Jasin Boland/Universal Pictures
They said it could never happen, but this year sees the return of Jason Bourne with star Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass in tow. The creatively titled Jason Bourne hits theaters July 29th, and as a fan of both The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum I couldn’t be happier.
Greengrass took the reins from Doug Liman for both sequels, and while the Bloody Sunday director may have seemed like an odd choice at the time his skill and hand-held style helped build the films into a billion dollar-plus franchise. His commentary for The Bourne Supremacy is (probably?) his first such track.
Keep reading to see what I heard on The Bourne Supremacy commentary.
The Bourne Supremacy (2004)
Commentator: Paul Greengrass (director)
1. The first film revealed to Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) that he was a contract killer, “so the second story needed to deal with the consequences of that. What could Jason Bourne do with the knowledge that he was a killer. How could he engage with life if there was blood on his hands?” This led them to an opening showing the shards of his broken memory and his new life far away from those past sins.
2. The choice to find Bourne in Goa, India was made before Greengrass came aboard the project, but he approved.”It was somewhere where you would imagine Jason Bourne would go and hide if he found that Europe was too small.”
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3. “The memory book was an idea that was around a long time,” he says, as a way to visually display Bourne’s confusion and pain.
4. Pamela Landy in essence replaces the character of Conklin (Chris Cooper) from the first film, and Greengrass wanted Joan Allen for the role “because Chris Cooper, he’s many things as an actor, but above all he’s a classy actor.” He wanted to replace one classy actor with another to maintain an integrity.
5. He cast Karl Urban as Kirill because they wanted an actor who looked “charismatic and immediately compelling, so that in the midst of this classic espionage operation you would have a suddenly youthful and contemporary figure walk across the stage and grab your attention. And that’s what Karl certainly did.”
6. He thinks the first chase scene “sets the style of this film which, you know, arises out of Doug [Liman’s] style for the first movie, but I suppose it’s a little more fluid perhaps, a little more intensely immediate.” He wanted to keep viewers with Bourne as much as possible in the physical sense. “When he runs we run, when he escapes in a jeep we’re in the jeep with him.”
7. The scene where Bourne and Marie (Franka Potente) crash their jeep into the river required the actors to shoot inside the car while twelve feet under water. “A total nightmare,” says Greengrass. “All you have to do is hold your breath and try and act.”
8. He discussed with Damon the idea of Bourne’s possible military background influencing his goodbye moment to Marie where he burns her photographs and identification. “There was always the possibility of a salute at this point, almost as if he would salute his fallen comrade before picking up on his journey, which would be a journey of revenge.”
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9. Scenes of confrontation require evenly matched adversaries, and “I think that Brian [Cox] and Joan in this scene you’ve got two perfectly matched actors with contrasting styles.”
10. The opening to the interrogation scene at the Naples airport was Damon’s idea. “I love the proposition of this scene, where in essence he was playing possum. The audience knows that even if you don’t know it consciously you know that he is one concealed ball of energy.”
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