'Limitless' director Neil Burger has had career ups & downs

NEW YORK - Strolling around Manhattan's Chinatown and Central Park, where he filmed scenes from his new film "Limitless," director Neil Burger is reliving his movie's arc. And his career. Which may not be all that far apart.

Burger, 48, radiates a calm that comes from going through the Hollywood ringer. He's moved from anonymous commercial work, to the critically acclaimed "The Illusionist," to the box office disappointment "The Lucky Ones." In between were numerous projects that never got off the ground.

"I definitely would get to the point where I felt like this is never going to happen, and I didn't quite get what's wrong. Or how to make it right," he said, recounting his feelings during those nadirs.

That changed in 2006 with his second movie, "The Illusionist," a turn-of-the-20th-century murder-mystery about rival Vienna magicians that was a critical and box-office success. At 43, Burger was now seen as a director who could handle even difficult period material with a commercial sure-handedness. His worrying seemed a thing of the past.

Then in 2007, he made "The Lucky Ones," a road-trip dramedy with antiwar overtones, starring Tim Robbins as one of a trio of soldiers home from the front. But with similar films such as "In the Valley of Elah," "Rendition" and "Stop-Loss" crashing every week, studio Lionsgate stuck Burger's movie on the shelf. When "The Lucky Ones" was finally released in September 2008, it flopped.

Perhaps not surprisingly, then, "Limitless" feels like the work of someone who's been hoarding ambitious visual ideas, even if he had only about $27 million to bring them to life.