Doug Liman in Baghdad. (publicity photo)

I guess you don't make a whole bunch of spy movies without learning a few tricks yourself.

Doug Liman broke into Hollywood with Swingers and has since directed, among other films, The Bourne Identity, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and now Fair Game, which opens Nov. 5. It was shot partly in D.C. last year, about which he says, "I was amazed that, basically, we could shoot wherever we wanted. We could be as close to the White House as we wanted to be. We were given extraordinary access" — which are not words you often hear from visiting filmmakers — "and then we snuck other access."

Please explain.

"In this particular film, I had the unique experience of sneaking into the CIA itself — into Langley. The way I did it was that I'm producer on a show called Covert Affairs, which has the cooperation of the CIA. Fair Game definitely does not, although it should because it is a really positive portrayal of the agency, but there's no way they could have known that in advance. So the week I decided I was going to do Fair Game, his producing partners said to him, 'If you want to get inside the CIA, you need to do it this week, before word comes out that you're going to make Fair Game, because we can get you in there right now as a producer on Covert Affairs and they'll open themselves up to you. So I had an appointment, drove into the CIA, and went through the whole security procedure, was taken in ... was given a really thorough tour of the place. They think I'm there for Covert Affairs, and all I'm doing is casing the joint for Fair Game."

Also, at the end of the film, Naomi Watts (playing Valerie Plame) walks into the Rayburn House Office Building, "and you see her enter the very same room that Valerie Plame herself testified in. You know, you're not allowed to film a commercial movie anywhere around the Capitol, so to pull that off required a combination of stealing stuff and heavy visual effects."

"It was like my whole career led me to that moment," he adds, "because with Swingers, we were running around, stealing everything — always keeping our eye out for the cops, knowing we'd get arrested. So I learned those techniques, which I needed to use to film the ending of [Fair Game], and having done films like Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Jumper, with a lot of visual effects, I also learned how to fill in the rest. So the finale of this movie was a combination of the techniques that I learned on Swingers and the techniques that I learned on Mr. and Mrs. Smith."

Liman's takes authenticity seriously — so seriously, in fact, that he filmed in Baghdad for Fair Game.

"That attention to detail with my locations has been a consistent theme in my life," he says. "People are paying money to go see a scene that takes place in Baghdad; I'm going to show them Baghdad. And by the way, I am adventurous and a little bit of a risk-taker, but I'm not suicidal. If there was, in fact, another safer country that looked like Baghdad, I would have just gone there and shot, but there isn't."

Oddly, it wasn't in Baghdad, but rather Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where his life was threatened during a shoot. While there filming I Just Want My Pants Back, a pilot for MTV, a bar owner threatened he and his crew with a shotgun. "Nobody threatened me with that level of violence when we were in Baghdad," he says. "Of course, when I was in Baghdad I was wearing a bullet-proof vest. Turned out it would've come more in handy in Greenpoint."

As for what drew him to a nonfiction spy movie for the first time, Liman says it wasn't because he was outraged over Plame's outing as an undercover CIA operative by the White House. "I was making Mr. and Mrs. Smith when this story happened. I read about it, was outraged, then had my own problems to worry about — you can imagine the kinds of problems that surfaced on Mr. and Mrs. Smith with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie — and I focused on my own life and forgot about it. And if I had political outrage, I channeled it into making political commercials for Obama."

Years later, though, he was handed the script and "fell in love" with the characters of Plame and her husband, Joseph Wilson (played by Sean Penn).

"They were more dynamic and more interesting than any characters I'd had the opportunity to portray in a movie," he says, "and it's not in spite of being real — it's because no imagination could possibly have come up with this marriage.... What screenwriter could make up a better villain than Dick Cheney or Adolf Hitler?

"For all the time I spent in the spy genre, it never occurred to me that, even though we portray them being flamboyant because of their actions in the field, the reality is they must be very private people because they're willing, when they come home, to never brag and never tell anybody what they might have accomplished. And especially for me, coming from the film business, the concept of not bragging could not be more alien."