice for their set. “For this scene we had to record lines everywhere [Hathaway’s and Ejiofor’s] eyelines were and go for it. And that’s my favorite scene in the movie, by the way, ”Liman says. (Hathaway, for his part, called the shot in the curve-flattening conditions both “very normal” and “completely wild.”)
LockedHarrods ‘third act depended entirely on Harrods’ cooperation: the luxury menagerie of Knightsbridge which had never ceased to function in its 172 year history, and which, moreover, had never allowed a film to turn between its walls. By exploiting the same kind of ‘the world has been turned upside down, normal rules no longer apply, and why not?’ prospects like their characters, Liman and his producers approached the department store in July anticipating difficult negotiations. “We said, ‘We don’t have a script. We have no idea for a movie. In fact, if you don’t say yes, we’re not going to write the script because we don’t have a plan B. It can only be Harrods, ”recalls the director. “Under normal circumstances, Harrods would never have said yes. But again, these are not normal circumstances.
The store not only ditched its food halls and retail showrooms to production, but Harrods enlisted its staff as extras and even gave filmmakers access to its deepest sanctuary. “We decided that we wanted to shoot in the Harrods chest – this is where the diamond [the characters want to steal] would come from, ”Liman says. “And Harrods was like, ‘No, this is our safe.’ And we’re like, ‘Okay, will you let us see your safe? Just so that we can try to recreate it somehow? It’s in this secret part of the building. They took our production designer and he took some pictures. From there, they were like, “Okay, we’re going to let everyone in. You can shoot in the safe. You just can’t show where it is in the building. I found myself in the vault with my producer Allison Winter. There is an airlock to enter. The person who brought us there came out. I look at Allison and I’m like, “We’re alone in the Harrods vault. We have literally become one with our characters. ”
Or Locked can be understood as a sort of exercise to push the boundaries of cinematic compulsion – to find unexpected freedoms within a forced enclosure, say – Liman’s next film aims to ignite an even less mapped territory. In May, Deadline announced he would “boldly go where no director has gone before,” filming an independently edited action-adventure feature film with Tom Cruise in space. Elon Musk’s Space X and NASA are said to be somehow involved. To date, little has been revealed about the project.
Liman hesitates when I ask about this film’s plot points, timeline and logistics challenge, saying he’s “not ready to talk about it just yet.” But as a licensed pilot who flies his own light aircraft whenever his busy schedule allows, the director has revealed an unexpected way to go. Locked helped him prepare – not only to escape Earth orbit with Cruise, but to keep pace with his own Limania.
“I flew to the other side of the Atlantic to make this film,” says the filmmaker. Locked. “It was terrifying. Landing in Greenland is not for the faint of heart! Most people think of astronaut training to be very physical, but more like pilot training. I just thought I should push myself out of my comfort zone. Because it’s gonna be terrifying to go to space. I think because of the space film I’m in a state of mind where I’m more open to taking big, big swings.
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