How Harrods was blocked from leaving a film crew in their coffers

For Doug Liman, the process of shooting a film called Braided during the coronavirus-induced blockade – a film that, in all likelihood, will be watched by people still trapped in the blockade – started with what he calls “an insane idea”. During a Zoom meeting in July, the filmmaker behind such hits as Limit of tomorrow and The Bourne Identity drew up a plan with screenwriter and producer Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders, Eastern promises) to write a roadmap, land financing and accelerate physical production by September 2020.

Despite an almost stoppage of filming across the industry (the megabudget event titles Mission: Impossible 7 and Jurassic World: Domain being rare exceptions at the moment), in addition to the almost “completely insecure” nature of their project, Liman and Knight felt confident that they could accomplish their feat. The end result? Braided was filmed at breakneck speed this year and will hit HBO Max on January 14th. In the feature film seriocomic, Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor play a couple living in London on the verge of separation; suffering from forced quarantine cohabitation, they devise a plan to pull off an audacious jewel theft at Harrods, the most glamorous (and heavily fortified) department store in the world.

“The script and our experience of making the film are almost the same story,” Liman told Vulture via the Zoom conference link. “Because Steve and I are stuck and we think, ‘Let’s get away with trying this crazy thing.’ When there is nothing going into production, all the actors are available. We would be the first independent film. It is totally unknown territory. “

“And the story we’re going to tell is this couple who are trying this audacious thing of stealing Harrods,” he continues. “I’m not sure which one was more risky: stealing the diamond or trying to make a film under these circumstances.”

Liman, of course, is no stranger to blasting the boundaries of mainstream cinema to suit your whims. Throughout a quarter-century historical career spanning its 1996 independent discovery Swingers, the biopic indicated by the Palme d’Or Fair play, and the action comedy Mr and Mrs Smith (the crucible in which the tabloid entity known as Brangelina was forged in 2005), he infuriated collaborators repeatedly, ignored studio “notes” and went beyond time and tens of millions of dollars over budget in search of his own subjective variety of cinematic excellence – a process that both detractors and admirers now know as “Limania”.

Directing Tom Cruise in the 2014 science fiction action thriller Limit of tomorrow, a planned two-week shoot involving an alien invasion on Normandy beach in France, which lasted three months of strenuous and simulated fighting, courtesy of the director’s self-described “workshop” style. While filming in Bourne in 2001, the director maintained his production team overtime to light a forest outside Prague so that Liman could play paintball. Then, when production delays, general chaos on set and screaming discussions with the producers of that film culminated in a $ 10 million budget overflow, Liman considered selling his director’s credit on eBay (with then-president of Universal Stacey Snider threatening that he was “I’ll never work again”). Perhaps most notoriously, when 20th Century Fox tried to impose stricter financial limits on the filmmaker after Mr and Mrs Smith With a budget of $ 26 million over budget, Liman became famous for using his own savings account to build a scenario in his mother’s garage in upstate New York – and then unceremoniously destroying it with a grenade. hand.

For a filmmaker who showed little scruple about flying through the seat of his pants (in addition to repeatedly flying in the face of movie conventions … more on that in a minute), Liman established a series of rules that govern production in Braided. Before a single word of the script was written, he and Knight endeavored to do something that could be filmed “safely”, where the leads could exist in a quarantine bubble and almost everyone else could be filmed from a distance. The actors were cast based on certain real-life parallels: Ben Stiller, for example, got the role of Hathaway’s sycophantic boss in part because he, like the character, had a teenage son living with him under shelter rules at the site. Predicting that the pandemic would worsen with the shooting, they would shoot quickly. And the whole thing would be done in the ultracheap – although Liman refused to reveal how much Braided cost, he dismissed a report that the film had been shot for $ 10 million, insisting that his actual budget “started with three”.

“The idea was that I would do it to specification, Steve Knight would do it to specification,” says Liman, using industry jargon for “speculation” – that is, unsolicited by a studio, with no commission from any financier and therefore much more risky for the creative team. “I was like, ‘As long as we stick to our production budget … we can continue without COVID insurance.’ The approach was: let’s do this as cheaply as possible, because we don’t know if it will be possible to finish this film. “

The entire cast, which also includes Ben Kingsley, Mindy Kaling, Stephen Merchant and Lucy Boynton, signed on without reading the finished script. The understanding was that there would be no remake and the dialogue they enacted would effectively be the “first draft” of Knight’s script.

For Ejiofor and Hathaway, the breakneck pace of completing main photography in London in just 18 days required some unusual shortcuts for the actors, as well as a newfound tolerance for Limania. “One day in particular, it started to rain when it wasn’t expected and I had to change the order of the scenes”, recalls the director. “I turned to Annie and Chiwetel and thought, ‘I have to film tomorrow’s work today.’ And Chiwetel is like, ‘I haven’t even looked yet’. And Annie said, ‘I started to memorize, but in no way did I memorize.’ “

The week before, Liman recalls, he and his cast were laughing at a photo of The Godfather, where Marlon Brando has his lines recorded inside another actor’s jacket. A few days later, it was an acceptable practice for the group. “For that scene, we really had to record lines wherever [Hathaway’s and Ejiofor’s] eyelines have come and gone. And it’s my favorite scene in the movie, by the way, ”said Liman. (Hathaway, for his part, called the footage under flattening circumstances of the curve “very normal” and “completely wild.”)

BraidedThe third act of was entirely dependent on the cooperation of Harrods: the luxury zoo in Knightsbridge which has never ceased operations in its 172 years of history and, moreover, never allowed a film to run inside its walls. Taking advantage of the same kind of “the world has turned upside down, normal rules no longer apply, and why not?” perspective on how their characters, Liman and his producers approached the department store in July anticipating complicated negotiations. “We said, ‘We don’t have a script. We don’t have an idea for a movie. In fact, if you don’t say yes, we won’t 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 gave up its dining halls and retail showrooms for production, Harrods called on its staff to appear as an extra and even allowed filmmakers to access its most intimate sanctuary. “We decided that we wanted to shoot in the Harrods safe – that’s where the diamond [the characters want to steal] would come, ”says Liman. “And Harrods said, ‘No, this is our safe.’ And we thought, ‘Okay, could you let us see your safe? Just to try to recreate it in some way? ‘It’s in this secret place in the building. They took our production designer and he took some pictures. From there, they said, ‘Okay, let’s let everyone in. You can shoot in the safe. You just cannot show where you are in the building. ‘I found myself in the safe with my producer Allison Winter. There is an air lock to enter. The person who brought us there left. I look at Allison and think, ‘We are alone in the Harrods safe. We literally become one with our characters’ ”.

Where Braided it can be understood as a kind of exercise in pushing the limits of cinematic restriction – in finding unexpected freedoms in forced closure, say – Liman’s next film aims to enter even less mapped territory. In May, Deadline announced that he would “boldly go where no film director has ever been”, filming an independently produced action and adventure feature starring Tom Cruise in space. Elon Musk’s Space X and NASA are somehow involved. So far, little more has been revealed about the project.

Liman hesitates when I ask about the plot points of the film, timeline and challenging logistics, saying he “is not ready to talk about it yet”. But as a licensed pilot who flies his own aircraft whenever his busy schedule allows, the director has revealed an unexpected way of Braided helped him get ready – not just to escape Earth’s orbit with Cruise, but to keep pace with his own Limania.

“I crossed the Atlantic myself to make this film”, says the filmmaker about Braided. “It was scary. Landing in Greenland is not for the faint of heart! Most people think of astronaut training as very physical, but it is more like pilot training. I just thought that I should push myself out of my comfort zone. Because it will be scary to go to outer space. I think because of the space film, I’m in a mindset where I’m more open to big, big swings. “