After wearing two hats on three feature films, Interview with the Assassin, The Illusionist and The Lucky Ones, writer-director Neil Burger decided it was time to narrow his focus and just direct. Conveniently enough, writer-producer Leslie Dixon had a script on her hands, but no director. They joined forces and the result is the wildly intense and visually vivid thriller Limitless.
The film focuses on a drug called NZT, a pill packing the power to give a person the ability to use 100% of his or her brain. For Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper), that means the ability to emerge from the foggy slump of an uninspired writer and step into the illuminated world of a high-powered financial consultant.
Yes, the character development starts with what’s in Dixon’s script, but from there, it’s all up to Burger and he certainly seized the opportunity to use the mind-bending nature of the topic to his advantage. While we get film after film saturated in CGI and all sorts of digital effects, it’s not very often you come across a piece that uses those resources in a realistic manner. Well, brace yourself because that’s exactly what Burger set out to do in Limitless and the results are wholly consuming and make for a fantastically tense and engaging end product.
How does he do it? Hear about that and much more straight from Burger himself in the video interview below.
