Collider: I was going to say to you, how did that affect you as a filmmaker?  Did you …?

Doug: I’m basically like I’ll shoot and re-shoot if I that option is available to me, but on “Swingers” I couldn’t re-shoot anything, so I just got it right the first time.  So I’ll kind of…in my gut I know what the restrictions are so in the case of the Coliseum I knew it was a one-shot deal, so we did more rehearsals to get it right the first time, whereas maybe if I had the ability to go back I’d rather not over-rehearse it to take a chance at getting something truly fresh and original, but knowing that also I may have to go back and re-shoot because we’re not rehearsing.

Collider: So I actually wanted to ask you, the film has a running time of around 90 something minutes I believe.  I wanted to know are there any key scenes—did you have a lot of deleted scenes on this or was it all on the screen?

Doug: It’s basically all on the…there’s like 2 deleted scenes.  Basically it’s that we paced the movie up…it went from being 2 hours to 90 minutes and that’s without taking anything out of it….I wanted to apply…hopefully this will make sense to you…when you first edit a movie, the characters…the first thing you do is you cut out what is called the shoe leather, so anything where someone walks into a room or walks out of a room, anything that gets a character from point A to point B that’s not necessary—you just try to cut to all the good stuff and get rid of anything that’s not important in between.  That’s called cutting out the shoe leather and that’s how you usually get a movie from 2-1/2 hours to 2 hours—your standard movie.  In this movie, the characters themselves are cutting out the shoe leather because they’re teleporters.  Why wouldn’t they cut just to the good part of the scene?  So, you’re already starting with a movie where the characters themselves are going to be living at a pace equivalent to sort of a tightly edited movie. Then what’s the role of the editor in the case where the actor’s are sort of doing the editing in the first place where the characters are already their own lives before you even get a chance to start as a film editor?  So, I toyed with both sort of keeping it in the actors pace and I really felt we should pace it up and try to communicate the speed with which somebody who could teleport would live their life.  And when the film starts and David Rice tells us how many places he visited that morning alone, you know, the rest of the film was an attempt to try to communicate the feeling of what that really would be like. So for an older audience, the ending may move so fast that they may not even know all the places that the finale action sequence takes place in, but you know it was really important for me to try to communicate the emotion of what that would feel like.

Collider: I think actually you did a really good job with that.  I wanted to know—you seem to really like this character and this universe. Assuming that the film does pretty well at the box office, would you just right back in and do a sequel and do you have any ideas for a sequel?

I actually have a ton of ideas for the sequel because this is whole new arena for me and so my mind was in overdrive the whole time and most of the ideas I came up with we either could tease or just save it for a sequel and so it’s…this power can be used to leave this planet, this power can be used ultimately to go back in time, this power can be used if you go and work for the government you’d be the ultimate Jason Bourne. 

Collider: See now…in the movie you mentioned time travel, did you drop any hints of that in the film?  Did I miss this?

Doug: No, but there’s one massive hint in the film for the ultimate twist that would take place in the sequel, which is…I guess people will read the 2^nd book so they’ll know, but Rachel Bilson’s character learns how to teleport in the 2^nd book.

Collider: So you’re saying that these powers can be taught to other people?

Doug: In this case they are taught and it’s, you know, one of the things that may sort of…things we toyed with on this movie is do we actually need to do the obligatory rule scene, where you lay out everything the power can and can’t do. We ultimately decided to say we’re changing so many other sort of aspects of this genre like let’s not do the rule scene because the rules don’t ultimately…the limitations of this power aren’t ultimately…don’t factor into the finale, so we skipped the obligatory rules thing and also because this film is set in the real world and David Rice is not a physicist. He is not going to understand why he can teleport.  He will never understand that, you know, different movie if you’ve got an MIT quantum physicist who discovers they can teleport.  That guy will spend the movie conducting experiments on himself to understand it and understand how it’s happening and what his limitations are. David Rice—not going to understand his ability to teleport the way Jason Bourne will never understand his amnesia.

Collider: If I’m doing one more question, I might as well ask you so what is your next project? I read online that you might be doing something…a moon project?

Doug: I have 2 projects I’m currently developing.  One of them is with Jake Gyllenhaal about a private expedition to go to the moon present day.  And I think when the United States of America put a man on the moon in 1969 that was one of the greatest accomplishments mankind has ever done. And rather than tell that as a historic movie I was like can I make this relevant to a modern audience, can I have modern characters today follow the blueprint of Apollo and re-create the Apollo mission today using parts stolen from the Smithsonian Museum.

Collider: Okay.

Doug: And so it’s kind of an action-adventure on the surface of the moon, and the 2^nd film is the story of Valerie Plame, you may know as the CIA officer whom the Bush administration exposed her identity.

Collider: I totally know.

Doug: And that’s with Nicole Kidman. And that project sounds straightforward except that I have a take on the material that if I go do it would be the most radical and revolutionary move of my career.

Collider: Well then you…I’m sorry to ask, but you need to tell me a little bit more than that, please?

Doug: Yeah, it’s so outrageous that the way I look at it, I’m taking material that could be, you know, just a docu-drama and I’m making it into art. I’d be doing you know ultimately what a filmmaker should do which is not just tell a story but push the boundaries of story-telling.

Collider: Absolutely.  Do you feel like one of those might win out over the other?  Or it’s just which script comes together first?

Doug: It’s which script comes together first. You know it’s…I’m feeling a lot of kind of family pressure to sort of tackle more serious subject matter like basically it’s kind of a…my mom feeling like I should grow up. So, but I can’t help it.  The idea of transporting an audience to the surface of the moon and trying to give them the experience that Neil Armstrong had.

Collider: Well, you’re also in the very rare position that you can make these big movies; that the studios believe in you as a filmmaker and you have that again…it’s like you’ve won the lottery, so of course you should do whatever you want to do.

Doug: It doesn’t feel like having won the lottery like I know sort of this you step back because like it doesn’t get any easier. Somehow I feel like if you’d win the lottery it would be easier, like in either of these cases like I still have to toil on these scripts the way I had to toil way back when like it didn’t….like that aspect like the movies don’t get easier to make. 

Well, I’m sure you feel even more pressure with the inflated budget which leads me back to would you ever make a film that would premier again at Sundance, you know?  Or…

Doug: Yes.

You know because that might make your mom happy.

Doug: My favorite parts of the shooting of Jumper were the ones where we were back to a Swingers style production and because Hayden Christianson like Matt Damon was on Bourne, these actors were willing to run around with me with just a camera and basically the look and feel of Bourne Identity stem mostly from the fact that I was running off and shooting with Matt with no permissions and therefore the camera was like hidden under my arm and you know we were worried about getting busted and we’d have to move really quickly and that ended up becoming a style for the whole franchise and you know on Jumper I wanted…you know we shot in 17 different cities and only in about 7 of them I could actually afford a real crew. And in 10 of them I was going, you know, guerilla.