Having directed big-budget action thrillers like “The Bourne Identity” and “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” Doug Liman is taking a grassroots approach to a new project meant to raise awareness about real-life violence, politics and torture.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the PEN American Center are expected to announce on Thursday a collaboration with Mr. Liman called “Reckoning With Torture: Memos and Testimonies From the War on Terror.” For this project Mr. Liman will create a feature-length film whose script is compiled from various documents on prisoner abuse and torture, some of which were obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, and whose footage will consist of user-submitted videos of their readings of these documents.

Though Mr. Liman’s résumé includes the film “Fair Game,” about the former C.I.A. officer Valerie Plame Wilson, the director said this newest endeavor was not being created to satisfy any political agendas.

“If you just read these documents, they don’t need editorializing,” Mr. Liman said in a telephone interview. “It’s not a Democrat or a Republican thing. It’s a moral issue, it’s an issue of what it means to be an American and what we stand for as a country.”

At a Web site for the project, reckoningwithtorture.org, users can find these original documents, including a 2002 statement from an interpreter at a detention site in Afghanistan who says he witnessed acts of torture; a 2004 C.I.A. memorandum about its program for rendition, detention and interrogation; and a transcript of a 2007 interview given by George Tenet, then the head of the C.I.A., to “60 Minutes.” The site also features videos of these documents being read by performers, including Lili Taylor, Dianne Wiest and Robert Redford, filmed by Mr. Liman at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Users can find instructions about recording and submitting their readings at the site as well.

Mr. Liman said this fall he will cull the user submissions and edit them with the previously recorded readings into a single film, and then determine how and where this film will be shown.

“When you do a documentary, unlike making an action film for a movie studio, you make the best film you can and then you see what the right avenue for distribution is,” he said.

What was more important, Mr. Liman said, was that people read the contents of these documents aloud and hear them spoken for themselves.

“Involving the audience in the making of it is one of the goals, even before you get to the movie,” he said. “The experience people will have recording a scene, whether you’re the one speaking the words, or the one behind the camera – or the phone that’s filming the person, more likely – is extremely powerful, in and of itself.”