With both comedies and thrillers on his resume, director Doug Liman's career has taken more turns than Jason Bourne in a high-speed chase. And with modestly budgeted indies like Swingers and blockbusters like the aforementioned super-spy saga to his credit, he's taken more leaps than Hayden Christensen's character in Jumper, Liman's tale of a secret society of teleporters, which opens today. Liman recently spoke with FEARnet about Jumper, a story he claims is solidly grounded in reality, while at the same time, well, teleportastic!

Your films have always differed from one another, but with its strong science-fiction elements, this seems to be a real departure in some ways. What attracted you to it?

In some ways it?s a departure from things I?ve done before in terms of the visual effects that are in this movie, but in other ways I think that this will feel very much like my other films, in particular like the Bourne franchise, in that there?s a level of honesty--both character honesty and technical honesty--in this movie that I also did with Bourne Identity. So yes this is a visual effects movie, and yes somebody has a super power, but Matt Damon had a ridiculous form of amnesia that was as unscientific and unreal as Hollywood could ever invent. So, yes, there is something for sure not real. We?re certainly a long ways away from teleportation, and it?s much more a creation of Hollywood than of science. But that being said, everything else about the movie is brutally honest.

How did you go about making it honest?

I worked as hard as I possibly could to make this movie not feel like a visual effects movie in the way that i worked to make Bourne not feel like an action movie, and to make it feel like Matt Damon was really doing those things. It?s the attention to detail that made it like I trained an actor to teleport, so that it feels like Hayden Christensen was doing his own stunts and that Jamie Bell was doing his own stunts. It became sort of a mantra during production and post-production: "This is not a visual effects movie." In the way that people heard that quite a bit from me during Bourne--"This is not an action movie."

There are probably four hundred teleports or jumps in the movie, and you can imagine what kind of research and development goes into figuring out what that jump is going to look like, and so I also realized that the most realistic looking jump, not the fanciest looking jump would make it real.

I was interested in creating an unrealistic power in a realistic world. That?s the same with Jason Bourne so it?s not as big a departure as you might think. The other thing that drew me to this project?and I?m not giving anything away?was, when David Rice discovers he can teleport, the first thing he does with it is start robbing banks. Because he can teleport right into the vault grab the money and teleport right out of it. It was clever that he came up with that, from a character point of view. I was drawn to someone whose first instinct was to rob banks, as opposed to save flood victims, for instance.

Do you see any sort of common thread that runs throughout your films?

If you look at my body of work, it?s been sort of a consistent theme of the anti-hero. You can go all the way back to Swingers. Vince Vaughn was not preaching in Swingers that you should love and respect women. These are not your traditional heroes. Like in Mr. and Mrs. Smith--they?re sociopath killers.

Why are there superhero films? Why is it every time someone gets a power they become a hero? It?s not changing their minds, its changing their physical powers. Not everyone on this planet is a hero. Most people I know are not necessarily heroes.

Is there anything that you held back from the theatrical release that might make its way onto the Jumper DVD?

Yeah, there was one action scene that we decided was a little too much action for the movie. We pulled it out, but it will go on the DVD. There?s a really great action scene that just was too much.

That had nothing to do with getting the film a particular rating?

It was really just about the pace of the movie. There?s really incredible stuff happening in the third act, we go really outrageous, so the action scene we pulled out was at the end of the second act because we thought it was going to take away a little bit of the outrageousness of the third act.