After the slow-burn success of 'Swingers', Hollywood told director Doug Liman he could do anything - except his latest movie, 'The Bourne Identity'. So how did he end up directing this mainstream spy romp, asksDonald Clarke

'Hollywood is a lot like high school," director Doug Liman explains in his blank, unyielding manner. "American high schools can be terrible places - there is a lot of pressure to be the same. Sometimes it's easier to just be a jock and conform. It wasn't until after I left school that I realised it was OK to be different. But Hollywood is just like school that way: they want everyone to be the same."

Liman has taken us down this interesting conversational by-way to explain just what he is up to in his latest movie, The Bourne Identity. Having made his name directing the independently-minded films Swingers (1996) and Go (1999), he seems like an unusual choice to helm an ordnance-heavy spy romp starring the hamster-cheeked Matt Damon. Surely he was giving into the very conformity he so abhors. But, against the odds, the Robert Ludlum adaptation has turned out to be a cracking thriller; the best John Woo film John Woo never made.

"After Swingers, Hollywood opened the door to me," Liman says. " 'What do you want to do now, golden boy?' they said. 'You can do anything you like.' Well I'd read the Robert Ludlum book and loved it so I said, 'I want to do The Bourne Identity'.

'You can do anything except The Bourne Identity.' Well, I'm not one to take no for an answer."

He rams a handful of Pringles into his mouth and gives me his disconcertingly wide-eyed stare. By his own admission, he was a weird kid at high school and he's more than a little weird now. Tanned, unshaven, intense: he looks like an ever-so-slightly crazed version of the actor Paul McGann. And my goodness, does he have self-belief! Swingers was only his second film: how did he persuade lead actor and writer Jon Favreau to let him direct this much-loved Los Angeles dating comedy?

"Jon and I are good friends," he explains. "And he'd been trying to get this movie off the ground for ages. I'd seen him struggle. I said, 'Jon, I don't want to step on your toes, but this is not going to be the movie it could be. I can bring this to life in a way you couldn't.'

"I had this theory about independent film that the way to do it is to go for greatness. It's not like The Bourne Identity where you have an audience there waiting, where all you have to do is just make sure you don't screw it up. In Swingers, you have a bunch of unknown actors in a film about a guy whining about his ex-girlfriend. Not one person who's not a relative is going to see that unless you make it great."

And, to be fair, he did make it great. Immersed in the the LA swing music scene, Swingers introduced us to a group of jive-talking hipsters who served as an advance guard for the (admittedly, now tiresome) Rat Pack revival. Made for only $250,000, the film did not do terrific business at first, but went on to become one of the sleeper hits of the decade.

"I decided it shouldn't look like a middle-ground studio movie," he says. "We had to shoot it in a way that the studios never would. We had to go out and shoot it live in the bars and the clubs. Those LA bars - The Dresden, The Derby - were where we all used to drink. The only people going there were aspiring film-makers and actors like us: they're the only people who can stay up till two in the morning on a Wednesday. I don't think we had to dress a single extra."

In the movie, Favreau plays a New York actor who migrates to LA after his girlfriend dumps him. His dissolute buddies try to cheer him up as they booze their way to Las Vegas and back, but it is to no avail. Only a brief encounter with Heather Graham (in her first significant role) finally shakes him out of his misery.

"In the original script, it was much more about the girls," Liman says. "But I realised the story was really about friendship. I asked Jon to write a few more scenes with the guys together. The inspiration actually came from The Odd Couple.

"In that play Felix is kicked out of home by his wife and spends the entire film waiting for her to call. Meanwhile, the guys all try to get him out dating. It ends with her phoning and Felix saying, 'Tell her I'm not home'. Familiar, huh?"

The son of a prominent criminal lawyer, Liman was born in New York and has now returned to live there. Nonetheless, the follow-up to Swingers found him back in LA and Vegas. Relating the busy whirl of events surrounding an all-night rave, Go was an altogether more frantic business than its predecessor. What is it with him and those two western cities?

'OH, TELL me about it," he says in a pained voice. "I hate both of them in some ways. I really didn't want to make another film in LA. I do sort of hate the place. During the night, when it cools down, it's all right. Swingers was mostly set at night, so I was able to show the LA I love. Actually I tried to move Go to New York. But I just couldn't, it's a real LA story. I'm fascinated with Vegas the same way I am with New Orleans. These are places where people let their guards down in a way they don't elsewhere."

Again, despite fine reviews and a cast featuring Dawson Creek's Katie Holmes, the film did not initially prosper at the box office.

"I always knew it would be a hard sell," he says. "But I knew it would do well later on video [and it has\]. It wasn't easy to reduce Go down to a phrase. Not like The Bourne Identity: 'Matt Damon is a spy with amnesia? OK, I get that!' "

And yes, that does sum up Liman's new film quite nicely. It's a neat little premise for a thriller: when Damon is fished from the ocean with two bullets in his back, he doesn't even know that he is a spy. But, much to his consternation, he discovers that he is possessed of instinctive combat skills and a flair for gathering information. Nonetheless, the film could so easily have turned out be so much hokum.

"These days, films don't have to be any good to make money," Liman says. "But, as is evidenced by all the drama on this set, I insisted upon doing it right."

All what drama? "Oh you know, we were shooting a film in seven countries with a script that wasn't locked off. It would have been easier to just settle for second-best. But I demanded that we get the right writers. I went to see Robert Ludlum and talked to him. I made sure we got Matt Damon."

Ah, Matt Damon. I own up that when I saw the trailer, I guffawed loudly at the notion of the smiley preppie as a deadly killing machine.

"But the thing about Jason Bourne is that he is such an ordinary guy," says Liman. "Now, it's not too big a leap when you're considering the All-American Guy to think: Matt Damon."

Which may constitute a slightly back-handed compliment. Anyway, leaving Damon aside, what really makes The Bourne Identity stand out from the pack are the excellent action sequences. So inured are we to fisticuffs and speeding automobiles that it comes as a real surprise to find oneself exhilarated as Damon and Franke Potente flee the protagonist's CIA handlers in a battered red mini. And such is the strange alchemy that goes on in the editing suite that one can't quite tell why the chase works so well.

"Firstly, we had to be careful not to make it to clean and tidy," Liman says. "We had to make it real. Of course, after the O. J. Simpson thing, we Americans are now really used to incredibly slow car chases. So we seriously thought about doing it really slowly, but that didn't work. We made sure that it was messy, that it wasn't clean and neat. Things go wrong during it. That helps.

"But the main thing is to ensure that the action is part of the drama. In too many films, the drama stops and then we have a sex scene, or we have an action scene. It is vital to treat those scenes as dramatic sequences like any other."

The Bourne Identity has proved a substantial hit and Liman is in negotiations to work on two sequels. Meanwhile, he is trying to produce a low, low budget feature. "Butnone of my friends will do it for me for what I can pay them. Not even the guys who worked on Swingers. 'We've paid our dues,' they say. They have mortgages now. It's all right for me, I make my money from The Bourne Identity."

So is he one of the cool kids in the Hollywood high school now? "Well, I think I am. I don't know if anyone else does."

The Bourne Identity is on general release