Naomi Watts, left, and Sean Penn star as real-life CIA agent Valerie Plame and her husband, U.S. ambassador Joe Wilson, in Doug Liman's film Fair Game. (Ken Regan/Summit Entertainment/eOne Films)

Director Doug Liman’s energy is infectious. It courses through his films – from Go (1999) to The Bourne Identity (2002) – and crackles through the phone line as he chats about his latest project, Fair Game.

'The CIA were helping me on Fair Game without realizing it. I had the unique experience of spying on the CIA.'

— Doug Liman, director of Fair Game

Speaking from his native New York while in the midst of a press tour that’s taken him through the U.S. and the Middle East, he should be exhausted. Instead, Liman exudes a giddy enthusiasm for everything related to Fair Game. He describes the film’s subject matter as “radioactive” and adds, “I recognize this is a once-in-a-lifetime event as a filmmaker, that a story like this lands in your lap.”

The story will be familiar to anyone who tuned in to CNN in 2003. A few months after the start of the Iraq War, former U.S. ambassador Joe C. Wilson wrote a New York Times op-ed piece that suggested George W. Bush had exaggerated facts about WMDs in order to justify the invasion of Iraq. A week later, a Washington Post column leaked the name of Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, effectively outing her as a CIA agent. The article ignited a political scandal known as “the Plame affair.”

Having previously directed the fictional spy films The Bourne Identity and Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005), Liman jumped at the chance to tackle the real thing. He speaks with a mixture of pride and zeal about the renegade manoeuvres he had to employ while preparing to film such a politically charged story.

“[The CIA] were helping me on Fair Game without realizing it, because they thought they were helping me on Covert Affairs, which is a TV show that I produce,” Liman explains. “I travelled to Washington, D.C., and was brought into the CIA by the people in the CIA who thought they were working on Covert Affairs, which has the support of the CIA. And I was only there to do research for Fair Game! I had the unique experience of spying on the CIA.”

Director Doug Liman is seen on the set of Fair Game. (Ken Regan/Summit Entertainment/eOne Films)

The efforts of this underground research are on full display in Fair Game’s early scenes, which record Valerie Plame’s daily dealings as a covert officer for the CIA’s counterproliferation in near-documentary, insiderish detail. Whether she’s meeting with contacts in Malaysia and Jordon, or sitting in on boardroom discussions about aluminum tubes, Valerie Plame comes across as a female Bourne. Played by Naomi Watts, she’s competent, shrewd and smart — and one of Fair Game’s greatest strengths is that it expects the same of the audience. This is a political movie, but it’s also fast-paced, and it doesn’t believe in spoon-feeding information to viewers once the scandal breaks.

Liman is an eclectic filmmaker with a knack for subverting genres. Fair Game’s richest pleasures arise when he takes what is essentially an All the President’s Men type conspiracy drama and turns it on its head. Once Valerie Plame’s identity is revealed, Fair Game morphs into a surprising, intimate family drama. Portraying Joe Wilson and Valerie, respectively, Sean Penn and Watts display the same easy chemistry they had in 21 Grams, and the two do a credible job of showing how the public uproar quickly strains the Wilson marriage. Liman insisted that this more personal storyline be added to Jez and John-Henry Butterworth’s original script.

“A rough draft of the script was done. It really was a four-hour movie that would’ve been the complete biopic of the Valerie Plame affair, and it would’ve been appropriate to run on the History Channel. It had every character and every event, but no emotion,” he says. “The parts of the script that I found so compelling were the parts where we were with the Wilsons. And so from the moment I got involved, I said, ‘Let’s just tell their story. Let’s just do it from their point of view and get rid of everything else.’”

But capturing the Wilsons’ story proved tougher than he imagined, once it became clear that much of Plame’s CIA narrative was off limits.

“The person whose point of view I was choosing for this film is Valerie Plame, who as a spy has signed a secrecy oath with the CIA, and can never tell her story,” Liman explains. “She was not allowed to tell me what she was going through. She can tell me how things felt, but she can’t tell me the specific classified details of missions she was on. But other people in the CIA, who were outraged by what happened to Valerie, were willing to come forward and talk with me, and they were willing to tell me Valerie’s story. So there’s information in the film that’s never appeared elsewhere.”

Liman, left, and Watts, centre, pose with the real Valerie Plame at a New York screening of Fair Game. (Clint Spaulding/Patrick McMullan Co./eOne Films)

Throughout our conversation, Liman’s respect for his heroine is palpable — he frequently pauses to praise Plame for her strength, loyalty to her former colleagues and continued allegiance to the CIA. Fair Game is her story. Sean Penn is typically fine in an outraged liberal role, but it’s Naomi Watts who commands the attention, in a portrayal that’s already generating Oscar buzz. Playing a woman who’s been trained not to crack, Watts shows a mettle she’s rarely displayed before.

That restrained performance sets the tone for the rest of Fair Game, which feels like a thoughtful, mature work from a director better known for adrenaline-fuelled blockbusters. The shift in tone is not lost on Liman, who once joked that his 2008 film Jumper marked the conclusion of his “sellout trilogy.”

“I don’t live in Hollywood, I live in New York City. None of my friends are in the film business. I’m very self-conscious about what I do for a living, because it can feel frivolous in comparison to the people that I’m surrounded by,” he explains.

“But there’s no doubt that with Fair Game, I can really hold my head high amongst my peers in New York City. I walk into a room and there’s a fundamentally different energy, and maybe the respect that I’ve been craving for so long, I’m finally feeling.”

Fair Game opens Nov. 5.

Lee Ferguson writes about the arts for CBC News.