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I discovered Doug Liman's 1999 film Go the same way a lot of people did. I rented it from Blockbuster. I was in middle school; my mom, God bless her, let me rent anything I wanted, more or less. Go looked weird and fun; I knew Katie Holmes from Dawson's Creek, which my brother and I watched obsessively, and I had devoured Pulp Fiction, to which Go was frequently (and unfairly) compared.
So I was fully unprepared, in the best way, for Go, which was much more of a romp than Pulp Fiction but just as thrilling, and brimming with even funnier one-liners. (“If you were any less Black, you would be clear.”) All I had learned until then, as a gay kid, was that gayness was supposed to make you feel either tortured or proud; John August’s sneakily subversive script includes a couple of gay dudes—actually pretty evil gays, if you think about it, self-obsessed soap opera stars fumbling through petty crimes—but never comments on their sexuality.
Go was also (debatably, more on that later) a Christmas movie, albeit one that was the opposite of wholesome, full of drugs and raves and Tantric group sex and strippers and an ecstatic car chase and a gunshot in the harsh light of day. It was, in other words, a perfect and unique B-movie.
Twenty-five years ago this month, Go premiered to lukewarm ticket sales (like everything else that April, it got blown out of theaters by a little film called The Matrix). But as nostalgia for the indescribably bizarre and fleeting Y2K era reaches its peak, it looks better than ever. Of its moment and somehow timeless in spite of itself, Go became a calling card for August (Big Fish) and Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and this year’s Road House reboot), launched brilliant acting careers (Timothy Olyphant, Melissa McCarthy, Jane Krakowski). It also helped convince Sarah Polley, now an Oscar winner for her work behind the camera, to start making films of her own.
“I remember feeling so free. I hadn’t worked in an environment where you just come up with weird shit and then do it. There's liberation in that,” the Away from Her and Women Talking writer-director told us. “I definitely had that feeling of, I think I probably can do that.”
We gathered the cast and crew of 1999’s coolest cult movie to talk about how the hell it got made, how it almost didn’t get made, permitless late-night shoots that definitely wouldn’t fly today, and the die-hard fans who keep its anarchic spirit alive. This is the definitive oral history of Go.
John August originally wrote Go in the mid-’90s as a short film about jaded grocery store workers, until people asked him about the lives of other characters. By 1997, he’d turned that idea into a script for a feature, which jumps around in time to tell three intersecting stories from different perspectives. Almost instantly, it was compared to Quentin Tarantino’s seminal indie hit Pulp Fiction.
John August (screenwriter): I was living in Hollywood, and my Ralphs grocery store was called Rock and Roll Ralphs, on Sunset Boulevard. I was there at Christmas, and I was just thinking, What are these young employees doing after hours? What is that life like? One of the nice things is that you can read this like, “Oh, it's a comedy. Oh, it's an action movie. Oh, there's dramatic stuff.” You can sort of see whatever you want into it.
Scott Wolf (Adam): The script was incredibly good. There was a lot of conversation about it.
August: It got passed around a lot.
Wolf: A lot of people compared [Go] to like a Gen X Pulp Fiction.
August: [Pulp Fiction] wasn’t top of mind. There had been other movies that restarted the clock. What was helpful about Pulp Fiction is that a successful movie had done it, and people felt comfortable with an unconventional structure.
Wolf: Once I put it down, I called everyone I worked with, and I was like, “Please, please, please find a way to get me a shot at this.”
In July 1997, an independent production company, Banner Entertainment, bought August’s script for a reported low six-figure sum.
August: It was getting me really good meetings, but everyone said, “We'll never make this movie, but we really enjoy it a lot.” One small company called Banner [Entertainment] said, “Hey, we'll buy this, we'll make this movie. We’ll make you a producer. You’ll be involved in every step of the process.” And I said, “Great.” So we sold it to Banner.
Doug Liman (director): [Banner producer] Mickey Liddell called me out of the blue to tell me about the script. It's a moment I'll never forget: I was leaving my apartment in Soho [in New York City], and I closed the door. I was waiting for the elevator and I heard the phone inside my apartment ring. I was like, Do I go back in to answer it or do I just go out? I made the decision to go back inside and answer the phone. He pitched it to me. He sent it to me. I really loved it. Mickey said they didn't have that much money for it. That made me like it even more. I like a good hard project.
August: We started looking for directors, and Doug Liman was very high on that list.
Liman: After the success of Swingers, there was a lot of pressure from my agent to take a bigger studio film. He was like, “You hit the jackpot with Swingers. Don't do it again. Go make a studio film while the doors are open because the doors can swing shut very quickly.”
Desmond Askew (Simon): I think getting Doug to sign on to it was what suddenly made it, “Okay. This is a go.”
Liman: I gave my roommate the script to Go and she was like, “Oh my God, I really don't like anyone in this.” I love all these people.
August: He had the right tone and spirit. Immediately, he was the director.
Liman: It's by far the most grueling casting I've ever been through. But it was my first time working with [casting director] Joseph Middleton. It was actually my first time working with any casting director.
Askew: I got home [in London] and my doormat was piled up with mail. Among them was the script for Go with a request that I put myself on tape for it. It had come through from my British agent. I took a look at the script, and I thought it was fantastic. I went into my agency and had somebody tape my audition and sent it off. This was before instant digital transfer. It was like on a VHS tape. The formats were different, you know, so when we would send out UK tapes, I think the casting director had to get them transferred on to the US format so that they could even watch them.
August: [The casting office was] upstairs from the Virgin Megastore, across from Crunch gym. Katie Holmes came in, and she was completely Claire. She's the voice of reason. She was 100 percent right for that.
Liman: Joseph, for the character of Marcus, he's like, “You know what? I saw someone in a play in New York. And he's perfect. You gotta go meet him.” I just remember being blown away [by Taye Diggs]. It's my first time working with a casting director. I'm like, This is awesome.
Breckin Meyer (Tiny): I went to school [Beverly Hills High School] with a lot of those white kids that wanted to be cooler than they were, and I knew those kids. I just knew that guy. It was similar to Clueless, where I walked in with a very specific idea of who this guy was. It was a lot of these white guys trying to flex how hard they were.
Askew: It was my first time here, first American movie. [Doug] saw a seed of [Simon] within me—this excitement and everything being so new. I was just a wide-eyed puppy dog, really.
Meyer: It was fun watching his eyes just like saucers.
William Fichtner (Burke): I swear to God, I thought this was quite possibly the worst audition that I ever gave in my life. I was so depressed when I left. I remember calling my agent, my agent was like, “How did it go?” I said, “How did it go? I was horrible.” Obviously, a few days later, I got a call, and they offered it to me.
Jay Mohr (Zack): I had this great meeting with Doug, we hit it off. He asked me if I read the script, I said, “Yeah, of course.” And he says, “Well, between Zack or Adam, which one do you want to play?” I couldn't remember which one was which. I panicked and blurted out, “Well, only one of them gets to say go.” And he goes, “Ah, I knew it.”
Liman: I really wanted Sarah Polley.
August: Sarah Polley, we didn't get to see her audition and she was up in Canada. She was really involved in political movements. She was nervous about just getting into the country.
Liman: She was like, “No, I'm not doing a Hollywood movie. This guy is MTV's Best New Filmmaker [for Swingers]? I'm definitely not doing that guy's movie. I don't do movies like that.” [She] refused to meet.
Sarah Polley (Ronna): Doug asked if he could meet me while I was [in LA], and I said no. I didn't want to do it, which meant I was suddenly the most desirable actor in the world to him at that moment.
Liman: I learned a lot about producing in the course of making Go, and one of the things was I had one of my producers threaten Sarah's agent, who represented a lot of other young actors. “We won't meet with any of your other clients if you don't get Sarah to sit down with Doug.” So that finally worked.
Polley: He was so funny and strange. He was talking about filmmaking in a way I've never actually heard anyone talk about it. He had this kind of DIY approach. I ended up kind of brokering a deal: “I'll do the movie, but I want to be able to shadow you.” He sparked an interest in me.
Liman: “You can go meet her for lunch.” So I do that. Pitch her the movie. She says, “Okay, I'll read the script.” Great. And she's like, “Where is it?” I was like, “I don't have it with me.” She goes, “You're here trying to convince me to be in your movie, and you don't have a copy of your script?” I was like, “Well, you know, there might be one in my car. Let me take a look.” I go digging through my car, which is a total pigsty of a car. I find a copy of Go. But it was the copy that my editor Stephen Mirrione had written his notes on. On every page is some very critical comment. Dialogue circled and giant angry letters: “Stupid.” “Dumb.” “Confusing.” That's the script I gave her.
Polley: And, as with everything in Doug’s life, it had a lot of food stains on it.
Liman: I don't know to my face, but she would be like, “If this idiot can direct a film, I can.”
Polley: Correct. I will absolutely verify that’s what was in my head.
Liman: Sarah and I became really good friends. We poke fun at each other. There's a little truth to it. I don’t know what Sarah you'll get. But you can tell her I said that.
Polley: He still remains a close friend.
Go was originally set to be independently financed, until at the last moment Sony, through Columbia Pictures, saved the movie from getting scrapped.
Liman: I remember getting a call from Mickey saying the film ran out of money. And then they sent the script over the weekend to Harvey Weinstein, figuring he did Swingers, if anyone would pick it up, it would be Harvey. And Harvey passed. There's really no chance of getting someone to pick up the film.
August: The problem was, we did not have a white male star who was on a list of approved actors for this kind of foreign pre-sales model.
Liman: Of course, my agent was like, “This is what I warned you about.” But Mickey wasn't the only producer on the film. And Paul Rosenberg was one of the producers. And Paul said to me and John [August], “Come in, we're going to try to sell this movie.”
August: We just hit the phones and called everybody. Places that had read the script and really liked it, but said, “We could never make this movie.”
Liman: We still had the Xerox machine, they hadn't come to collect it yet. After John or I would finish pitching the movie to somebody, we would get one of the PAs to drive the script to that person's office.
August: Sony with Columbia Pictures stepped up and said, “Sure, we will be the bank, you'll still be an indie film, but basically we'll be buying the movie now.”
Liman: Mickey has called me on Monday morning to say the movie’s done, don't bother coming in. And by Monday afternoon, we're hard at work getting scripts out, and Tuesday morning, we got interest from Columbia Pictures. By Tuesday evening, we were in a conference room with them. And by Wednesday morning, I was back in prep.
August: It was very stressful.
Liman: I was back in an alley in downtown LA, which was the alley where the car gets stuck [in the film]. Which was also a place a lot of homeless people used as a bathroom. [I’m trying] to figure out how you pay to remove human feces so it'd be safe to shoot. Tuesday evening, we're in a fancy conference room talking about the movie. And then Wednesday morning, it's like, Oh, the movie business is not as glamorous as people think it is. It's not as glamorous as it looks when you're at CAA sitting in an I.M. Pei-designed building. The problem of Wednesday morning was human feces on a set. That’s really what movies are. I mean, they really are.
Go’s production was further troubled (albeit temporarily) when Sarah Polley was denied access to the U.S. while traveling from Canada to shoot.
Polley: I forgot about that, yeah. I got turned away at the border. I came to do the job, and they turned me away. I've never been able to really figure out what happened except I’d been really politically active. I don’t know if I was on some list. That seemed extreme. I've never been arrested. I think Doug got some high-level political person involved [to grant me a visa], which is pretty shady.
Askew: In order to get a specific type of visa, you have to show that you're—I believe it's a “person of extraordinary ability.” I had been on a couple of TV shows in England. You just have to basically come up with all this promotional material that says, I've won certain awards.
Polley: I remember being so relieved when I got turned away from the border, like, Oh, good. I'm just gonna stay home. I don't need to go to LA.
August: And so she just showed up and did it and killed.
The first section of Go introduces us to Sarah Polley as Ronna and Katie Holmes as Claire, supermarket clerks whose coworker Simon, a low-level drug dealer, has left for a trip to Las Vegas. Desperate for cash to pay her rent, Ronna ropes Claire into a scheme to buy 20 ecstasy pills from Simon’s dealer, Todd (a perpetually shirtless Timothy Olyphant in a Santa hat), and sell them at a much higher price at a Christmas-themed rave. Ronna is unable to pay Todd the full amount, so she leaves Claire in his apartment for the night as collateral.
Timothy Olyphant (Todd): At the risk of sounding like a shallow actor, I thought [Todd] was pretty cool. This guy's got his shirt off. And if I get in the gym, it can be a real score for me.
August: It’s a sexual character. And it's a dangerous situation for Claire to be in. Nothing in the movie is based on real people. But some of it's inspired by real situations. I remember being in a similar situation with, you know, the shirtless guy in an apartment, and it's unsettling when people are at different levels of dress.
Olyphant: I just adored working with [Holmes]. She’s enchanting.
Polley: Katie and I—you couldn't find two more different people. I was the most cynical, jaded, political activist like, What the fuck are we even doing here? And she was the warmest, kindest, most open. She has a real interest in other people's happiness.
Olyphant: She was kind of blowing up on the spot. We came back for some reshoots, and she was on the cover of Rolling Stone. I remember her being a bit of a kid in the candy store at the time in LA, trying to spot celebrities. She was very refreshing to be around.
In addition to being the director, Liman served as the cinematographer on Go and frequently served as his own uncredited camera operator.
Liman: There's a style that I developed in Swingers, where I kind of pre-lit the sets, and then I could point the camera anywhere I want it. And because I'm operating the camera, I could very quickly be doing someone's close-up and then switch to someone else's close-up just by panning the camera and then decide to go back to the first person’s close-up just when you think you're done. I was using a documentary 35mm camera. It doesn't take any time to reload.
Polley: He was literally doing shots with a handheld camera himself, while looking at a manual about the camera.
Meyer: My character's unconscious. You have to lie down in the back of the car all day. And at one point, I was lying down in the car, and I felt something on my back. And I looked up and Doug goes, “Hold still.” And Doug was taping a light to my back. Some actors back in the day might be like, “What are you doing? I'm not a prop.” I was like, I love this.
Olyphant: It sounds awful, but I remember Doug being like, “All right, great. Let's move on. What's the next scene?” Where there's a whole page here we haven’t shot.
Liman: You just do what you have to do. I'm used to improvising.
August: Doug's aesthetic, his work style is quick and dirty, get it done, figure it out. Ask for forgiveness, not for permission. A lot of run-and-gun. And that was very true to what we ended up doing.
Olyphant: It might seem like Doug is gonna trip his way to an Oscar, but other times you realize, no, he is a very skilled artist.
Askew: We'd get a brief rehearsal, and sometimes none, before they started rolling. “Just start rolling, and they'll find it.” And I like to work that way as well. I don't like to over-rehearse and have the performance too polished. That doesn't feel as natural to me.
Polley: I ended up learning a lot. I always worked with filmmakers who were very precise, everything was quite planned. But Doug is sort of the opposite of that. And it was good for me in a way to see how different filmmaking can look from the outside. A film can be made a million different ways. And they can all be right. If he sees or feels a better idea, the fact that he was looking at that manual in front of me—oh my God, I thought that was really refreshing. He wasn't playing the part of the director. He wasn't trying to convince anybody of his expertise. I really appreciated that as a lesson that it's okay to be vulnerable. And say what you don't know. It's okay to look to collaborators. That was very unusual at the time.
Liman: Jay Mohr’s first day on set, he had been out late the night before, but he’s like, “It's fine,” because [on another movie set] you’re hanging out in your trailer for hours while [the crew is] lighting and you go do a shot or two, then they send you back to your trailer. He'll take a nap. At some point during his first day, he's like, “I'm exhausted. Are you ever going to stop shooting?” And I'm like, “No.” If an actor is going to the craft service table, I've screwed up. I like not taking a break.
Askew: He likes the actors to feel a certain amount of—I don't want to say discomfort, but just to not be overly prepared, to try to get something really organic.
Polley: It was kind of chaotic and crazy, but it wasn't, like, completely out of control. And there was a sense in which [Liman is] really open and malleable. His openness extends to everything. I think there was something for me to learn there in terms of just not getting too entrenched and rigid.
August: Between takes, [Polley] was at the checkout counter, and she yawned and I was like, “Oh my God, are you tired?” And she’s like, “No, no, I'm yawning to stay in the moment.”
Polley: I think for me with Go, there's a story of class in there, right? When we’re at the checkout, and the woman is like, “I used to have your job.” Ronna says, “Look how far it got you.” All of the fear and pain of what it means to be poor in North America, or really anywhere—there was always, for me, something in there that was speaking to something more profound without ever being earnest about it.
The first section of Go wraps up, toward the end of the film, with a suddenly smitten Claire and Todd sitting across from each other at a diner, as Todd describes his distaste for the popular comic strip Family Circus.
August: I do hate Family Circus. “Bottom-right corner, just waiting there to suck.” Yeah, I've had a long beef with Family Circus. I've always been frustrated by it. We had to get permission from the creator to do that. He was like, “I don't care what a lowlife thinks about my strip, it's fine.”
Polley: I went into [Go] feeling like, This is gonna be some Hollywood shit show. I was such a little Grinch at that age, so cynical. And they somehow punctured that and made me have a good time.
In Go’s second section, Simon (Desmond Askew) takes a boys’ trip to Vegas with his friends Marcus (Taye Diggs), Tiny (Breckin Meyer), and Singh (James Duval). Their fun is interrupted by a hotel fire, a joy ride in a stolen Ferrari, a strip club mishap, and a vengeful bouncer and his dad, who trail them back to LA.
August: I remember watching [Askew’s] tape and [saying], Well, that kid is fantastic. And also, Can he bring that shirt he's wearing? That shirt was great.
Askew: There was something about the shirt.
Meyer: It was right when Taye Diggs had done How Stella Got Her Groove Back. We went to the airport to go to Vegas to film the movie. We're at the ticket counter. He walks up and he gives his ID and gets his ticket and then moves aside and I step up. I’ve never seen this in my life and I've never seen it since: Taye’s so incredibly, ridiculously good-looking, and a specimen of yes, that he walked away and the lady was watching him go and literally went [Meyer’s eyes bulge], like she couldn't believe that a cupid had been cut out of onyx like that. I've never felt more invisible and smaller in my entire life.
Askew: I went home and said to my friends. “Okay, I'll see you in a couple of months. I'm off to America.” And so I made friends with Jimmy Duval.
Meyer: The most exciting thing [in Vegas] was going down to the old school blackjack tables with your per diem, and spending six minutes losing it. And then I had to go back to my room because I had no money for the whole week until my per diem kicked in again.
Meyer: It was low-rent so we weren't staying at like the Venetian. We were at the Frontier. Four guys with per diem in Vegas was just fun. None of us were cool. We were just gambling, goofing off.
James Duval (Singh): We were in Vegas for 10 days. And all I can think is, You're gonna put us up for free in Vegas and actually gonna give us money? And the moment we showed up, Doug and the producers and everybody, the first thing we did was go to a strip club.
Askew: The producers are gonna kill me for saying this, but the first night we were in Vegas, they asked if any of us had ever been to a strip club. And we all said no. “You need to know what it's like.” So they took us out there the first night we were in Vegas, which was a blast. That was crazy.
Meyer: Jimmy was talking to a dancer. And she took his shirt and ripped it open. The buttons went ping, ping, ping, ping, ping.
Duval: Someone decided to try to give me a private dance, and I was very shy and awkward. She takes my jacket off, my shirt off, and then she tore my tank top off.
Meyer: He was like, “My girlfriend's back at the hotel. I can't go in there with a ripped-open shirt and explain to her the stripper just did that. There's no way she'll believe it.” And I was like, “We'll corroborate it.”
August: Oh, strippers are great. I remember going to strip clubs with friends. And just being amazed by the rules and the structure around things. But it also felt lawless in a way and so I wanted there to be a sense of some moral line that Simon's going to cross, [and] old-school justice being done.
Liman: Being strapped to the front of an ATV and racing down the Vegas Strip was incredibly exhilarating.
Duval: [Liman] really let us go wild.
Liman: When I started on Go, I think Mickey said we had $3 million. And it turns out, we didn't have it at all. But he thought he had $3 million. And Mickey said, “Obviously we're gonna have to take the Vegas car chase out of the movie.” And I said to him, “Well, I did Swingers for $250,000.” We could spend a million dollars on the car chase, and $2 million on the rest of the movie. Which is what we did.
Askew: I was blown away by the action scenes. Even back then, I thought, You cannot do a good car chase in a movie that costs less than $50 million. It just can't be done.
Mohr: He probably hates his action chops. Like Thom Yorke hating to play “Creep.”
Liman: To this day, it’s my favorite piece of action I've ever shot, really. And the reason is because an audience feels the budget of the movie there. They can't put a finger on it. They're not consciously aware of it. They kind of know that Go was a low-budget movie. So no matter how exhilarating the car chases in Bourne Identity, you're expecting a car chase. You're not expecting a car chase in Go.
Askew: Things like when we get trapped in the car in the alleyway, I think Taye’s scripted line is “Are you happy now?” [And he goes] “Is your British ass happy now?” It wasn't scripted that way. That’s my wife's favorite line.
Meyer: The best writers are game for people to riff on their stuff if it makes it better. You can even see in the bloopers that we are these guys. We had such a good relationship with everyone. Taye and I had so much fun playing off each other, especially in that “My mother's mother's mother was Black” joke.
August: “If you were any less Black, you would be clear.” That’s a favorite.
While hanging out in Las Vegas, Marcus introduces the group to tantric sex, derived from tantra, a set of texts and practices dating back to seventh-century India. Simon applies the technique to his group sex experience with two bridesmaids he’s just met, and achieves blissful results (until the hotel room catches on fire). He utters Go’s most famous line: “Tantra, baby!”
August: I think the inspiration behind it was probably Sting talking at that time about tantric [sex].
Askew: Doug directed the hell out of [the three-way sex scene]. I must have said that line 100 times. He had a real vision. That was actually one of my audition scenes. I'm in that room on the Sunset Strip, and [Doug’s] like, “Now can we do the sex scene?” And there's very few lines in it.
August: And it felt like the kind of thing that Marcus would say, but also Simon is just a guy who parrots back the last thing.
Askew: I was simulating the whole thing sitting in a chair, looking at the Hollywood Hills, fully clothed on a Tuesday morning or whatever. Joseph gave me the feed line, and then I say, “Tantra, baby!” It was a very important line.
August: It all felt really nice and natural. The uniting theme of Go is that you have characters who try a thing, it goes wrong, but there's no way to pull back. You have to push forward faster. Simon fully embodies that.
Askew: [Filming the sex scene in Vegas was] still just really awkward. Nobody there wants to have sex with anybody else. We're just trying to make it believable that we do.
Go restarts the clock again in section three, focusing on Adam and Zack, soap opera actors who are dating. Having been busted for drug possession by police detective Burke (William Fichtner), they’re forced to try to ensnare their dealer, Simon.
Liman: I would say Scott Wolf and Jay Mohr surprised me the most in terms of people coming in and my immediately knowing how well they would work together. You don't always have that, [where] no one else can do it.
Mohr: [Wolf and I] grew up one town apart [in northern New Jersey]. He's that sweet guy all the time. He's never grouchy when he's tired. He never snaps. He's just that sweet. You would think it's an act, but it's not. Whereas at the time, I was a lot more volatile, up and down, up and down. My emotions were pinging like an EKG chart. We were a good couple to play a fake couple.
Wolf: I loved that they were two gay men in a relationship, but the story wasn't about their sexuality. That was incidental. At the time, it felt so incredibly valuable. Back in 1998, if there were gay characters, that was the story. It was ahead of its time.
August: They're not dealing with coming out or homophobia. They're not being persecuted. They're taking agency.
Mohr: To be gay, to me, it's the least interesting. I'm in show business, I don't really care. If we, two straight guys, played it at all quote, unquote, gay, it would not have been effective whatsoever.
August: As a gay writer, it's a little bit frustrating that it doesn’t get included in the gay canon at all, because there are central gay characters who are really fundamental to the story. There's a whole sexual conversation that is very specific to that moment.
Mohr: Doug Liman is a genius. But it’s like trying to understand jazz, trying to get into Doug's thought process. It's not a standard drumbeat.
Wolf: When I pulled my pants down during rehearsal, Doug was like, “Those aren't good underwear.” I was like, “These are what costume gave me.” He's like, “They're not right.” He started to describe [what he wanted]. One of the producers is like, “You mean these?” And he sort of pulls his jeans down and pulls up his [whitey-tighty] underwear. And Doug goes, “Yes.” I go, “Do you want me to put those on?” Those are the producer’s underwear [I’m wearing].
Mohr: I was young and hot.
Wolf: The scene in the liquor store, something wasn't working. I pulled Doug away, and I'm like, “This isn't it.” I don't know why it's not happening.
Mohr: We didn't have any permits. So at any moment, the cops could come and shut this entire production down. We're trying to get this done very quickly. It had to have been the 10th [take]. I remember he says to Scott, “Pretend you're a gorilla.” And I'm thinking, Okay? We were both very puzzled.
Wolf: Finally, Doug comes over and goes, “All right, look, we gotta get out of here. We're past our permit times.” And just this idea that we were going to move on cracked me. I was so invested. I wanted so badly to be serving the thing and having the story be what it was supposed to be that I just started to cry. I welled up. And he's like: “This. Last take, roll camera.” And that's the tape that's in the movie.
After the bust goes wrong, Burke invites the two actors to Christmas dinner at his house with his wife, Irene (Jane Krakowski). At dinner, the husband and wife pitch Adam and Zack on a multilevel marketing enterprise.
Fichtner: Jane and I just found a rhythm. Right then and there. There's that one scene at the dinner table where she crosses her fingers about something, and I'm like, “You got that right, babe.” We were on the same page.
August: “It’s a different company. It's a different quality of product.”
Fichtner: The boys look at us and say, “Do you want us to sell Amway?” But the heartbreak of Burke [is] how many times he’s had to explain in his life that it's not [Amway], it’s Confederated Products.
Liman: I sheepishly asked [Fichtner], “How would you feel about full nudity?” And he was like, “Fuck, yeah.” He was all about it. He was like 40 years old. “My body's never gonna look as good as it looks right now. I’ve been going to the gym every day. I want you to film every angle of me.” He really put me at ease.
Mohr: Bill Fichtner, when I come out of the bathroom, he's butt naked. That entire scene. Entirely naked. All he does is treadmill, bike, run, swim. He looks ridiculously amazing. And he grabbed my hand to put the cologne in my hand, but he kept pulling my hand right toward his penis. I just kept breaking [laughing] earlier and earlier.
Fichtner: That was the last scene that we did [that night]. I remember I was going to see my older boy in New York. I had like a 7 a.m. flight. And it's four o'clock in the morning and Jay walks out, and he would just glance down at me naked and crack up laughing, like four or five times. And finally I said, “Hey, Jay, I'm going to smack you. You got to get this take. I cannot miss this flight. Come on. Would you stop laughing please? I'm naked. You saw it. Here we are.” I just had such a blast with those guys.
Mohr: That scene took about an hour to do because I couldn't stop.
Fichtner: I remember my beautiful wife Kimmy said to me, “How was work?” “Good. I got this little nude scene with Jay Mohr.” She's like, “Really? You're going nude?” And I'm like, “Yeah, it's a flash on the screen.” I suppose we're at Sundance and that scene comes up, and I'm standing there after two or three seconds, I get a little elbow. She’s like “Yeah, a real flash, buddy.”
A then-unknown Melissa McCarthy makes her debut feature film performance in Go. She’s in it for just one minute-long scene, in which Adam and Zack attempt to confront the man they’ve both been cheating on each other with, and meet his roommate Sandra (McCarthy).
Wolf: [Melissa McCarthy] stole the shit out of that scene. We didn't have a chance. I remember just giving her a big hug and being like, “You're incredible. Thank you.”
August: I saw the dailies and how she just slayed it. Like, She's amazing, and I have to write something for her, so I ended up writing the short film God. I didn't know her at all. And that became her audition reel.
Olyphant: I remember meeting Melissa at the premiere, coming up to her, and saying, “How about you showing up for less than a minute and knocking the thing out of the park?”
Mohr: It was no surprise when she became Melissa McCarthy.
After a raucous out-of-competition midnight screening at the Sundance Film Festival, Go was released in theaters on April 9, 1999—just over a week after The Matrix came out. Ticket sales were disappointing, but the film would find a passionate audience on VHS and DVD.
Liman: It was a very personal experience making Go, because I kind of knew while I was making it that this was gonna be my last juvenile movie. I was gonna have to grow up.
Mohr: [Go] was the midnight slot [at Sundance]. We were just hot shit. And it was so well-received in the theater. The actual physical response in that theater was like, Oh, we're in the greatest movie of all time. Because that's where my brain immediately goes. And then [at the box office], as Yogi Berra once said, if people don't want to come, we can't stop them. But it doesn't change the fact that it's a fantastic movie.
Polley: They airbrushed my face [on the poster] to make me look kind of like a Hollywood starlet. I wish I looked like that. I was like, Go for it. I don't care.
Fichtner: I remember seeing a trailer for it. I thought, Very interesting. It’s an R-rated film. But, boy, it really feels like they're targeting a teen audience. That was odd to me.
Polley: I got a really terrible review in the New Yorker. So brutalizing. By Anthony Lane.
Anthony Lane (review of Go, The New Yorker, April 19, 1999): “Polley, after her performance in ‘The Sweet Hereafter,’ is a slight disappointment as Ronna—she looks lank and bored—but there is an affability to Liman’s actors that makes you both warm to his movie and scoff at its pretensions to true grit.”
Polley: “She looks lank and bored.” I remember thinking, Oh, fuck, I've walked around thinking I really nailed that part.
August: I remember going into a meeting at Warner Bros. for a pitch and the executive said, “We have this movie The Matrix coming out the week before yours, and it’s going to crush your movie.”
Wolf: Keanu Reeves, that beautiful bastard.
August: It was just an incredible year for movies. And so I'm happy to be part of that. I would have loved for [Go] to have made $100 million, but the movie cost $5 million and made like $18 or $19 million in theaters. I’m not sad about that. We were the movie that people would see five times in theaters.
Meyer: It was cool. The people that saw it and liked it were people I thought were really cool.
Liman: I didn't know that there was a cult reputation [around Go].
August: It did get frustrating that people directly compared it to Pulp Fiction when really it has no relationship to Pulp Fiction at all except for the fact that it's a nonlinear timeline, and Tarantino certainly did not invent that.
Liman: When I meet somebody, and they say their favorite of my movies is Go, I feel like we're in a little club together. How special can Quentin Tarantino feel when somebody goes, “I love Pulp Fiction”? Everyone saw Pulp Fiction.
Mohr: You don't want to be in any part of Pulp Fiction. There’s nobody [having] fun at all. Even if you’re the boxer winning the boxing match, it’s like, Ughhh. You don’t want to be with the Gimp, you don’t want to be in the restaurant.
Askew: So many people have a soft spot for [Go]. It's really an icebreaker when I meet somebody new, particularly within the industry, because it wasn't so widely seen theatrically. I think many, many, many more people saw it on DVD as a rental or when it came on pay TV or whatever. But within LA, it was huge.
August: The real surprise for me has been that it's held up so well. The fact that there weren't cell phones in the movie, or there's like two cell phones, but they're not really used that much, is just one of those lucky moments in time. A few years later, a lot of little plot points would have happened differently.
Askew: It was a very different world back then.
Liman: I wanted to cast [Olyphant] as Jason Bourne.
Olyphhant: He’s mentioned that to me before. I don't know if he told you, but I'm just assuming there was a moment where some studio executive laughed out loud to him.
Liman: [Universal] did say, “We’ll let you cast Timothy Olyphant, but let us tell you why we think it should be Brad Pitt.” Brad was attached for a moment. They obviously convinced me. I was right about Tim. Because look at the career he's had.
Askew: I'll bump into someone [from the Go cast and crew], or once in a while Jimmy and I will connect, but I think we've all kind of moved on to our different lives. But it's always a nice thing to see someone and talk about the old times.
Meyer: John August, I was texting with yesterday. We both have kids and every now and then see each other at the park. Melissa and I, our kids are at the same school, so we still run into each other.
August: [Go] is older than the characters portrayed in it, which is sort of a weird thing. I wonder if every generation feels this, where it seems like time has accelerated in ways that are impossible. I think back, 2000 doesn’t feel very long ago. Even the wardrobe doesn't feel all that dated or strange. I don't know if I believe it's 25 years. I don't believe it.
Liman: Go is the favorite of all my movies I've ever made. It's awesome. It was probably the one fewest people have seen, but I'm sort of a one-man sales team for the movie.
Meyer: It is the one where when people come up and mention Go, it stops me. I've always described it as my favorite movie I've done. Not as an actor. I had a great time. But it's my favorite movie I’ve done to watch.
Fichtner: It happened about a year ago, where somebody came up to me and put their wrist up to my nose. “CK One. But it's not.”
August: I love it to death. And obviously you love all your children. But Go is special. Big Fish is special for very different reasons.
Liman: I'm proud that when everybody was saying, “Don't make that movie,” somehow I had inside me the wherewithal to resist. To take this giant gamble. I look back at that person, and I'm like, What the fuck was I thinking? But I'm proud of that younger Doug Liman that made that decision.
August: Christmas always felt crucial to me. Christmas in LA is strange. Not just because it's warmer. There's something about LA in December that is sort of special and dark. I always had the vision of Claire's car and the lights around the windshield. I love that it wasn't about family at all. It was some of the iconography of Christmas, but completely taken away from its normal context.
Liman: Yeah, it is [a Christmas movie]. Swingers is set at Christmas. Bourne Identity is set at Christmas. I don't know because I'm Jewish, but maybe I just love Christmas.
Askew: Obviously, it's not a traditional Christmas movie by any stretch of the imagination, but even how the whole thing wraps up: “What are we doing for New Year's?” It is one of those sort of irreverent—let's call it an alternative Christmas movie.
Liman: The happenstance. What if the elevator had come a second earlier? I've never been able to come to terms with that. That my whole career trajectory has come down to a split-second decision by the elevator. How can life be so random?