Doug Liman, Matt Damon and the Afflecks made a heist comedy for Apple. ‘The Instigators’

Filmmaker Doug Liman quickly realized he was no longer in his territory.

Matt Damon, who directed “The Bourne Identity” more than 20 years ago, recruited Liman for his new film “The Instigators,” an action comedy about a heist gone wrong. While two decades of friendship is nothing to scoff at, here Liman was coming to Boston to work with Damon and the Affleck brothers, Casey and Ben, whose roots ran twice as deep.

“All of a sudden, I was parachuted into someone else’s family,” Liman said. “Every family is crazy. And I loved it. I loved everything about it. In a way, I was back in the days of making independent films, where you couldn’t get anyone’s attention in the industry, so you did it alone with your friends. It’s my favorite kind of cinema.”

“The Instigators,” an Apple TV+ release coming in August, is a “throwback” movie of sorts, in the vein of “Midnight Run,” said producer Kevin Walsh. Written by Casey and Chuck McLean, Damon plays a desperate father, Rory, and Casey is Cobby, a small-time criminal who teams up to rob a corrupt politician. Things go wrong and they run away, with Rory’s therapist (Hong Chau) in tow.

Liman was excited to direct Damon again for the first time since “Bourne,” and in a role so different from Jason Bourne, who was essentially a hypercompetent superhero.

“You’ve never seen a character like this in a heist movie,” he said. “This is a guy who doesn’t accelerate. He’s done everything in his life by the books and this is the first time he’s going to break the rules.”

And although it was Liman’s first time working with Casey, playing a guy who “could never act well,” he said he quickly became his favorite actor.

“The Instigators” was a largely free and creative environment where everyone was contributing to the script, including Damon and Ben, and working to make things better. as they have been since “Swingers”.

And it was a big contrast to his ‘Bourne’ days,” Liman said, where there were all these “adults in the room telling us how the movie should be made.”

“Obviously we didn’t listen to them and that’s why ‘Bourne’ is as good as it is,” Liman said. “But here, we were like ‘holy—, we’re the adults in the room. How did this happen?”

He praised the model of Artists Equity, Damon and Ben’s production company, for getting rid of many of the costly excesses of film production. But, he laughed: “It really looks like the inmates are running the asylum.”

The filmmakers also used Boston, closing off streets and tunnels for the chase sequences.

“We did a scene along the Esplanade that runs along the Charles River, which they never closed,” Walsh said. “We did some things that you will never see in other films. It was challenging, but really cool.”

“The Instigators” was made in partnership with Apple TV+, which will give the film a limited theatrical run starting August 2nd, before arriving on the service on August 9th.

Liman recently criticized Amazon/MGM for not giving his “Road House” reboot a theatrical release. But he’s not anti-streaming. This is a person who credits his entire career to home video, where most people watched “Swingers.” He laughed that it would even be absurd to put “Swingers” on a giant screen “given how terrible the technical work on the film was.”

His main concern, he said, is that the company is “in sync with the filmmaker’s schedule.”

“It’s not so much about streaming or theater. It’s about what’s the company’s agenda? Apple is a premium brand. They want to make ambitious films because they are in sync with their brand,” he said. “For a filmmaker like me who wants to make smart, fun, bright commercial films and, in the case of ‘The Instigators,’ doesn’t take himself seriously, it was a really great collaboration with a company.”

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