|
It’s
hard to imagine now, but there were those who doubted
that Matt Damon was the right actor to play Jason
Bourne. As the third eagerly awaited installment in the
series, The Bourne Ultimatum, opens throughout
the world this month, Damon and the tortured former
black operations agent he plays so well are as one in
the collective mind of the huge audience waiting for the
film.
But at
the time of the first movie, The Bourne Identity,
back in 2002, Damon, as he himself admits, wasn’t
exactly flavor of the month in
Hollywood.
“Basically, what you’re saying is that it saved my ass
and that’s completely true,” he laughs. “The weekend
that it opened I was doing a play in the
West End [of
London]
and I hadn’t had a film offer in six months because I’d
had a couple of movies tank.
“And the
word was that the first Bourne movie was going to tank,
because it had been delayed so long and it had so many
rounds of reshooting, and it just had all the hallmarks
of a turkey.”
How
wrong the rumormongers and cynics were. The Bourne
Identity, directed by Doug Liman, was released to
glowing reviews and huge box office as a worldwide
audience flocked to see an intelligent thriller
virtually reinventing the action spy genre with
groundbreaking filming techniques and a gripping story.
“So I
went from the Friday night of my final weekend of doing
this play to the Monday morning when I returned to
New York,
and I had something like 20 or 30 movie offers, just
based on the opening weekend of The Bourne Identity.
So it’s pretty easy to understand why these movies have
been a great boon for me.”
It’s
also fair to point out that he has made the character
his own and left nothing to chance in preparing for the
role. Before the first film started, Damon cleared his
schedule and spent six months researching and preparing
to play Jason Bourne.
“Doug
had this idea of casting me, and at the time nobody had
put me in a movie anything like this, and my big fear
and his big fear was that people weren’t going to accept
me as the character.
“And so
we decided that the best way to overcome that was that
if I just overtrained like crazy for all of these
things—for the fighting and the firearms—so that I could
actually do them.
“Because
audiences are smart enough to know when you are actually
cutting away to a stunt man. We wanted to make sure I
could do as much of them as possible, as much of them as
was safe, and the audiences were hip enough to go ‘Oh,
wait, that actually is him doing that.’ I think that
actually went a long way in selling me as the character,
and I just kind of stuck with that approach.”
He
adopted that same approach for The Bourne Supremacy,
which was directed by Paul Greengrass, who reunites with
Damon again for the film that will complete the Bourne
trilogy.
Both
men, says Damon, feel like “guardians” of the franchise
and fans of the films.
“We
really are fans of the character and of the whole thing.
And, you know, that starts with some fantastic writing
and great production values. So we’re both proud to be
part of it, and also we both want to do a great job
because we are fans, too.
“I do
enjoy [making] them because we’re allowed to make them
the way that we want to, and we’re not asked to do any
of the conventional things that normally you see in
movies like this.”
He
credits the studio, Universal Pictures, with giving the
filmmakers creative freedom to run with a character that
doesn’t fit into the usual parameters of a standard
Hollywood hero.
Jason
Bourne has been suffering from amnesia and is gradually,
over the course of the films, piecing together the
details of his former life as a political assassin—and
he clearly doesn’t like what he’s discovering about
himself.
After
two extremely well-received films, the expectations for
the third are running extremely high. “There are certain
expectations that people have because they’ve seen the
first two,” he agrees.
“There
are certain signposts we have to hit but at the same
time, you can’t be repetitive or people go ‘Oh, they are
just selling me the same old pair of sneakers.’ And
that’s hard, too, because you have to find new ways of
being entertaining within the style that you have
entertained them before, without being repetitive. But I
think we’ve got a great story and some great twists and
turns.”
Damon,
36, is one of the best actors of his generation, and is
enjoying a remarkable run of success. Recently, he
starred alongside Jack Nicholson and Leonardo DiCaprio
in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, which won Best
Picture at this year’s Oscars. He played a CIA agent in
Robert De Niro’s thriller The Good Shepherd and
was last seen with George Clooney and Brad Pitt in the
hit Ocean’s Thirteen.
Damon
has a daughter, Isabella, who is nine months old, and a
stepdaughter, Alexia, with his wife Luciana.
This
interview was conducted on set at London’s Waterloo
railway station where The Bourne Ultimatum was
filming a key scene involving Jason Bourne meeting a
British investigative journalist (played by Paddy
Considine).
What
does playing Jason Bourne mean to you?
Obviously, it enables me and Paul to be the guardians of
this franchise that we really are fans of. But also, it
enables us to go and do other films. Because of the
success of these films, we are afforded the opportunity
to go and make films like United 93 or Syriana and, to a
certain extent, The Departed. Now it’s come out
and it’s done very well at the box office, but
classically, Scorsese’s films don’t make very much money
at the box office, so nobody went into it thinking they
were going to make money; we all did it because we
wanted to work with Marty. So it’s easy to make choices
to do films that you don’t think will do particularly
well at the box office when you know you have a Bourne
movie in your back pocket.
Do you
enjoy doing (the Bourne movies)?
Yeah, I
do enjoy them because we’re allowed to make them the way
that we want to, and we’re not asked to do any of the
conventional things that normally you see in movies like
this. Basically, we are given more money in the budget
than we would normally get, to go and do a big movie the
way we want to make it, and I don’t think you get that
chance very often.
Is it
easier for you to work together with Paul Greengrass on
The Bourne Ultimatum because you know each other so
well?
Paul has
become really difficult since the success of the first
one and the success of United 93. [Laughs]
Seriously, it definitely helps that we have such a good
working relationship and a history together with the
last film. He’s a great guy and a fantastic director.
Not all
actors take to filming action sequences. Was it a
learning curve for you?
Yeah.
Each sequence is different. I think it’s hard to gauge a
performance within those sequences because you can feel
really kind of goofy. I mean, my only experience doing
them is with these Bourne movies, and I think I’ve got a
little better at them. But they always require slightly
different things. My approach was to figure out what the
sequences require and then train as much as I possibly
could so that physically, I could do them in a way that
was believable. And at the end of the day, the only job
you have as an actor is to be believable and not take
people out of the movie by looking like you don’t know
what you are doing, or that you couldn’t do what the
movie is saying you can. I think it is a little more
demanding to do them the way we do them.
Do you
enjoy the physical challenges of the role?
Yeah,
it’s interesting. That’s the best part of this job for
me, the time before we start working is when I get to
quietly go and try these things out. And it’s
particularly fun when the shots are challenging and
everybody is working together, and it’s because the
camera operator does something and you do something and
everybody is working in concert and you pull off a shot
that is really difficult and you do it all in camera.
That’s a pretty exciting thing to happen.
Did you
meet special forces people for your research?
Well,
for the first one, I met with different specialists:
martial arts people, a boxer.
Why a
boxer?
Because
Doug had a theory that I thought was really interesting,
and turned out to be right. He wanted the character to
walk like a boxer because he felt like there was a real
economy of movement in the way those guys carry
themselves, an assuredness in their posture. I had six
months, and I had never boxed before and I went and
trained and, really, it changed my body, and also it
worked and it changed the way I walked a little bit. And
for the firearms training, I went to a former SWAT
marksman, and he just took me to the desert in Los
Angeles where we would work six or eight hours at a time
and he taught me everything. We had all summer to work
on it and he was great.
The
character has that physicality but more of his very dark
side is being revealed in each successive film. What’s
that like to play?
Well,
it’s really interesting. For me to do that in a
mainstream movie is actually a great coup for us. When
in a big American movie, have you seen the protagonist
kill two people in the middle of the second act, and
then at the end go and apologise for it and start to
understand the consequences of his actions [as in The
Bourne Supremacy]? I really thought that was a good
thing to put out in a mainstream movie, particularly
with everything going on in the world. And that was the
big attraction for me. Doug Liman always talked about
that. Because Robert Ludlum wrote it and it was this
Cold War novel, and Doug’s movie was very different from
the book, other than its title. We kind of went far
afield right out of the gate. Doug always said he was
turning a Republican novel into a Democratic movie.
[Laughs]
How does
Paul Greengrass’s background in documentary filmmaking
influence the style of the Bourne films?
What
really helps, particularly in the last movie, and it
does come from documentary work, is that he never lets
the camera anticipate the action. When something
happens, the camera reacts to it, it’s following the
action, which is the same with a documentary. As a
result, you are sitting there watching and you start to
feel really insecure, because you know that if something
blows up you are not going to be in on the gag, it’s
going to blow up and knock you over! [Laughs] It’s
really based on all that documentary work, and I think
it adds to the film aesthetically. And when people say
“I was on the edge of my seat...” what they are really
responding to is that subconscious feeling of
insecurity.
You’re a
father now, with a stepdaughter and a baby. Do you try
and take the family with you when you are away filming
for Bourne?
Yes, I
do. In fact, we started in Tangier, and they didn’t come
for those few weeks, and that was really, really
miserable, so we decided en masse, as a group, that we
are just going to make a go of it on the road. It’s a
new experience, but it seems, knock-wood, that’s it’s
going to be a good one for everybody.
Are you
enjoying being a father?
It’s
great, and just for peace of mind. It’s great that we
are all together and having all these adventures
together. I’ve been on my own for so long on the road,
you know, before these kids came along, and there was
always that feeling of “I really want to show this to
somebody.” It grates on you after a while. So to have
them here with me and to know that they are out having
adventures when I’m at work is wonderful.
You’ve
had a fantastic couple of years—working with Martin
Scorsese and Robert De Niro and now back on Bourne. Has
it changed you as an actor?
I hope
so. I feel like I got better. I learned so much working
with Bob. I jumped into that role pretty quickly, and he
had been basically preparing it for eight or nine years,
and he said to me, “Look, I’ve prepared this role, you
don’t have to worry about anything; I’m going to walk
you through this moment by moment,” and he really did.
To be working that closely with him on a movie that
mattered to him was so special. It was the best year of
my career—you know, between Bob and Marty, it literally
couldn’t be going any better. I’ve been waiting for the
other shoe to drop for, like, 10 years, but things keep
getting better. I just want it to keep going. |
