Hi, my name is Doug Liman.
I'm the director and producer of The Bourne Identity.
Right off the bat, you'll notice
we didn't do the traditional Universal music
against the advice of our excellent mixers,
Bob Beemer and Scott Millan,
who felt that it's very tricky to pull out that music
because it tells the audience to shut up and pay attention to your movie.
And they were definitely right when I saw the film on 42nd Street.
This image, here, was from my original storyboards.
lt was deep under the water, looking up at Bourne's floating body.
We ended up not shooting it, but ILM created that
from scratch in a computer.
We couldn't afford to shoot most of these shots in a tank,
so we're shooting in Imperia, Italy.
For the most part, we were tied to the dock, and we also had a barge in the harbor
and we added rain on the spot.
Then, digitally, Peter Donen and his excellent effects staff
added most of the storm that you're seeing.
Especially here. This is a boat tied to the dock
and we added all the sea behind the fishermen.
That's not really there.
It's amazing, with digital effects
what you can do with people just tied up.
That body is also just next to the dock
with a motorboat driving along, creating the wakes around it.
What a mess.
You've never seen a dead man before?
Put a blanket on him. Cover him.
I'm coming.
Be careful.
One of the fun challenges of this movie
was that we were based in Paris, but
we had to have casting offices in different parts of the world,
like a casting office in Rome, to cast the actors for this sequence.
That's Orso Maria Guerrini,
who's one of the great Italian actors.
lt was definitely fun to direct people speaking a language you don't understand
and trusting them that they're actually saying the lines.
You're really directing from a very emotional place.
This sequence is all shot
on a soundstage in Paris.
Actually, not a soundstage but a warehouse.
The set's on a gimbal
and a lot of this actually isn't with Matt Damon.
Obviously that's not Matt Damon.
This great effects company in Paris called Spadaccini
created a rubber mold of Matt
and we used that not only for the bullet shots but for shots like this.
A shot like that is not really Matt.
Matt lost a tremendous amount of weight to do this movie.
Actually, he didn't lose so much weight. He got himself physically into shape.
For about four or five months, he was on a strict no pizza, no beer,
nothing fun to eat, just bland white-meat chicken.
And boxing every day and doing his Kali work
and working with his trainer, Mike Torchia.
I thought I should get in shape and work out with him and Franka,
but I only survived one workout. Really, it was quite grueling.
One great thing for Matt was, because Spadaccini made a mold of his body
when he was at his most fit,
we were able to continue to use that mold
for shots of him after we...
There's a point at which he went off that regimen and became more normal.
For those of you who know the book,
the Swiss bank account number used to be a piece of microfilm in the hip.
I'm not one for gratuitous gadgets, but
this is something I felt we should modernize.
Microfilm doesn't even exist anymore in the library.
Probably most of you listening to this have never used a microfiche machine.
It just shows the generational difference.
I've always thought I was the younger generation
but microfilm probably separates us.
A boat! A fishing boat. You were in the water.
We pulled you out.
What water?
You were shot. See? There are the bullets.
The origin of The Bourne Identity
was a book I fell in love with when I was in high school.
I re-read it around the time I was finishing Swingers
and thought, "Wow, this would be a great movie."
And Swingers opened so many doors for me
and people were saying, "What movie do you want to do next?"
I said, "There's this book I want to do, The Bourne Identity. "
And, obviously, Swingers came out five years ago,
so it wasn't as easy as saying, "I want to do the book The Bourne Identity. "
it took me two years to secure the rights to the book,
and then another year developing the screenplay
and then two years of production.
Treadstone, actually, is not from the book.
This is based on my father's memoirs, his autobiography called Lawyer.
He ran the Iran-Contra investigation.
Most of you probably would remember his interrogation of Oliver North.
And there's a lot of Oliver North in Chris Cooper.
ln fact, the entire Treadstone operation...
The name is taken from the book,
but the actual nuts and bolts of it are taken from my father's memoirs
and my conversations with him about what was going on at the NSA
under Ronald Reagan.
Again, some of those shots you just saw there,
we did actually go out on the boat with Matt,
we took it out to sea one day and did some filming.
This is second unit helicopter.
Everybody thought this shot wouldn't work.
I'm actually shooting Matt on the dock.
That crane you just saw on the right side of the frame
was actually something on the dock, but you can't tell.
This is soundstage work.
...and tell me.
If you want to eat, you better get in there.
You know, based on these charts, I think I may have been closer to the coast.
What is this? You tie these knots?
-So, it starts to come back? -No, it doesn't start to come back.
The knot's like everything else. I found the rope and I did it.
Same way I can read.
I can write. I can add, subtract. I can make coffee.
-I can shuffle cards, set up a chessboard. -Yes, it will come back.
No, it's not coming back, goddamn it! That's the point!
I'm down here looking through this, all this shit!
For two weeks I'm down here.
It's not working. I don't even know what to look for.
You need to rest. lt will come back.
What if it doesn't come back?
We get in there tomorrow, I don't even have a name.
It's not much, but it should get you to Switzerland.
Thank you.
This was all Imperia, Italy.
That harbor is also where we filmed all the water stuff from the beginning.
You can see it's a very calm place that we had to add the rain and the storm to.
Saar Klein, my editor
who's also an Academy Award nominee, like Matt,
had this vision for this film
that Bourne should disappear early on.
Just a little trait. So, right here, see, he's gone.
Most people miss that.
You'd think that that's a digital effect, but that's not.
We actually did that in camera.
There are a lot of digital effects in this movie
like the tunnel wall that's going behind him.
We're not actually on a train.
We're sitting on a stage. Again, Peter Donen's group put in the tunnel.
Now, here we are in Paris at Gare du Nord.
lt was our most expensive location for the whole movie.
Those are my footsteps. He was supposed to be looking at a virgin field of snow
but I needed to do something and ended up...
I couldn't be mad. When we re-framed the shot, my footsteps were in it.
I really couldn't get mad at anybody else.
This is an interesting combination of stage work and location.
This is on location in Prague. This is on a soundstage in Paris.
This, for me, was a critical performance for Matt
and required a controlled environment, using a long lens.
Especially this moment, here.
It's such a subtle, small change that happens.
And now we're back to Prague
and this bigger stuff is the location.
This, for me, was first and foremost a drama
and secondly an action film.
And those little moments were extremely important to me.
This is Adewale. I'm not even going to try to pronounce his last name.
You probably may know him from Oz. Really a phenomenal actor.
This notion for the...
Those who know the book know I jettisoned
pretty much everything except the premise,
not only to modernize it,
but to bring it in line with my politics, which are definitely left of center.
I wanted to create a back-story for the film
that really talked about America's foreign policy.
ln this case, it's about a small African nation,
but it could be an allegory for South America or even the Middle East.
Obviously, in today's climate, that's on people's minds,
but this was on my mind long before September 11.
It's something I wanted to work into the film
without cramming my political beliefs down people's throats.
So you can take it, or not take it.
I was recalling a conversation we had some time ago.
Talking about Treadstone.
I seem to remember...
I really was very fortunate to be able to work with Brian Cox and Chris Cooper.
One of the luxuries of doing a studio film
versus Swingers and Go,
is that, on my earlier films, we'd say,
"We need somebody like Brian Cox," or "We need somebody like Chris Cooper."
That's how I would have gone about casting this scene.
On The Bourne Identity, I started off saying to Joseph Middleton
who was my casting director on Go and who worked on this film with me,
"We need somebody like Chris Cooper and like Brian Cox."
And he just said, "Well, what about Chris Cooper and Brian Cox?"
ln your big Universal Pictures movie, you actually can get those people.
lt turned out, not only did I get the people who I actually wrote the roles for,
but they obviously did an amazing job, and they were really great to work with.
Those guys worked under really tough circumstances because
Tony Gilroy, who wrote the script...
I wrote the script first with Blake Herron and then Tony Gilroy came in.
Tony is an amazing writer, and probably where he shines most
is when he was writing Chris Cooper and Brian Cox.
Anytime he was writing Chris Cooper, he could do no wrong.
And he wrote so many great scenes with Chris Cooper
that I ended up insisting on filming them all
'cause I couldn't stare at a good scene
and have a good actor on set and not film it.
So I shot more than I knew we could use
so we had to shoot three of their scenes a day for five days.
Brian and Chris really were troopers. We'd finish a scene
and we'd say, "Take a two-minute break."
And then we'd have to be back in there blocking the next scene.
This bank is a combination of shooting the lobby in the Sorbonne,
and then this is a set we built in Prague.
We were based in Paris with a completely French crew.
Then we went to Prague to build our sets
because it was more inexpensive to shoot there.
My crew was phenomenal. lt was my first time working overseas.
I had done some commercials overseas, but my first time doing a feature.
And I found the French crew to be
so supportive, and it was an environment where they just love movies.
So this is a set that Dan Weil, the production designer, created.
Again, like when I was casting, I said,
"I want a production designer like the guy who did Nikita."
La Femme Nikita.
And he went, "Well, what about the guy who did La Femme Nikita?"
So that's Dan Weil and
I worked with Oliver Wood on the cinematography.
Those of you who know my work know that I DP'd my prior films myself.
And I really learned a tremendous amount working with Oliver.
I continue to operate the camera,
to keep that personal relationship with the actors.
But given the sheer workload
of having two crews shooting simultaneously
and the fact that we were working on the script,
just the logistics of a film that's shooting in seven countries,
it was great to have a partner in the cinematography domain.
This box with the money really was, for me
the defining image for the movie.
It's one of the first things I did when the studio green-lit the movie.
I sent my assistant out with whatever I could find in my wallet
from different travels I'd done around the world.
I gave him different currencies and made him color Xerox them
and create my own personal stack of money from different countries.
Just as a prop for myself.
I should talk a little bit more about the cinematography.
I worked with Oliver Wood.
I was also fortunate to be able to work with Don Burgess
and Danny Mindel.
That really was incredible:
To work with these three world-class cinematographers.
Especially given my own personal interest
and hands-on attitude towards cinematography.
They really were great collaborations.
I had also started talking about the French crew...
The thing that was incredible about working in France is that
everybody on the crew loves movies.
It's not a job to any of them.
They really have a personal interest and stake
in the fact that you're making a good movie.
When we'd issue new pages, everybody would have opinions.
Yes, in Paris.
Do you have the number for a Jason Bourne?
Yes, sir. Would you like me to connect you?
Yes, please.
My best boy grip, Jean-Pierre Deschamps,
was a critical component
to the photography of the movie.
Mikael Monod, who was the gaffer
was a really critical component to how the film looked.
My first AD, Luc Etienne...
First and foremost, first ADs are there to wrangle the crew into shape...
but Luc was very passionate about the movie,
the script, the story and the performances.
lt was a really great experience as an American filmmaker
to go there and be surrounded by these people who are passionate about movies.
The sequence you just saw was all filmed in Prague
dressed to look like Zurich.
That was a little bit of a stunt with those trams.
I'm an American.
Bourne is very calm in situations where the rest of us might not be.
That's just a little throwaway thing...
Obviously now
is the perfect opportunity to talk about the amazing Franka Potente.
There is a character Marie in the novel, but she is an economist from Canada.
I had seen Run Lola Run, and I said, "It's a girl like that
"that Matt Damon should meet."
Somebody who doesn't feel
so familiar to American audiences.
Because, to me, one of the things about this story is
it's very much the Wizard of Oz.
Jason Bourne is trying to get home,
and is trying to get home the entire movie
and he eventually has to realize that Marie is home
and he was home all along. He just had to realize it.
That, to me, is like Dorothy going down the yellow brick road
when she could have just clicked her shoes at any time.
She didn't realize that home was so close.
The red bag!
Stop right there! Put your hands up!
Obviously we should talk about the fight sequences.
At this point, you've had the amazing sequence in the park,
and now, Matt just kicked some butt here.
Nick Powell was my stunt coordinator on this.
He was so much more than a straight stunt coordinator.
He really was a visionary for the stunts and, in most ways, directed them.
He really understood
not only how to physically have the actors do what they need to do,
but he really understood where the camera should be to best pull that off.
lt was an example of how involved Nick Powell was
that I invited him to the editing room in LA
to work on the edits of the fights, which is very unusual.
Most stunt coordinators block the physical action and move on.
And Nick, he's got a world-class reputation.
He definitely demonstrated to me why he's held in such high regard.
There was something that was really important to me that we just passed:
Matt grabbing the walkie-talkie and the map off the wall.
lt was my vision from the beginning, for this movie,
to create a character, who, when the pressure heated up,
he got calm.
And he used his brain instead of his muscles.
When I first talked to Matt Damon,
because Matt is not known for doing action movies,
I said, "Our action is going to be a little different."
People used to bandy around the term "thinking man's action movie."
lt seems like a bunch of semantics to me.
But the one thing I will say about our action is that
it's character-driven and it was very fun for me to think of ways
for Matt to get calm and think about his problems.
Something like grabbing the map off the wall, for example.
There were a number of smart people who were helping me on this movie.
We would sit around and brainstorm and take two weeks for four of us
to figure out something for Jason Bourne to figure out in two seconds,
like, grab the map off the wall.
ln hindsight, it seems a simple thing to think of,
but it took some time for us to think of all those details,
or grabbing the walkie-talkie.
That shot you just saw, again, was my idea of how I wanted to do the action work.
It just feels very simple and natural, because to Jason Bourne
it's no big deal.
That's part of the character-defining aspects
of the action in this movie
that Jason Bourne's certainly not happy about the skills he has.
He doesn't know why he has them and we don't dwell on it.
This is not a self-indulgent movie.
You don't see Matt Damon talking about his amnesia very often.
You don't see him moping a lot in this film.
As an example, we made a bold choice when I shot this sequence
that when Jason Bourne came down off the wall, the obvious thing to do
would have been to have him stop, turn around and look up at the wall
and react to what he just did.
We felt that that was not Jason Bourne.
Other movies would do that, but Jason Bourne
is much more matter-of-fact about it.
-He's in Zurich now? Right now? -Yes. lt just came in.
This is Gabriel Mann playing Zorn, who is a phenomenal actor.
I was given access to such amazing talent for playing the secondary roles...
I mean, he cleaned out the box. He left a gun. What does that mean?
I said I don't know!
I liked it better when I thought he was dead.
The interesting thing about this sequence was
we were shooting in Prague in January and February and it's cold there.
We actually wardrobed Matt when we were in Paris in October.
The sweater seemed like a good idea back then,
that he would dump his jacket to change his look.
Again, not call a lot of attention to it, just have him do it.
But Matt was really cold.
Actually, most of this is ADR
because the original production sound was like,
"Good morning."
There were certain sounds he couldn't make with his mouth.
He sounded like a boxer.
We would heat him up between takes
and put those chemical heat packs on his face.
We also had this propane torch thing on the side of the set.
But it didn't work and we ended up having to ADR him
because he was talking like that.
This scene...
Those of you who are familiar with my previous work
know that I have always been a fan of the hand-held camera.
I was trying to evolve with this movie.
This amazing Czech Steadicam operator, Jaromir Sedina...
We developed a style.
This is Steadicam, but the camera is moving in a way that has an energy
that my hand-held work...
I was always a fan of hand-held work
'cause it put an energy into the cinematography.
With Bourne I wanted to see if it was possible
to be more sophisticated with the camera work
but still keep that energy. Jaromir and I developed a technique
for working with a Steadicam.
lt was exactly what I was looking for.
lt was a little rough with Jaromir in the beginning
because these people take pride in their craft
and I'm asking him to do things that go against all his training and his teaching.
One of the techniques I used for doing the Steadicamming,
you'll see, it is mostly within the Treadstone sequences that I did this,
was I wouldn't let Jaromir see the rehearsal.
So he wouldn't know who was going to speak.
Because English isn't his first language, it would be harder on him in the first place.
He wouldn't know who was going to speak
so he'd always be a little bit late.
lt was exactly the edge that I wanted to give to the photography.
After the first one or two times we'd done this scene
when Jaromir could anticipate because he figured out what was going on,
I would then add extra challenges for him
and make him start the scene with the camera...
I'd make him start in the other room, and yell, "Action!"
He'd hustle in with the camera and try to catch up.
Eventually we developed a style where he could do that on his own.
And it's definitely a style of photography that I plan on continuing to explore.
...which was fine with me because I was ready.
After six months in Amsterdam, you're not sure
if you've been there 20 minutes or years, if you know what I mean.
This sequence...
I was talking about the cold out by the car
where Matt first gives Franka the money.
This scene, we're actually shooting in the Czech Siberia.
While Matt in the other sequence was the one suffering
because I had a huge, heavy North Face jacket on,
and a big hat, a Russian hat
and Matt was in a sweater.
ln this sequence, Matt's in a nice heated car
and I'm actually outside the car on a trailer, filming
in Czech Siberia where it's negative 20 degrees.
They're going 50 miles an hour, so you can imagine what the wind-chill was like.
We went through three cameras shooting this sequence.
We had a Panavision and that got too cold and literally stopped working.
We went back to my trusted Aaton,
which I always insist on having.
Even that froze up, and we ended up using our ARRI,
which was our second unit camera.
That thing is German-made and can survive anything
and it survived the Czech Siberia.
...and it's just starting to move to the background
so keep going.
Really, if you want, please keep talking.
One of the things about doing a movie that's PG-13 is that
you only get to use the "F" word once or twice.
It's actually a very helpful word, and as we were rehearsing
there were many scenes where we realized using the "F" word would help
an actor with a moment.
But I only felt like I could use it once.
And first I gave it to Franka, and then eventually
I decided that Matt should get the "F" word
because he needed it for this scene.
lt was interesting how the "F" word got moved around
from scene to scene, because we knew
we were only going to get to use it once in the entire movie.
Another thing, in terms of being a cleaner movie,
you'll notice that nobody's smoking in this movie
which is just a personal thing of mine.
Ironic coming from the director of Swingers,
but it's actually because of Swingers.
I started to feel that, as a filmmaker, I had to take a little bit of responsibility
in terms of the kind of role models that I'd be putting forward.
I didn't want to be part of encouraging
anymore teenagers to start smoking.
So, even though this film is set in Europe,
where literally everybody, including our French Steadicam operator
who would smoke while he was operating the Steadicam...
There was smoking everywhere. But it was never actually on film.
What is he doing?
ls it a game? ls he warning us? ls it a threat?
Sir? Look at this.
The other great thing about doing all those Treadstone scenes is
in addition to Gabe Mann, I got to work with Josh Hamilton,
who many of you will recognize.
And also Walt Goggins, who's in the room right behind them.
Here comes Walt now.
They are both just amazing young actors.
Again, people who should be playing the leads in films.
It's such a great luxury, when you're doing a studio film
that you get to work with talent of this caliber.
And one of the fun things...
There are so many scenes that take place in this room
which my production designer, Dan Weil, envisioned,
as opposed to the hi-tech plasma screen,
a custom-built CIA space that you would see
possibly in a film like Enemy of the State,
was that this was their conference room,
and that's why those cables are hanging down,
that they've just been adding more computers to.
Again, it captures the bureaucratic feeling of the NSA,
which is what I had become exposed to through my father's memoirs
and through discussions with my father about the NSA,
about how the world of espionage is really quite bureaucratic.
And speaking of my father's memoirs and Julia Stiles, who
a lot of people would ask why an actress of such huge stature
like Gabe Mann, or Josh, or Walt, would be in a small role.
She really was on their level when we started this film
and then she had some films that broke out and made her a bigger star.
There was some concern that it would be distracting.
But I wanted to have
an actress who was significant enough
that even though the role is very small you would pay attention to it and
it would bring some of the politics contained in this film
a little bit further forward.
...and first thing I'm doing is I'm catching the sightlines
and looking for an exit.
I see the exit sign, too. I'm not worried.
I mean, you were shot.
People do all kinds of weird and amazing stuff when they are scared.
I can tell you the license plate numbers of all six cars outside.
I know that our waitress is left-handed...
and the guy sitting at the counter weighs 215 pounds and can handle himself.
This monologue that Matt gives in this scene
was, I think, the reason that Matt Damon chose to do the movie.
This is something that Tony Gilroy
crafted in his first draft, and both Matt and I fell in love with.
He really captured the essence of the character.
We played with a lot of different ways for Matt to say that monologue,
which were all great.
One of the challenges was to figure out which one to put in the film.
That's the only time you see Matt sleep in the movie,
where he gets to be peaceful.
And that's not unintentional.
And here we are on the banks of the Seine.
We're only a few blocks from where I lived in Paris while we were doing this film.
We were obviously trying to make the most of Paris.
I think it's one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
But not trying to...
Probably this shot is the one that says,
"We're in Paris and we're going to show you we're in Paris."
ln the rest of the movie, I throw it away
because I didn't want to go into this film the way so many Americans go to Paris
and just shoot the most beautiful places in the city. lt feels touristy.
Part of working with a French crew and living in Paris was that
I got to know the city the way a local would know the city.
These people would...
As I said, the crew, they're all filmmakers.
They all really care about the movie and
they would introduce me to neighborhoods like Belleville.
This is one of the ritzier neighborhoods in Paris,
the 16th arrondissement.
Again, I say "arrondissement" pretty well.
I had learnt French in high school, did a little bit in college.
Pretty early on, I decided that
it would be more effective for me to speak French with the crew than English
because, when you speak French, if something is misunderstood...
you're the one not understanding it, and you know it.
Whereas, if you speak English, out of respect, they'll mostly say, "Yes",
like they understood and maybe they didn't.
Here.
Thank you. Okay.
Thanks for the ride.
Anytime.
Well, you could come up. I mean, or you can wait here.
-I can go check it out. But you could wait. -Oh, no, no.
You could wait.
And if that monologue of Matt's was one of the reasons he did the film,
then his line in this scene, "You're the only person I know"
is one of the reasons she did it.
Again, another great original Tony Gilroy moment.
Jason Bourne speaks a number of different languages.
We saw him speak Swiss German on the park bench.
Again, I just needed to be able to communicate in French.
Matt needed to pull off perfect fluency, because that was a character trait.
Matt went through a pretty incredible process
because we'd have a native speaker, either Swiss German
or, in this case, for this scene, my assistant
Benjamin would tell him how to say the lines in French that he's about to say.
The scene was a little bit longer, so it doesn't seem as impressive.
He actually had to say a lot more when we shot this.
He also recorded it onto a micro cassette recorder
and Matt would sit in his trailer and listen to it,
and it would go into this part of his brain and he could say it back out
with the accent perfect, hit every syllable.
Not only that, you could go to him a couple of months later
and he could output it again.
lt was incredible to watch that process and watch all the different languages
and how he convincingly pulled them off.
Especially because some of the languages that he does in the film are more difficult
like in the mirror early on, where he's speaking Dutch, I believe.
It's not the simplest language to pull off.
Something that was always important to me was bringing him to this house.
This is all about, as I said, this film being
a Wizard of Oz in its desire to return home.
For me, the best way to dramatize that was by giving him a false home.
Giving him a place where he thinks he's gone home,
and then it's not really his home and it gets stripped away.
But I was not approaching this film like it was an action film.
I was approaching it like it was a drama, like it was Wizard of Oz.
And also, since it's also a mystery,
going to the apartment also gave us an opportunity
to put some interesting clues into it.
This we were shooting in a real apartment in Paris.
We also built part of this apartment on a soundstage, in a warehouse.
I keep saying soundstage, but
for the most part, we did not shoot in soundstages but in old warehouses.
They're fun. They have more history to them and they're a lot cheaper.
Yeah. Hello? Hello?
Yes, sir, Hotel Regina, Paris. How may I direct your call?
-Yeah, you're in Paris? -Yes, sir.
I'm looking for a guest there.
A Jason Bourne.
Since we're about to introduce Nicky Naude,
assuming I'm not spoiling the movie for anyone listening to this,
I should talk more about the French casting and the European casting.
We had Joseph Middleton, who was based in Los Angeles
and was sort of the head casting director for the film,
but we also had Kate Dowd working out of London,
and in France, with me in my Paris office, I had Nathalie Chéron and Claire Hammond.
Nathalie and Claire were sort of my day-to-day casting people.
They're the ones who got Nicky for me, which was not an easy task
because, since Matt was going to do all of his own fighting
we needed the person he fought against to not only be able to act,
but also be trained as a stunt person.
Claire, unfortunately, was killed in a scooter accident
right after we finished shooting the movie.
She's somebody that we all miss tremendously.
The film is dedicated to her and also to Robert Ludlum
who also died after we finished shooting the movie but before he could see it.
Those were both big losses for me.
Claire because she was so part of the process of making the film
and also just part of my life in Paris. She was so full of life.
Ludlum because I had gone to visit him in Montana
as a little independent filmmaker and he took a liking to me
and ultimately let me take his most high-profile novel
and shop it to the studios and try to make it into a movie.
He really took a chance.
A lot of people have taken chances on me, in my career, but
I feel like Robert Ludlum really took a chance on me and
really took a sort of fatherly attitude towards me, and I will always...
He'll always occupy a special place in my heart for his having done that.
This was a very difficult film to make, and
thinking about Robert and trying to do something that would be
a great version of his book, was something that was important for me,
not just to do it for myself but to do for him.
So...
What?
Nothing.
We're now in Prague, here. This is a set we built in Prague.
This was something that didn't work.
ln hindsight, when you look at the sequence with Nicky coming through the window,
and it makes everybody in the theater jump,
it's really pretty fun to watch.
I'm used to doing comedy where everyone laughs at the same time.
It's very interesting to stand at the back of the theater and watch
500 people collectively jump up in their seats.
The initial shock that I did, did not work.
Luckily, I came up with a pretty simple fix to it.
Obviously I should be talking about the fighting sequence now. This is Kali.
Nick Powell is coordinating and, for the most part, directing this.
This sequence's probably the most rehearsed thing we did in the entire movie
over a period of about two months.
So we had every shot, every move worked out.
Everything that's in this room was shot all in one day
broken down into three or four move sequences, like a dance.
They'd do the three or four moves, we'd call cut, get it from a few different angles
and then we'd move on to the next three or four move sequence.
There is no stunt double in this. It's all Nicky and it's all Matt.
There's never a double in this sequence, as you can see,
because you've seen Matt's face in every shot.
lt was important to me. I feel that audiences are too sophisticated today to trick them.
Open that. Open that. Tell me what's inside.
Who are you?
The style of fighting called Kali
was something that was demonstrated to Matt and myself early in the process,
really, right after he signed on to the film.
We saw a demonstration of martial arts and of Kali in Los Angeles.
The thing that we loved about Kali was how efficient it was.
You don't break into a sweat. You use the aggressor's energy against them.
Not only did we decide that that's the fight form Jason Bourne should use,
but it started to inform other decisions that I was making about Jason Bourne.
I said, "That should be the defining thing about Jason Bourne.
"He should be ruthlessly efficient
"and not waste energy when he doesn't have to."
The guy went out of the window. He's not running around or freaking out.
He looks at his watch thinking, "I have two minutes before the cops get here."
He's calmly putting the money in the bag and calmly telling her to get her shoes.
That all actually originated with this demonstration of Kali.
You see it throughout the film when situations arise that
a lesser person or a more normal person might start freaking out,
Jason Bourne gets calm and gets efficient.
He conserves energy, and that's what Kali does.
lt gives you a sense of how the action and the drama of the film were very integrated.
It's why I felt that with this project I could do an action movie,
but not sell out, not do a movie where the action was gratuitous.
Because it is so integral to the drama
that it actually influences a lot of the straight dramatic choices.
Don't look.
Code in.
Alpha 37509.
Yeah.
Hang on.
Bourne went to Paris, to the apartment.
-We got him? Tell me. -He killed our man.
-What? ln the apartment? -Yeah.
-Well, you got to clean that up. -No, I can't clean it up.
-There's a body in the street. -So?
There's police. This is Paris.
Put up the scanners. Get as much radio information as you can.
Okay, you stay here.
I'm gonna go find a place for this money. I'll be back in 10 minutes.
The next sequence that's inside the Gare du Nord,
Matt and I went and just shot it,
which was easier when I was working with Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn
than with Matt who was being recognized by everyone in this train station.
While we're shooting this sequence we're literally running away from crazed fans,
but all of this is stolen.
The crew for the sequence consists of myself and Matt Damon, and that's it.
We had to take Matt around the block twice to lose most of the people following him.
There's one shot in here that was legitimately shot.
That's this shot.
But you can see that it's missing some of the energy that's in the earlier shots
which is why I went back in there with Matt
to get those shots, but we actually did pull it off.
But it's also harder to do that when you have a huge movie star like Matt Damon.
The camera was low because I was hiding it, so people didn't notice it.
But Matt couldn't cover his face, so the days of doing that,
if I continue to work with people of Matt's stature, could possibly be numbered.
There are a number of shots woven through the film
where Matt and I just went off and did it ourselves.
I had an amazing assistant
during this film, who started to work with me on Go.
His name is Colin O'Hara. He's kind of a can-do kind of guy.
A lot of times, it would just be myself and Colin and Matt.
I come from independent film, and because I'm used to shooting my own movies,
I'm very comfortable just grabbing the camera and going.
I recommend to people who are going into film
it's not a bad thing to learn the straight technical side
because you never know when grabbing the camera
could get you something special for your film.
We didn't do it very much in this movie,
possibly with a little bit more planning we wouldn't have had to do any of it,
but we were shooting in seven countries
and this was much more logistically challenging than I thought it would be.
This is a sequence where
I really wanted to keep Jason Bourne stoic
throughout the entire film, and never see the emotional side,
which was a risky choice because
the guy has amnesia, it's hard to relate to him.
But there was the moment early on and there's this moment
where I really wanted to see the other side. I wanted to put a little crack in the veneer.
The reason I was willing to take that chance with Jason Bourne
is that, for me, in a lot of ways, this is Marie's story
'cause she's the one normal person in the movie.
Again, I talk about Kali influencing Matt Damon's performance.
The cops are starting to surround the car,
he's getting very calm, he's looking for the map.
This is not how people normally react to stressful situations.
To me, this is the dramatic equivalent of what Kali is to martial arts.
This is obviously a great time to talk about
my incredible second unit director, Alexander Witt,
and I also had an additional editor, Chris Rouse.
This sequence wouldn't be the sequence it is
without the contribution of those two incredible people.
Doing a big studio film isn't all that different
from shooting a lower budget movie,
but getting to work with people like Alexander and Chris,
being able to have an editor who does nothing but work...
Chris did a great amount on the movie. He worked a long time on this sequence.
Alexander shot this sequence.
I would storyboard the sequence with Alexander, and we would go over it.
Besides the fight, this was the most planned thing in the production.
This was worked out two months before we started principal photography.
Pretty much every shot, because of the permitting process in Paris.
But Alexander would be off shooting this sequence...
Almost the whole time we were in Paris shooting the rest of the movie, he was off
every Saturday and Sunday shooting a piece of this sequence.
For the most part, I would just show up to check on it.
All the work had to be done in advance, so I had nothing really to do on the day
other than the shots I wanted of Matt Damon and Franka Potente
in the actual stunt sequences.
So there are some shots in this sequence where
Franka Potente would get in the passenger seat.
I'd get in the back seat with the camera.
The stunt person would go through the sequence with the two of us in the car.
We also had an English version of the car with the steering wheel on the right side
and the stunt person would put on a wig to look like Franka Potente.
Matt Damon would be on the left side of the car
with a fake steering wheel pretending to drive.
I'd be in the back seat filming him.
I'm a big roller coaster fan.
I like high-adrenalin excitement.
But going in a car and doing the stuff like the shot you just saw
was definitely the scariest thing I've ever been through.
Turn your head away. Turn your head away.
We were working under Nick Powell,
but the French really have probably the best drivers in the world.
Especially motorcycle drivers, but also precision car drivers.
lt really was an amazing team that was put together here.
Our first assistant director on the second unit crew, who worked under Alexander
Fanny Aubrespin, really did a phenomenal job
because there's obviously some similarity between this and Ronin
because it's a high-speed chase in France.
But I really wanted the streets to be crowded with people.
I didn't want this to take place in a fictional space where the city's empty,
which you see in a lot of movies. I wanted Paris, in the middle of the day.
I wanted there to be people and it to be messy.
It's a lot of Alexander, but it's Fanny, really,
as the first assistant director on the second unit crew,
it's her job to wrangle all the extras and the extra cars
and make the city feel populated.
First assistant directors are often under-appreciated.
But you can spot a movie where they haven't done their job,
or the director hasn't let them do their job,
where it feels like the movie's taking place in a movie world.
Luc Etienne, who was my assistant director,
and Fanny, who was Alexander Witt's first assistant director,
together really filled and populated the world.
This scene is actually my favorite scene in the whole film.
Everything that we did, and all the fun gadgets
and cool sequences, and high-energy scenes, and this scene
in all of its simplicity, for me, was why I was doing the movie.
It's what it was about.
lt humanized the car chase and made it about character development.
For us, in the audience, it was four minutes of really exciting car chase
but for Jason Bourne, it was four minutes of learning about his past
and learning things that he probably wasn't so excited about.
I loved all these actors I got to work with in the morgue.
Like Hubert Saint-Macary who's the guy they're dealing with right now.
Really just amazing French actors.
Because, by the time I got to this, I really had become fluent in French,
I felt I was able to work with them in a very comfortable manner.
Based on my experience with them, I'd love to do a whole film in French.
This is some of Alexander's work, the cars driving through Paris.
Just amazing to have
such a capable second unit director like Alexander.
John August actually went off and shot some things for me.
They just left.
It's really a great luxury as a director
to look at a shot list and say, "We can't get all these things"
and know that there's someone to turn to that you can give the material to.
You recognize this upcoming shot of the car.
This is a style of filmmaking that I had started working on
in the case of Go, we filmed it from a quad 4runner.
Here we're filming from a motorcycle.
I love trying to put energy onto the screen,
capture energy and put it on the screen.
Because it's a movie not a play.
If you ever sat next to me in a play
you might understand why I'm not aspiring to do movies that are like plays.
I have a very short attention span.
This moment was very important to me
that it be Franka trying to kiss Matt
and her awakening in him something, but
I didn't think that we really had the luxury here
for the two of them to completely forget
about the fundamental problem that
Jason Bourne is facing as a character.
This was really a challenging scene on both parts, because
in terms of Marie's character, given everything she's been through,
there were some issues about being attracted to somebody
who's just put you through what Jason Bourne has put Marie through.
I, ultimately, felt that, "Yes, I would."
That's actually really how I started this film.
I was reading The Bourne Identity on an airplane
and what struck me was:
What would it be like if you met a guy like Jason Bourne?
Somebody who looks like Matt Damon,
who had a heart of gold,
but he was incredibly violent, was leaving a trail of bodies
and had a past that might be really dark.
What would you do?
Hey.
You already cleaned the room?
I wiped the whole place down for fingerprints.
Can I walk around or is it gonna leave any footprints?
You can walk around. It's no problem.
But we'll just keep track of everything we touch.
I think it's better if we leave a room, that we don't leave a trail.
Why? Where are we going?
I need to go to the hotel where John Michael Kane stayed.
The Hotel Regina.
If I was him, then they're gonna have some records.
We need that hotel bill.
Okay.
lt gets slightly complicated, though.
Because you're dead.
Right.
-Sir, please. -If they want war, then we'll give them war.
If they want to kill me, they better kill me the first time.
They better kill me dead. They better kill me when I'm in my sleep.
Nykwana, listen to me. We need these people.
It's hard enough getting people that we know to help us.
We need to be careful.
We?
No, you.
You need to bring me back that bastard kid's head,
put it in front of this house, and show them the war we're fighting.
But that is precisely...
Nykwana!
We'll give the watch a reference check before we go.
Okay.
What's the pay phone number?
616-2468.
Exits?
There's three.
Service at the back, side goes to the street past the shops,
front is the best.
If I think I'm being followed, I walk out with the bag over my right shoulder.
And if there's no taxi?
I keep on walking, don't look back until you make contact.
What?
We need this, right?
Okay.
I need distances.
You walk in, you pick a spot. Some midpoint in the lobby.
Count your steps to that spot, and then remember that number.
Because after I call you, I can get you moving.
You understand?
I also need a head count.
How many people from when you walk in until you get to the desk.
How many hotel employees are there? And obviously security.
And it might not be that easy to see who they are.
So I'll call you, you give me the layout, and we'll take it from there.
Regina.
Yes, the house phone in the lobby.
-What happened? -I...
-Did something go wrong? What... -I've got the records.
This guy at the front desk was smiling at me.
So I thought, you know, all this trouble, maybe it's easier to just ask for them.
-You have the bill? -He made me a photocopy.
You just asked for it?
I said I was Mr. Kane's personal assistant.
Okay. That's good thinking.
This is one of my favorite Treadstone scenes
because there's so much unspoken.
And that, to me, is where you get character and performance.
You don't see that too often in action movies.
People are usually just speaking the plot.
But Tony Gilroy gave me a scene, here, where
for those of you who are astute,
you realize that Chris Cooper is really telling
Gabe Mann to lie to Brian Cox.
You're getting that Brian Cox might be starting to pick up on it.
Again, none of that is said or in the dialog.
That's all the actors bringing that to the scene.
We think he'll come back in.
They always do.
When?
How long till he checks in?
-24 hours. -24?
Yeah, it's usually something like that.
Then what?
I told you we'd clean this up.
I should talk about John Powell, who is the composer,
and Julianne Kelley, who was my music supervisor.
Julianne is actually part of my oldest team.
She did Swingers and Go with me.
And she did Bourne Identity.
This was a new thing for Julianne and I
because Swingers and Go were all source material.
Picking songs, and spending endless nights with stacks of CDs.
Here we were working with John
up at his studio in his house,
going there for these six-hour sessions where he'd play music for us.
We'd listen to it and give notes.
We'd come back the next day, and we'd listen to more music.
Then we'd come back the next day.
There was a tremendous amount of score in this movie.
John was extraordinarily collaborative.
He was the kind of guy who...
This was not an easy movie to score because in some ways
it's what people call a "tweener."
It's a thriller, but it's not one of those traditional studio spy-action films
where you just throw in a bunch of songs, and put them on the poster, too.
"Featuring the music of," whatever the hot band is.
This was something where there was something more traditional about this,
but I'm a throwback filmmaker, and I wanted the sound to be modern, moving forward.
lt took a lot of exploration to find the right sound for the movie.
lt was incredible. When we finally finished John's score and put it to the movie,
probably more than any other single element,
it elevated the viewing experience of the movie, double.
lt made the movie literally twice as enjoyable
listening to it with John's music rather than listening to it with temp music.
lt was an extraordinary experience working with Julianne and John to do that.
Mr. Kane?
Mr. Kane!
-How are you? -I'm good. I'm good. How are you?
Mr. Kane. Come right in. Please have a seat.
Thank you.
So, this is the Palmer Johnson tri-deck.
I'm assuming you're still in the market. It's still the same vessel?
Yes.
This was also a re-shoot where we felt that
we needed to just see a little bit more of his emotion.
Again, I was really trying to stick to my guns to keep his character stoic.
But every 20 or 30 minutes in the film
we felt that we needed to remind people
that he actually is human and is bothered by his dilemma.
Because it's in keeping with his character to not actually say that.
...John Michael Kane's body.
ln a morgue here in Paris.
But if you are John Michael Kane, whose body do they have?
This actor, Philippe Durand, was, again
courtesy of Nathalie and Claire, my French casting directors.
I loved working with Philippe and with Hubert
on this sequence.
I loved directing this scene in French.
This scene pokes fun at the French,
but in a very loving way.
It's a country I really respect,
but these are such classic French characters.
Probably to French people watching the film, it may seem like a cliché.
For me, it was fun to work with Philippe and Hubert
and to do this sequence in French.
ls this it?
This is also one of my
favorite sequences in the film
and in two points coming up here, this is actually
Oliver Wood with the camera on his shoulder shooting this.
lt was one of the first times I relinquished control of the camera.
I loved what Oliver did.
lt actually made me a more trusting filmmaker.
Ultimately, it resulted in me turning over a lot of the camera work
to Jaromir, who is my Czech Steadicam operator.
Because of the techniques we developed, I started working more with Jaromir
even when we weren't using Steadicam.
-Slow down. You can't take the book. -This is it?
It's okay. There's a pencil in here. That's fine.
Honey, why don't you go wait outside? Here it is.
-We can't have... -Okay.
Jason, what just happened in there? What are you looking for?
Nykwana Wombosi.
Wombosi went to the morgue to visit Kane.
Matt and Franka look so good here.
We'll talk a bit about how that happened.
A lot of Oliver Wood's lighting, with Mikael.
It's also because I had amazing people.
I had a French makeup person, Jean-Luc Russier.
For hair, Kay Georgiou,
you have probably seen her in the credits of tons of huge movies.
Obviously for Franka,
hair was a huge issue because it was gonna change in the movie.
And because in Run Lola Run, it was all about her hair being red.
There were tons of discussions with the studio about
what color her hair would be or not be.
And then, the haircut that Matt "gives" her in the film
had to seem plausible, but she still had to look great.
Kay and Jean-Luc really did a phenomenal job
with Franka and Matt,
making them very sexy and appealing, but not
making it feel artificial or glam,
which is hard to do.
lt was important for the story.
I was very glad to be working with them.
This cab driver, who's driving
was actually one of our drivers in the film,
Manu Booz.
You shoot in France, you have a French crew.
There are people from the crew that you can sometimes pull into it.
We auditioned a lot of people, but Manu gives a kind of authenticity
that is very important for the movie, because once you lose that authenticity
as a filmmaker, you make an agreement with the audience, and you create a world.
As long as you honor that world, everything is okay.
If you violate some of the rules you're setting up for the world,
if we ever did anything in this film that didn't feel authentic,
the whole thing would unravel.
Then people would say,
"If it's not gonna be authentic, then give us a lot more explosions"
which we obviously didn't do.
Having Matt and Franka to work with
was a huge asset, because in a scene like this
we were given an hour to shoot this entire scene. Total, from beginning to end.
Everything you've seen from him handing her the page,
to running across the street, to yelling at her,
there are only two takes, at most, of any of these shots.
You can only do that when you've got actors of the caliber
of Matt Damon and Franka Potente.
-Marie? -Get away.
-Marie, stop right there. -Get away from me.
What are you gonna do? Kill me?
-Marie. -ls that what's next?
Listen, stay calm. Stay calm.
Whatever we do, we have to do it together.
-We have to be... -We?
The only thing we had in common was that neither of us knew who you were.
-We've passed that now. -Listen to me!
The police'll find us. The people who took the picture in the embassy
who killed Wombosi, they're gonna come here and kill us.
The people who you work for.
I will take you wherever you need to go. I'll take you there. I'll leave you there.
You can do what you want. You never have to see me again.
But not here. If we stay here, we die.
Boy, great police work! Really brilliant!
Why don't they just hang out a banner that says, "Don't come back!"
Jesus Christ! What is the French word for "stakeout"?
Okay, this was 16 minutes ago.
This is our starting point.
They can't fly. Trains are risky.
This is some of that Steadicam work that I was developing with Jaromir.
Some of my favorite Chris Cooper moments are in that sequence.
Again, Saar Klein was able to...
By doing this intercutting, he was able to use
more of the material that I shot
than would otherwise have been okay.
Because, as I said earlier on the DVD, I overshot Chris Cooper and Brian Cox
because Tony Gilroy had written so much great material between the two of them.
One of the more difficult aspects of editing this film was trimming it down.
The way Saar intercut this,
we were able to actually incorporate the best moments from a couple of scenes
into the time and space that one scene would normally occupy.
We started it.
Get it out.
This is actually the Czech Siberia.
Earlier on I was outside. Now these guys are outside.
That really is a snowstorm. We're not adding that.
We back-checked them, ran a search merge with other data we had, which wasn't much.
Pins. These pins.
These are all the places we think she's lived in the last six years.
One, two, three, four, five.
That's our pool.
Matt's putting the tape on that window because he stole the car.
lt was one of my desires in making this film
to keep the pace moving forward and to not explain every detail,
but make sure that the information is there for the audience to figure out.
So I'm not sure how many people figured out the car was stolen.
But for people who wanted to figure it out, there it is.
He broke the window and that's how he got into it.
This whole sequence is actually one of my favorite things
that Saar put together.
I think he pulled this off in his editor's assembly.
Editors do that.
The first cuts of movies are usually the worst.
They are pretty much unwatchable.
But there's always moments in that first cut
that don't change, even if you spend another year editing.
There's always moments that the editor nailed.
And that was one of those moments.
This farmhouse is supposed to be in Paris, but we found it just outside Prague.
A little moment like this, where Matt looks at a problem
and just thinks of a simpler way to attack it and is very nonchalant about it,
is something that, to me, was very important to his character.
He's starting to figure out that somebody must be home.
He doesn't freak out. He just tells her, "Okay, we're going."
I thought it would...
-Oh, shit, that's Eamon. I'll talk to him. -We're leaving.
When we went to cast the role of Eamon,
we needed to do that out of England
because he is an English actor.
And because we had our casting director, Kate Dowd, up in London,
she was able to find Tim Dutton for us,
who is an incredible actor.
He brings so much to the role, so quickly and so easily.
Did she get you into this?
lt was just gonna be for a day.
Daddy, Alain has to go pee!
All right, all right, come on. Here. Get out of the car.
Okay, in you go.
Come on, Alain.
I'm sorry. I...
I thought it would be okay. But I guess I was wrong.
-Let's find Mommy. -Mommy?
Mommy is away for two days, thank God.
You've got yourself all tied up here.
Okay.
What's he do for a living?
He used to be in shipping.
ls he good for you?
Are you happy?
You know me. I try too hard.
Here you go.
Sleep well.
Good night.
I was talking about making the characters look great and
Kay and Jean-Luc.
We also had an amazing French costumer, Pierre-Yves Gayraud.
One of the great things about doing a studio film is
you get to get the top people in their fields in each of the jobs.
Pierre-Yves didn't just do the costumes.
He was part of the creative process.
They were in Paris at 2:00 a.m.
They can't fly. The train's too dangerous.
He knows better than to go anywhere we might track him.
So this is our best guess.
Julia Stiles out here on the Tuileries
is the last time you'll see that Ferris wheel
in a movie
because it has since been taken down.
Some of the aerial shots of Paris in the film
I actually filmed from the top of that Ferris wheel.
This sequence that is coming up
when I talk about Marie and the film, from her point of view,
and what you'd do if you met a guy like this, given everything you've been through
and he asked you to run away, would you?
lt comes down to the sequence coming up. lt also, on an intellectual level...
Since this film is about Jason Bourne,
who, up until this point, has been trying to unravel his past
because he wants to go home,
he feels like unraveling his past is the key to going home.
This, for me, is the moment in that journey
where he decides he doesn't want to know anything more about his past
and he doesn't want to go home to that place anymore.
Can you just leave your past behind?
They're going to find out in the morning that you can't leave your past behind
because it will come and find you.
It's an intellectual concept,
but, to me, it was one of the really fundamental concepts
that went into crafting this story.
Another important thing about that sequence was that
I'd wanted to start to plant something with the kids.
You saw him playing on the swings with the kids. Again, not hit it too hard.
Christ. You were up early.
Bless you for making coffee.
One night. You weren't kidding.
For a change.
He's not there either.
Again, when I talk about how
we crafted the character of Jason Bourne in here...
How, under pressure, he's calm and how he thinks.
This kind of moment, where Jason Bourne
hears the facts and very matter-of-factly says, "Get in the basement."
Something that Tony Gilroy, as far as we're concerned
just hit out of the park.
As a filmmaker, when you're crafting a story like this,
there are these tent pole moments. To me, that's one of them.
ln other movies, those tent pole moments would be, "I'll be back"
or something much bigger and more dramatic.
For me, it was moments like, "Get in the basement"
that were the tent pole moments for this film.
lt was also very interesting working on this sequence with Matt
because, in Tony's script, the tent pole moment really was
coming up when Marie says, "What about these children?"
Jason Bourne says, "I won't let that happen."
lt was clear how Jason Bourne should deliver, "I won't let that happen."
But Matt Damon wouldn't do it.
He said, "That's derivative of things that I've seen in other movies
"first and foremost." And, actually, little side-track here,
I love that he figures out that the gun is up high
because there are children's games down low...
My production designer, Dan Weil...
My original idea was that the gun would be in a rack.
He said, "No, if you have a gun, you're going to keep it up really high."
Because Dan has kids.
He doesn't just build the sets. He's part of creatively figuring out the characters.
So, getting back to the, "I won't let that happen."
lt was a fun challenge working with Matt,
to take a line like, "I won't let that happen," and figure out a way to say it
that doesn't feel like the cliché "Bruce Willis Die Hard" moment.
We weren't trying to do a movie that was derivative of that
and Matt Damon wasn't pretending to be one of those guys.
And Matt, I think, came up with something very special.
ln this sequence... I haven't talked about Frank Marshall yet,
who came on board as my producer about a week into production.
I had invited Frank to come on board as a producer
much earlier, but he wasn't available, and then his schedule changed.
I had Alexander Witt out shooting
and when I got under pressure, I'd also send Frank out with the camera to shoot things.
This sequence was kind of fun, because
I had Frank shooting some of Clive Owen's footage
while I was shooting Matt Damon's.
And we agreed we'd meet on this field.
We had these two crews out in the middle of winter in Prague
and we knew eventually we'd meet up,
but I'm following Matt Damon and he's following Clive Owen.
There's a lot of digital effects in this movie that Peter Donen put in
that are done so well, you don't even know they're effects.
There's no birds. We didn't have any birds when we shot this sequence.
You'll see that, where Clive just got shot there,
that wheat was digitally painted in.
It's amazing what you can do with digital effects, and you don't even know it.
The audience doesn't know it, but as a filmmaker
you can tell the story more effectively and more economically.
We're going to get to some sequences
where we couldn't physically build the set, or find the location.
And Peter Donen created the locations from scratch.
This sequence is shot entirely on one piece of film
without me calling "cut."
-What do you mean? -Who are you? Rome?
Paris?
Treadstone, both of us.
-Treadstone? -Which one?
Paris. I live in Paris.
You get the headaches?
Yeah.
I get such bad headaches.
You know at night when you're driving a car?
Maybe it's the headlights.
What is Treadstone?
Treadstone said pills.
They said go to Paris.
ls Treadstone in Paris?
Look at this.
Look at what they make you give.
All right, all right.
All right, Claudia, get in the front and put your belt on.
All right, we're just gonna put you in the back.
All right, get in the front, Claudia.
I'm not waiting, Marie.
-One minute, Eamon. -I'm not waiting!
Please!
Take it.
I took out $30,000. The rest is yours.
-That's it? -That's all I got.
No, that's not what I meant.
This is not gonna stop, Marie. You got to get out now. Away from me.
You got to get out. You got to start running.
You get low, you stay low.
No more friends. Nothing familiar.
There's enough in there for you to make a life. Any life.
I'm out of here, Marie!
Hey!
Get in the car. You got to go.
What are you gonna do?
I'll end it.
Go ahead.
Please.
This scene is the start of the new ending for the movie.
Writing endings of movies is extraordinarily difficult.
The ending for Swingers had to be rewritten.
Luckily, we were able to rewrite that before we started shooting.
The ending of Go needed to be rewritten
and the ending of Bourne Identity needed to be rewritten.
I mean, it didn't need to be rewritten, but to make it the most it could be,
it took more work on the script than was able to be done
before we started shooting the movie.
All of this material was done as part of a re-shoot.
Again, I was very fortunate that Universal really believed in the movie...
and let me go back and do this.
Code in.
Who is this?
The original ending was a little bit more pat.
Jason Bourne just showed up where Chris Cooper was.
There was no action in the end of the third act.
The last action in the movie was the farmhouse sequence.
Hello, Jason.
What Tony had written involved a huge fire in Julia Stiles' office
and the studio just didn't have confidence
in my ability to shoot that sequence
in the schedule that we had left to shoot it.
And they were right. We'd have definitely gone over schedule
because it was very elaborate what Tony had written, but quite brilliant.
Then, when we first previewed the film,
Mark Shmuger, who is the head of marketing for Universal
said to me, "You should put in another bit of action at the end of the film."
Basically, from where I started talking about the alternate ending
at the farmhouse, where he's at the table,
until the very end of the film, is all new material,
and all shot under a very tight time schedule of 10 days
in two different countries. And I was able to pull that off.
5:30 p.m. Paris.
Today. Pont Neuf.
Come alone, you walk to the middle of that bridge.
You take off your jacket. Face east.
-I'll redial this number. -Jason, wait!
First flight out. Tell Nicky I'll call from the car. Tell her to find Picot. Go.
So...
What are we gonna do?
I told you I'd clean this up. That's what I'm doing.
Can you really bring him in?
I think we're past that, don't you?
Do you have a better idea?
You've given me nothing but a trail of collateral damage
from Zurich to Paris. I couldn't do much worse.
I should also talk about some of the people who...
Their names aren't prominent in the credits, but you just couldn't do it without them.
One of them is the production manager, Tink Ten Eyck,
who really believed in me
and would sneak me extra time
and believed in the movie.
There was a lot of material that I was able to shoot
because she went out on a limb to support me and the movie.
There's also our production coordinator, who's the woman who runs the office
who was this amazing Austrian woman named Hilde Odelga.
Hilde was the kind of woman who you could ask anything of her
and she could produce it.
lt became kind of a running joke in the office
to think of the most obscure thing you could ask Hilde for
and then see if she could produce it.
She had cases of Tupperware containers behind her desk.
You could say, "Hilde, I need a key-chain."
She'd open up... They're totally unlabelled.
She'd open up a Tupperware container, pull out a whole thing of them
and say, "What color would you like?"
The bus, the tour bus, second level.
Negative on the target.
-Position one? -Negative.
-Position two? -Negative.
Position three, motorcycle.
Negative.
Jason?
I told you to come alone. I guess that was too complicated.
So try this. I'm gone.
Fuck.
Get Nicky on the phone.
Yeah?
How long does it take to wipe the room down and move it?
-Get rid of everything? -Yeah.
-Two to three hours. -All right, well, get started.
Listen, no breaks.
Two men outside, one in the lobby. And keep your eyes open.
-Keep the truck? -Yeah, keep the truck.
I'm gonna close this unit down. We'll move the gear in the truck.
Here we've got the character of Manheim, Russel Levy,
who Kate Dowd cast in London.
lt was one of the tougher castings I had to do
because Manheim doesn't speak during the film.
He just needs to have a kind of presence.
It's very hard to cast that, and it's hard to act that.
lt was an extraordinarily rigorous search to find Russel.
This is Matt Damon on a soundstage.
Again, all of this is new material shot during this two-week period.
There's an interesting moment about to come up here.
I pride myself on being a risk-taker in life.
But there's a moment coming up here where I chose to play it safe
which is where Jason Bourne scales the wall in the background.
I actually had shot it... This shot, right here, that you're seeing.
Matt Damon crosses in the background and goes up the wall behind them.
And it had been my idea to not cut to this close-up,
that close-up was a safety backup, and to just hold on the big wide shot.
Maybe half the audience would catch that he's climbing up the drainpipe in the back
and half the audience wouldn't.
Maybe you wouldn't even catch it till the second time you saw the film.
I really like the idea of building a moment in like that.
But we didn't have time to test the movie.
I needed to know that at least a third of the audience would see it.
I was worried that it might be the kind of thing that nobody noticed
until I gave a commentary on the DVD.
If I'd been able to test it, I could've asked people to raise their hands.
How did Matt get into the building?
People who figured out that he went up the wall obviously noticed it.
If a couple of people had noticed it, that would've been enough for me.
But since I couldn't test it, I had to play it safe.
But that's life.
This sequence is actually
a combination of original principal photography
and then we went and re-shot the ending.
This, basically, was the only scene that existed in the original ending.
We didn't have any of the preceding action to get Jason Bourne into the apartment.
Nothing on the bridge, or on the phone. He just showed up there.
Because of scheduling considerations
we couldn't get Julia Stiles back for this sequence
when I could get Chris Cooper and Matt Damon. We had a very short window.
So this is a combination of using footage from
the original shoot and the new reshoot
between Jason Bourne and Chris Cooper.
We couldn't just go with the existent scene that took place in this apartment
because once we made Jason Bourne more active
in terms of getting into the apartment,
we needed to make this scene between them much more heated.
You're a malfunctioning $30 million weapon!
You're a total goddamn catastrophe!
But through the magic of editing, and working with Chris Rouse and Saar Klein
on this sequence, which is the most important scene of the movie,
I just had great editorial support to pull this off.
Matt Damon and I basically rewrote this scene in Paris
days before we shot it.
Frank Marshall really showed me what a producer is about
in terms of carving out a little bit of time for us to shoot it.
I don't remember what happened in Marseilles.
Bullshit! This is unacceptable, soldier.
You hear me? You failed!
-Unacceptable? -You failed!
-You failed and you're gonna tell me why! -I can't tell you! I don't remember!
You brought Kane to life. You put together a meeting with Wombosi.
You found the security company. You broke into the office!
For Christ's sake, you picked the yacht as the goddamn strike point!
Now this material that we're about to see, out on the boat,
I had a tremendous amount of support in shooting it.
lt didn't come from where you'd expect it to come from.
lt came, first and foremost, from my production manager, Tink Ten Eyck.
And it came from the crew of the M.V. White Knight,
which is the boat that we're filming on in Greece.
And Captain Costas...
lt seemed like everyone we met in Greece working on the movie, was called Costas.
But it's actually...
The rest of the crew went home and I stayed
and shot this sequence with my assistant, Colin O'Hara.
Once we got Matt and Adewale in the can, the rest of the crew went home.
And all of those POVs that you see, I shot.
I used the crew of the boat as my crew.
There's a sequence where it's Matt's POV going out the door.
I had the camera on my shoulder.
To simulate being shot, I asked Captain Costas' wife to hit me on the back.
So, that's me. I just fell with the camera
because she was a very strong Greek woman
and when she hit me on the back, she literally knocked me to the ground.
But I put my arms around the camera and I didn't break it.
Don't you?
I don't want to do this anymore.
I don't think that's a decision you can make.
This dialog that Tony wrote for Matt
which was meant to be delivered...
When you read it in the script, the more clichéd way to read it would be
sort of much bigger.
Matt Damon and I had a lot of fun making it small.
I will bring this fight to your doorstep.
I'm on my own side now.
These characters that Jason Bourne is about to fight,
Picot, who is the character right outside the door, Denis Braccini.
Again, all part of the reshoots. All part of that same two-week time period.
I really had
great support in terms of casting these people.
Nicky Powell came in and coordinated a great fight.
Matt, by this point, had pretty much become a complete arms expert.
lt was his idea to hold the gun upside down.
And what's interesting about this sequence is that
we technically couldn't build the stairwell.
So there is no stairwell. This is all Peter Donen's creation.
The beauty of modern filmmaking
is that sets that are too expensive to build, you can now paint.
That's what we did here.
Peter did an amazing job with this.
I'm talking about everything. There is no stairwell.
There's just half a flight
that Peter then turned into a five-flight stairwell.
Again, the whole point of Jason Bourne is
he doesn't have a Q who gives him the gadgets to get out of his situations.
He has to do it himself.
He starts this movie naked and he never accumulates gadgets.
And so the real fun of this was, okay, he's in the stairwell.
He's trapped. What does he have? All he's got is a dead body.
And then, what can you do with a dead body?
You can use it as a cushion. You can leap through the banister.
That's the fun of making this movie
once we defined those characteristics of Jason Bourne,
was to put him in a situation and then say, "How could you get out of it?
"What would you do if you were him?" And put yourself in his head.
lt became...
One of the highlights of the whole process were the action sequences,
to try and figure out clever things for Jason Bourne to do
that didn't feel like MacGyver.
He disables somebody with a pen or he grabs the walkie-talkie
or, in that case, he uses the dead body.
A suspense sequence like this makes me think about editing.
When I think about editing, it's not just Saar and Chris
but the incredible team that supported them.
Especially Saar's main assistant, Liza Espinas,
who, like many people in the editing department, when in Paris
fell in love with a French person.
They actually got married and she lives there now.
Thomas and Peter and Keith,
we became like a very close family editing this film
and they all contributed enormously
to the process.
It's done.
Shut it down.
We're about to come up to a shot
that is the bookend to the opening shot in the film where Jason Bourne
disappears on the dock in Imperia.
Again, my independent film roots and Matt Damon's background
paid off because I actually went out and filmed this with Matt
and there's nobody else there, no crew, just Matt and myself.
It's during our Christmas break when everybody else had gone back to America.
As I pan left, he's just running around to be out of the shot.
We timed this so we'd be there right at dusk.
There's no lighting equipment involved in that.
The Treadstone project has actually already been terminated.
lt was designed primarily...
This room, by the way, doesn't exist. This also was created by Peter Donen.
We were filming in Prague and it would seem simple enough to find
a room like this, but it just didn't exist.
What's next?
There are some other rooms Peter created
that I didn't talk about, like the Treadstone cafeteria.
To me, that's where cinema is going.
Here we are. It's a helicopter shot in
Greece, in Mykonos.
Here we are in Mykonos.
We had to shut down production and come back a couple of months later,
just seasonally, because we were shooting in winter.
Obviously I was talking about how cold we were and
this needed to be shot in summer.
We also wanted Matt's hair to have grown out a little bit
and obviously we changed Franka's hair.
With a woman it's easier because you can use a wig.
To me, the thing about this scene is
these aren't two lovers who've been separated, who are being reunited.
This, to me, is the start of their relationship.
The whole movie you've been learning about them. They've been together
but because of the situation they were in,
they were never free to explore their romance.
The book ends with Marie... He tells her his name is David.
She says, "Hello, David." Those are the last two words in the novel
and you realize that the end of the book is the start of their relationship.
That's why they are hugging there, and it's not this hugely dramatic kiss.
Because, in the book, the whole set-up of the movie is that when it's over
these people can have a love story, but not while the movie is happening.
The Moby song at the end is a Julianne Kelley special.
My music supervisor did go with me and
once again has proven herself to be the perfect music supervisor.
Before I go on with the thanks, I want to verbally
dedicate this film to Robert Ludlum and Claire Hammond.
Robert, not only on whose book the movie was based,
but who took a chance on me, on a kid who came to visit him
and said he wanted to turn his most popular novel into a movie.
And Claire Hammond who worked tirelessly on the film
and was just an incredible moral support to me and to the rest of the team
and kept the spirits of everybody up.
I'd like to thank, first and foremost, my girlfriend, Catherine Marsh,
who also worked on the film
and helped me through an extraordinarily challenging production.
Universal Pictures, obviously,
for taking a chance on an indie filmmaker and
giving me the budget and the resources and supporting me all the way through.
And, specifically, Allison Brecker and Stacey Snider.
Kevin Misher who was president of the studio when the film was green-lighted.
Mary Parent and Scott Stuber who took over for him
and, although it was not their baby, supported it like it was.
ln terms of the crew, I think I've
hit a lot of the French crew
who, really, I could not have done this film without.
But, again, I'm...
It's actually very challenging to do this voiceover and try to keep up and
before you know it, a new scene's come on and you got to stop what you're saying,
but I really need to thank Dan Weil, who is my production designer,
my confidant, who helped me with the script,
helped me with Paris, helped me keep my morale up.
I just could not have asked for more during production
and during postproduction.
Peter Donen, my visual effects supervisor,
who worked miracles, and Saar Klein and Chris Rouse,
my editors, I could not have asked for better people.
John Powell, who pulled together an amazing score,
and obviously Oliver Wood and Danny Mindel
who shot the movie,
and Don Burgess, as well.
And I think about my first assistant director, Luc Etienne,
who was responsible for so much of the texture that you see on-screen,
and his assistant, Claire.
Hilde, who was our den mother,
and Gilles Ségurel who did my props.
And the most incredible focus puller I've had the luxury of working with,
Marie-Laure Pierret,
who not only was incredible, but had fingers small enough to work with
the Panavision ultra-light camera
and could reload it extremely fast
because regular-size fingers really can't fit in there.
And my key grip,
Jean-Pierre Deschamps, who really became one of my closest friends,
and having Marie-Laure on my side and Jean-Pierre behind me
you know, I felt,
really like I was in a protective cocoon.
ln terms of my actors, obviously Matt Damon and
Franka Potente were incredible, not only on-screen
but behind the scenes.
Chris Cooper and Brian Cox did all of their scenes in five days,
just the greatest. Clive Owen,
we gave him very little dialog, and he hit it out of the park.
Adewale inspired me to develop
enough material that I could've cut together a movie that was just about Wombosi.
The people who worked for Chris Cooper, Gabe Mann and Walton Goggins,
Josh Hamilton and Julia Stiles were
incredible and dedicated young actors.
All of my overseas actors.
Orso from Italy. Tim from England.
Denis and Nicky from France.
We had actors coming from all over the world to do this film.
The stunts, that were incredible, were done by Nick Powell,
and my second unit photography by Alexander Witt.
They both made me look a lot smarter than I probably am.
ln the art department, Dan had put together an amazing team
run by Bettina.
I always loved going to visit them there and felt like
they were never going to let me fall on my face.
All of the casting people who helped me, Joseph Middleton in LA,
Nathalie Chéron in Paris, and Kate Dowd in London.
And finally, I want to thank
Robert Ludlum for taking a chance on me
and letting me turn his book into a movie.