FLYING HIGH

a laugh-out-loud moral comedy and suspenseful tale of deadly skulduggery at the same time.

For Liman, though, it was something more: a very personal connection to his youth. The filmmaker’s father, legendary New York attorney Arthur L. Liman, was chief counsel for the U.S. Senate’s Iran-Contra investigation, and man, did he tell college-age Dougie some crazy stuff.

“My father’s work on IranContra not only helped us fact-check the story, but my father used to laugh about some of the things he was discovering,” Liman, calling from the Canadian location of his next sci-fi movie, “Chaos Walking,” recalls. “So I really chased a comedic tone for this movie, because I was dedicating it to my father.”

The events of “American Made” predate White House operative Oliver North’s bright idea to finance Nicaragua’s anti-Sandinista insurgents with the proceeds of secret arms sales to another of the U.S.’ boogeyman regimes, Iran’s Islamic state. But many of the same players were involved, even though Liman didn’t quite realize it when he started to read Gary Spinelli’s script.

“It was completely new to me,” the director admits, sounding amazed and a bit abashed. “And what was amazing about reading the script was that, for a story that I knew so well, I didn’t even realize that I was following a tale that was so connected to Iran-Contra. It just highlights the massive disconnect between the policymakers in Washington, D.C., who were the people my father was investigating, and the people on the ground who were actually conducting this massive covert war. That chasm was so huge that, reading this script, I didn’t even realize it was the same story.

“Well, actually I did” eventually, Liman says. “But by then I was already hooked into the character Barry Seal. The movie sort of combined two of the things I love most. I love spies and I also love anti-heroes and outlaws. The idea of somebody working for the CIA and making a fortune at the same time, that was extraordinary.”

Liman thought he had already used everything his father taught him for “The Bourne Identity” in 2002 (he went on to also direct two very different films with undercover elements, 2005’s “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” and the 2010 Valerie Plame docudrama “Fair Game”). But he discovered it was a gift that kept on giving.

“All of the CIA components in ‘The Bourne Identity’ were drawn from my father’s work on Iran-Contra; none of them were taken from the actual book,” Liman ironically notes. “I thought I’d already mined my father’s Iran-Contra work when I created the ‘Bourne’ franchise, but reading Gary’s screenplay, I realized the most interesting part of the CIA had yet to be told: the mechanics of how the CIA works.”

Liman knew there was a certain straight arrow, young Republican vibe to many who worked at the spy agency, but the assets they had to recruit to do their dirty work were anything but law-abiding citizens. Of course, in “American Made” (and possibly Seal’s real life), the feds turn out to be as ruthless in their own ways as the Colombian drug merchants he worked for on the

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