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It doesn’t surprise me that Limitless was number one this weekend — I thought it was a pretty solid flick, from the writing to the directing to the acting. That said, as much as I enjoyed it, I wanted it to go further. But it definitely excites me that movies are digging into this kind of content now. And I feel pretty lucky to have interviewed director Neil Burger about his creative process. The piece ran on AOL last Friday, and alas, I wasn’t able to use all of his quotes — I only have so much room for each week. But there were some fun bits that I had to edit out and some insights he offered that I thought were interesting, so I figured I’d publish them here.

For example, when Burger shared how New Yorkers pretty much ignored Bradley Cooper when they shot him “off the drug” (with scruffy hair and zero style), I kind of loved how he termed his desire to shoot Cooper alone with a handheld camera was — in a way — to “let New York be New York.” As he put it, “It was a great kind of freedom to shoot New York that way with a big star. When Bradley had his hair cut and he was shooting ‘on the drug’ and speaking different languages, we were shooting in a different way — gliding along with him on a dolly or crane, using a different film stock, the scenes were lit more, there was more production value, but we couldn’t let New York be New York. New Yorkers are pretty loose, but with a guy with that kind of star rising, and he’s so in people’s consciousness… it was crazy.”

When Burger discussed (jokingly, obviously) his suspicion that Cooper was on NZT, he talked a bit about how on-the-fly the production had to be in light of their budget, which wasn’t as overblown as some. So when Cooper would figure out the languages he had to speak so quickly, it was because he didn’t have time to immerse himself in it — they shot too fast and had a really compressed schedule. When he talked about Abbie Cornish and how awesome she was about doing her own stunts, he revealed she did her scene while running across a melting ice rink with a quarter inch of water on it. Meanwhile, it was interesting to me to hear Burger discuss his inner fanboy over Robert De Niro, and admitted he was a bit intimidated — not because De Niro is intimidating, but because he was kind of psyching himself out over it. (As he put it, “It was my problem.”) It was refreshingly honest, not to mention human — particularly for a seasoned director who works so deeply in this world.

“It’s a really good question,” Burger said when I asked him if he and the crew discussed what kind of movie they would make if they were all on NZT. ” Mostly we were working so hard, we all wished we had NZT to get through it. Movie making is 24/7 and you’re running on adrenaline for months at a time — you want to keep things moving. But people have all sorts of different ideas on what they would do on the drug — play music, learn languages — but we discussed the ethical considerations. I think it was interesting whether people wanted to take it to do something for the public good, versus people wanted to take it for personal gain. Is it just enhancement? Is it about not wanting to be so ordinary? Is it for your ambitions? Or for some greater good? It was interesting who would say, ‘I’d take that drug in a minute.’”

And then there was this tidbit: “Actors are pretty well protected on the set, but — you know — we did things a little on the edge. There’s a truck crash that takes happens when Bradley runs blindly into the street and almost gets hit. It was a very controlled situation, so it’s safe to a degree… but a guy like Bradley, he really does run blindly into traffic and into that truck. And yeah, the truck was driven by a stunt driver, but you still have a truck coming at you going 25 mph and the driver has to slam on breaks. Bradley got clipped by it, but he does everything fearlessly. Even drinking the blood off the floor — it was a combination of blood, which is a syrup, and floor, which was kinda clean, but there had been crewmembers walking over it. And Bradley just got in there and went for it, and he totally sold it.”

And apparently that’s a pretty big deal. According to insider peeps, movie blood is corn syrup and food coloring, which pretty much everyone knows… but apparently the coloring is some kind of industrial-grade dye that stains like a mofo. Says said source, “He put his face right in that shit, and I guarantee you, his face, his teeth, and anything that touched that blood was stained for at least three days.”

Gives you a deeper appreciation for the actors in horror flicks and the cast of Dexter now, doesn’t it? Anyway, Burger was awesome and I’m glad he had time to give more behind-the-scenes tidbits on the movie. I’m totally going to hunt down the book to absorb the source material. Now, if only I could get my hands on the script…