A twist of Liman

In his new film, Swingers director Doug Liman again throws us in the back seat for a trip to Vegas. But it's a wilder ride, writes RUSSELL BAILLIE.

In his first feature, Doug Liman trained a camera on Los Angeles nightlife and a road trip to Las Vegas.

In his second feature, Doug Liman trained a camera on Los Angeles nightlife and a road trip to Las Vegas.

That debut was Swingers, a sharp, insightful 1997 comedy of young blokes trying to get ahead in LA and moping about in bars in various states of self-delusion.

Liman's sophomore effort is GO. And while it might keep the same dusk-to-dawn hours and take the same freeways as Swingers, it's a different movie.

You could almost say it's Liman's Pulp Fiction to Swingers' Reservoir Dogs, coming with a crisscross of storylines, each following a wild live-to-tell-the-tale night for its young but (for Hollywood) unusually believable characters.

The ensemble, which includes Sarah Polley (The Sweet Hereafter), Katie Holmes (Dawson's Creek) and Scott Wolf (Party of Five), all get mixed up in various adventures involving sex, drugs and dance music.

But as for those aforementioned similarities - a sense of deja vu, Doug?

"I guess I was slightly worried about that, but that is like an intellectual worry. It is nothing to do with the film," Liman drawls New York-ishly.

"What I also realised when I started was that similarity actually helps make GO a better film. The more the audience start to say to themselves, 'I get this film because I saw Swingers, I know what is going to happen cos these guys go to Vegas,' the more surprised they are going to be when all hell breaks loose."

After the success of Swingers ("I was all of a sudden a member of the club"), John August's script for GO was one of the few that made it all the way to Liman's ... er, reading room.

"Between movies I am a complete disaster and the odds of me reading any one screenplay are minuscule. I leave them places, I lose them ... the screenplay that is most likely to get read is the screenplay closest to the toilet. GO happened to land near the toilet, and it was great."

Ones that got misplaced on the way to Liman's quiet contemplation included Good Will Hunting and the Austin Powers' sequel.

"It's a good thing I didn't direct it," he told the Sydney Morning Herald about the latter, "because I still don't get it."

But GO he got right away. He's a night owl himself, he says, and likes his adopted city only after dark. Also, there was its Pulp Fiction-like triple-narrative to have fun with. And no, he doesn't mind the comparison.

"In that it has a playful attitude to traditional structure it can be compared to Pulp Fiction, but in terms of what the film itself is aspiring to be, GO is celebrating life and the fun of one of those nights where everything goes wrong.

"GO is one of those nights we've all had when we were 19 and we laugh about now. But at the time we were worried about whether we were actually going to make it through the night. Somehow I can't imagine the characters in Pulp Fiction 10 years later laughing about that experience."

Liman agrees GO could be seen as part of a wave of alternative Hollywood flicks that's aren't so much hip - though GO's soundtrack fair pulses with the likes of Leftfield, Fatboy Slim and Air - as smart; films that engage the audience's affection for initially unlikeable characters.

"If it's part of a new generation of films, it's part of Boogie Nights and Swingers, which are films that are not trying to be any other movie. If they were trying to be other movies, they might actually try to be cooler ... I see myself as part of a group of film-makers who are trying to tell good stories."

Tell them to who?

"GO's for people who are older than teenagers, who had one of those nights, and it's for teeenagers who are having nights like that. And it's for pre-teens who aspire to one of those nights and should be encouraged to have one," he laughs.

But he's leaving the LA nightlife and Las Vegas excursions well alone for his next flick. The next script that made it under the bathroom door was an adaptation of the Robert Ludlum spy thriller The Bourne Identity.

The crossover from alternative-Hollywood to the mainstream?

"I think it's a genre that needs a good slap, and I'm the man to do it."