By Gill Pringle and Travis Johnson
Based on a true story, American Made sees Tom Cruise step into the shoes of maverick pilot Barry Seal who, in the ’70s and ’80s, ran what was essentially a covert airline for the CIA out of the small town of Mena, Arkansas. Seal and his team transported drugs, money, guns, and guerilla soldiers into and out of Central America for a decade, in the process becoming embroiled with Pablo Escobar’s Medellin Cartel and the Iran-Contra scandal, which saw the White House investigated for illegal arms sales to Iran in order to found anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua. It’s a fascinating slice of hidden history, and Liman has a personal connection to it…
Your father, Arthur L. Liman, was chief counsel for the Senate Iran-Contra hearings in the mid-’80s. Did that connection bring you to American Made and Barry Seal’s story?
No, this film was not about Iran-Contra. I mean maybe in part because that’s my father. And I’m not trying to fill his shoes. It’s almost Shakespearean. I have to chart my own path. So I decidedly am not telling Oliver North’s story. I know there’s a great movie about Oliver North. In fact, when I made Bourne Identity, I based Chris Cooper’s character on Oliver North. And Julia Stiles is based on Fawn Hall.
No, it was Gary Spinelli’s screenplay. As I was reading it, I was falling in love with Barry Seal, and this kind of rule breaker, and was falling in love with this side of the CIA I never really thought about, which is that the people who work for the CIA are recruited from college campuses, like the best college campuses. They were recruited from Ivy League schools, and they’re like the straight A students. They’re the valedictorians. But once those people are working for the CIA, their job is to now scour the prisons and detention halls, to hire the people who are actually going to go out in the field and do the real work. The people who are going to break the law on behalf of the CIA. So, you have this amazing dynamic of kind of the rule followers, who work for the CIA, in business with scoundrels, who are going to try to abuse the hell out of that relationship; because you’re looking for those qualities in the first place. You’re looking for people who have an inclination to break the law. And I thought “Wow, that is such an interesting dynamic!”
And so it seems like you worked quite closely with [Barry’s widow] Debbie Seal? Why didn’t you call her Debbie in the film? Why does she become “Lucy”?
Because Barry had more than one wife, and he had children from different marriages, and we thought, we would take the qualities of Debbie. In fact, this is one of those movies where we didn’t have to exaggerate from reality. A lot of ways we had to rein it in to make it more believable. We tried to capture the feeling of the marriage with Debbie Seal, but give it a fictional name. Tom and I were decidedly not making a biopic. We wanted the spirit of Barry.
What was it that caught your attention on the subject matter? Was it something you read or was it something that always kind of stuck with you?
I started with Gary Spinelli’s script that Brian Grazer sent me. And then I started reading this story and I just fell in love with Barry Seal and it was, I am kind of a rule breaker myself, and I loved the sort of kind of this celebration of a life led outside of the normal boundaries.
You fly, so did that spark any additional interest?
Oh yeah, flying and rule breaking, because in a way flying is one area where I don’t break rules. I think part of why I find flying so soothing is because it’s the one thing that I try to do the same every single time. Like when you land, you want to cross over the runway at 85 knots every single time. Maybe 84, maybe 86, but it’s like my movies and the rest of my life I am never trying to repeat myself. But flying you want every flight to be the same and by the numbers, so I kind of was attracted to this other version of flying, this Wild West, flying and you basically couldn’t get away with today. I mean a reason to tell a period story from the ‘80s is that it’s really the last days of the American West. And the American West didn’t end in the 19th century, its people that were flying airplanes in the ‘80s were still kind of in this lawless, that kind of freedom, was still possible in the skies in the ‘80s, not so today.
Because there is this incredible moral ambiguity to the story of he is doing bad things, but we like him and we want him to get away with it.
Well, he is not in the drug business. The drug business is decidedly bad. But he is in the transportation business and he is like the Federal Express for the underworld and he doesn’t care what is in the back of his airplane, he just cares how heavy it is. And I have always been drawn to anti-heroes and I really don’t know if I could ever make a Tom Hanks movie, like a movie where your hero is really just a hero. And it’s part of what I love about working with Tom Cruise. When I approached him on American Made and it was like, here is a character who for him morality isn’t even part of the thinking, we came up with this philosophy that if you are walking down the street and you see a hundred dollar bill sitting on the sidewalk, you might as well pick it up, otherwise someone else is going to take it. And that sort of quantifies Barry Seal’s crass pursuit of opportunity.
The movie is also done in a very entertaining style, and it also could have turned into serious heavy drama, but you didn’t do that. So how did you decide to go with this tone, this style?
Gary Spinelli’s script already had some of the comedic tone in it, and I workshop my movies and Tom Cruise and I have a process now where we tear some things apart and in pursuit of new ideas, but Gary’s script was very much about the CIA setting up this outrageous operation in this little town in Arkansas. And the humour of the arrogance of people in Washington DC being like ‘we set this up in Arkansas and no one will pay attention’, but what about the people who live in Arkansas? And you could see how you could think no one is going to pay attention because they are in Arkansas, and that is arrogant thinking, but meanwhile, there are people living in Mina. It is a real place and there are people living there and suddenly they are living next door to this outrageous CIA operation.
There was humour in Gary Spinelli’s script, but also I knew some of these events firsthand, because my father ran the investigation into these events. But as deadly serious as my father’s work was and it involved the possible impeachment of a very popular President, he also was very amused by the details and would recount some of the stories to me over dinner, laughing about them. And so I had a filter already when I was looking at this story that I could just hear my father’s sense of humour and hear his laughter as I was looking at some of these scenes, so that was a big influence on me in terms of looking at the comedy in the story.
The cinematic device of Tom recording into the video and how it plays out, did Barry actually do that, or is that something that you just kind of added to tell the story?
No, Barry towards the end of his life, started doing interviews, because he knew the end was coming.
Do you have those?
Yeah. And so he showed off everything, he showed how he dumped off the cocaine out of the airplanes. So we first tried doing it as an interview and really copying and we actually even copied some of the actual words in those interviews. And it didn’t work, and the film had sort of matured beyond that. And so we came up with the idea of the device of Barry recording himself and we could get a little bit more intimacy and also it sort of tells the audience right at the beginning that the film may not end well. Which I think is an important thing to put over the film because you are right, the film does not have morality and it doesn’t challenge what Barry Seal is doing. I kind of like celebrating characters and not judging them.
How advantageous was it having your lead already know how to fly? I mean, I am sure that is probably what drew him to the story, but did you sometimes have to pull Tom from the cockpit and go no, somebody else is going to do this?
No he did all his own flying in the movie. Tom does all his own stunts, it’s my second film with him and I have never done something with a stunt double with Tom. We have had, the most we have had is where you have a double do a scene once, so Tom can watch it and see what it looks like, and then he goes in and does it for real and he does it even better.
Spielberg said about Tom Cruise that he is the greatest movie director not currently directing movies. But he really can sit there and watch a double do a stunt and look at the monitor and then he will go in and be like ‘okay now I know what it looks like and I can go in and do it better and really make it look like it makes sense for camera’. And when it came to the flying, I am a pilot and I was really interested in leaning on the details of these small planes and their limitations and creating drama and tension from that and in the same way that Bourne Identity, I could have Bourne Identity in which Jason Bourne takes a Lamborghini and it’s a high speed chase through Paris in a Lamborghini, but I was interested in what would it be like if you were in this shitty little car that doesn’t have much acceleration and make that part of the challenge facing your hero, are the limitations of the car. So when I looked at the flying in American Made and that these were going to be propeller airplanes and I fly a propeller airplane, I know the limitations, and they are not like fighter jets. They can’t just point straight up at the sky and they are going to have trouble clearing trees at the end of runways and I was really interested in portraying and leaning in on the real details and the real limitations of the airplane and then creating suspense and action through that.
American Made is in cinemas on August 24, 2017. read our review here.