My name is Paul Greengrass.
I directed The Bourne Supremacy.
It was an amazing adventure.
One year from start to finish.
We began with Tony Gilroy's story
which opened inside Jason Bourne's head, really.
What we wanted to do, I suppose, was to explore
the next chapter in the Jason Bourne story.
The first film, Jason Bourne had discovered
that he was a contract killer for the CIA.
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?
And so the opening of the movie is all about
seeing the shards of disconnected memory,
the violent pieces that made up Jason Bourne's mind.
Then when he woke up,
he needed to be somewhere else, somewhere very different.
Not Greece,
where we'd left him and Marie at the end of the first movie.
Somewhere further away, somewhere further off the grid.
And before I came on board the project,
a decision had been taken to set it in Goa in India,
which I actually thought was a brilliant idea
because it was somewhere where you would imagine
Jason Bourne would go and hide
if he'd found that Europe was too small.
Maybe they'd spent a year or 18 months
hiding out in small villages along the Med.
But sooner or later they would need to go further, so where would you go?
Australia? No, not good.
South Africa? No.
Goa felt right. It was hip,
it was youthful.
You could imagine they would blend in.
And so that's where our story opens.
In a little cottage, on the beach
and Jason Bourne is tormented.
It's just bits and pieces.
Tormented by fragments of memory.
I can hear Conklin's voice
and there's that photograph, but...
I just can't stay with it.
- But you're sure it's not just a bad dream? - It happened.
It was a mission.
In a way,
some of the exuberance of their relationship has gone.
Maybe there's a tiredness there,
the weariness of being on the run,
never being able to stay in one place too long.
But still trying, trying for something better,
trying for the light.
Because that's what the Bourne story's all about.
The memory book was an idea that was around for a long time
as we developed the story,
some physical way of showing
Bourne's struggle to reclaim his memory.
And it was also an interesting visual element,
you could almost see on the page, the confusion, the pain.
I wanted these early scenes to bring us closer to Bourne.
That was what the second film's all about,
bring us closer to Bourne.
Then, of course, we cut to Berlin, which is where the story is played out.
And this tells us it's a spy story.
Survey One, this is Hub.
Do you have visual contact?
In a way, it's a classic espionage set-up,
you know, a stakeout,
a clandestine operation is in progress,
the CIA are buying information.
- Hub. - Director Marshall...
It's off the books, it's secret,
but yet it's occurring right in front of us
on the streets where we live and work.
I'm here. So is Donnie and Jack Weller.
We understand you're using the full allocation for this buy.
- It's where we came out. - It's a lot of money, Pam.
For a thief, a mole.
If it does nothing more than narrow the list of suspects,
it's a bargain at 10 times...
Here's where we meet Pamela Landy,
who, in terms of the story, replaces Conklin,
Chris Cooper's character from the first movie.
I wanted Joan Allen because Chris Cooper...
He's many things as an actor but above all he's a classy actor
and I wanted to replace one classy actor with another,
and Joan Allen is certainly that.
Gives the whole piece an integrity, I think, an elevation.
And here's Karl.
Karl Urban. Our bad guy.
But his look needed to be 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.
Hub, Mobile One and seller have entered the office.
It's an interesting part of the film
because we've met Jason Bourne, we've met Marie,
but now it's an opportunity to see the cast of characters
who are going to weave our story.
I think your audience, at this stage,
is prepared to allow you to trail a mystery,
to go far and wide in the story, really,
before you start to gather the threads in further down the film.
That was a difficult scene to shoot.
In fact, we shot it twice. The first version of this scene we lost
because we had a laboratory processing problem.
Those were shots.
And it needed to have a certain sort of archness to it.
So in the end it is quite a theatrical event,
a clandestine buy, but it needed to feel real, too.
But above all we needed to know that the pressure was on Landy.
- Eye contact. I don't care if it's visual. - Mobile One, can you copy, please?
- Are you there, Mobile One? - Damn it. I'm sorry.
What do you see?
So we unfold the mystery.
What is Kirill doing?
Why has he shot these two people?
This is the scene that deepens the mystery. It's to do with oil in some way.
And it in some way connects with Russia, too.
He's become one of the wealthiest men in Russia
after consolidating drilling rights in the Caspian Sea
and gaining control of one of the...
I love this scene taking place in a little motel room next to the airport.
It sort of reminded me of
the motel room where All The President's Men began.
Just a...
Like a Howard Johnson's or...
Not a flashy hotel, just a down-at-heel motel room,
a contract killer and a very rich Russian.
They've been hatching some kind of plot
and we just know this is something to do with Jason Bourne,
but we don't know what the connection is yet.
And when we come back to Goa
for our second Indian chapter.
As an audience you implicitly understand
that you're going to find out how all this mystery connects.
But first let's build Bourne's character,
let's stay close to Bourne.
Restless, always running.
And just a glimpse here of Marie's idyll.
How life could have been if they were not always on the run.
But, of course, when she opens the book,
it's like her window into Bourne's mind.
A beautifully edited sequence.
We had two editors, Chris Rouse and Rick Pearson,
yet you would never know.
Such was the synchronicity of their styles.
They cut this film with an intensity and an originality
that is a lot to do with its qualities.
An ability to take small pieces
and capture an unusual rhythm
and yet land on the point
and deliver you to the next scene, as they have here.
We're out in the streets, this is classic Bourne world.
It's unfolding in present tense.
Out of nowhere danger comes.
It's interesting looking at Karl and Matt here.
You'd think it looks pretty easy to perform this stuff,
but actually it's acting of a very high quality.
To compel attention without dialog,
where just looks and gestures have got to carry it.
- Good morning, sir. - Morning.
He is my friend. There's been a death in the family.
And I wonder if you've seen him.
Always it's about the intensity in the eyes.
It's a straightforward thriller set-up.
The challenge is to try and make it fresh.
It's the first moment in the film where if I had been watching,
I'd be going, "Yes, this is what I expected to see
"when I came to see the sequel to The Bourne Identity."
And it lifts you up.
Danger. How will Bourne react?
- Hey. - Get in.
- What's wrong? - We're blown.
- How? - We pushed it. We got lazy.
India was a great choice, too, because of the textures, the look of it.
It's just exotic without being forced. It just is a different palette.
...you sure? How can you be sure?
They look completely of that world, too.
The buses, I love,
and the teeming streets, the ordinariness of it.
This is real.
That's him. That's him right there.
Get your head down. Silver Hyundai. Get your head down.
I suppose this scene sets the template of the style of this film
which arises out of Doug's style for the first movie,
but is a little more fluid, perhaps, a little more...
How far is he?
...intensely immediate.
We wanted to be with Bourne, always with Bourne.
Closer to him as a character, closer to him in action.
When he runs, we run.
When he escapes in the jeep, we're in the jeep with him.
I wanted the audience to feel
that they had had the experience of life with Bourne,
and that it should feel real.
This is a classic. How do you switch seats?
We wanted them to switch seats
because Bourne's got to take on Kirill,
but to stop the car and run round would have been deeply inelegant,
so we worked with them to literally change seats
as the car was moving.
- Turn here. Cut through the field. - Hang on.
All right, you keep going to the shack. I'll meet you there in one hour.
I'm gonna bail out on the other side of this bridge.
It's the only way he can follow us.
- What if it's not who you think it is? - It's them. It's Treadstone.
Jason, don't do it.
- Look, Marie, I warned them. - I don't want you to do it.
I told them what would happen if they didn't leave us alone.
It's never gonna be over like this.
- I don't want... - We don't have a choice.
Yes, you do.
A shocking moment.
But I wanted us to feel like we were there.
Incredibly scary to work in underground tanks.
Those actors were literally inside a jeep
in 12 feet of water, slightly more.
And a total nightmare.
You are literally immersed, with nothing to breathe
in a tank.
All you have to do is hold your breath and try and act.
It's acting of a very high quality here 'cause it's full of detail.
Look at this scene and see what both of them are doing here.
The immobility of Franka Potente's face.
Hard when you're fighting rising panic, I think.
You've got to trust that the divers are there
to dive in if you get in trouble.
Then look at the detail on Matt's face when we come round the other way.
To tell that story, from panic,
the struggle to escape, the death throes, the three kisses,
the first two being an attempt to resuscitate, the third one a kiss of farewell.
It's wonderful detail and all good acting is about detail.
It's about fighting generality.
And then a last little glimpse of Karl.
It's a very significant moment
in the sense that our story, Tony Gilroy's story,
he wanted Marie to die, and he was quite right
because in a way, it's a brave decision
because the Bourne-Marie relationship in the first film
was really the heart of the film's success.
It was a relationship that everybody bought into.
When they met at the end of the film in the café in Greece,
you wanted them to survive, to go on their journey.
And to kill her off so early
was a bold and radical thing to do.
In many ways, although the film takes a hit for it
in the sense that we're not going to go on an adventure with them again
what it does is unlock all sorts of possibilities
for a darker story for Bourne, a new, fresh story for Bourne,
a Bourne who would now have to be alone.
And so, in many ways
The Bourne Supremacy in terms of being a fresh chapter begins
at the moment that Marie dies.
An early glimpse of Moscow.
Important because later we'll return
in different circumstances.
Now the pace is starting to pick up,
the interweaving of our elements of story
from Moscow to Goa to Berlin.
But before that happens,
a moment to remember Marie.
One of the things Matt and I talked about
was that Bourne perhaps had a military background.
There was always the possibility of a salute at this point.
Almost as if he would salute a fallen comrade
before picking up on his journey,
which will be a journey of revenge.
Two men dead.
Three million in cash gone, no Neski files...
So now we have an interesting situation
because Bourne is now going off on a journey to discover
who killed Marie and why.
But meanwhile, Landy is off on her own journey
to find out who's killed her people and why.
And that journey will bring her to Treadstone and ultimately to Jason Bourne.
If you want an answer, you're going to have to give me
a level five SCI access.
We have a lead, Marty.
All right.
You've got your clearance.
But
you're on a very short leash.
And you'll give a full report to the group. I wanna know where you're going with this.
Sir.
I love that.
Whatever journey she's going on,
the authorities don't want her to go on it.
So we start to weave together these two journeys,
and in this scene they intersect.
'Cause now she knows it's Bourne's fingerprint.
This is a scene which reprises
necessary information from the first film,
but I wanted to still sell our style, that it should be
hand-held, unconsidered, raw, rough.
That you see things almost despite themselves
rather than have it served up to you spoon-fed.
- Ward? - Yes?
And it also gives us an opportunity to meet Abbott, Brian Cox,
who'd played an important role in the first film,
but in this second film comes center-stage, as we shall see.
Excuse me, I need to...
- Excuse me. Can I help you? - Yeah, I'm here to see Mr. Abbott.
Twenty minutes? See you.
I love this scene.
- Operation Treadstone. - Never heard of it.
That's not gonna fly.
Whenever you're dealing with scenes of confrontation,
you want evenly matched adversaries.
But adversaries of different qualities.
With Brian and Joan here,
you've got two perfectly matched actors,
contrasting styles.
Joan, cool and reserved and a piercing intelligence,
and Brian with that power
and authority.
Pugnacious.
Sparks fly.
You want my desk. Is that it?
- I wanna know what happened. - What happened?
Jason Bourne happened. You got the files.
Then let's cut the crap.
You know at this stage that you're in for an interesting ride.
Bourne was his number one.
The guy went for a job, screwed the op, never came back.
Conklin couldn't fix it, couldn't find Bourne, couldn't adjust. It all went sideways.
So you had Conklin killed? I mean, if we're cutting the crap.
I've given 30 years and two marriages to this agency.
I've shoveled shit on four continents. I'm due to retire next year.
But if you think I'm gonna sit here and let you dangle me with this,
you can go to hell. And Marshall, too.
It had to be done.
- And Bourne? Where is he now? - Dead in a ditch.
- Drunk in a bar in Mogadishu. Who knows. - I think I do.
I had a deal going down in Berlin last week.
And during the buy, both our case officer and the seller were killed.
They were killed by Jason Bourne.
They're ready for us upstairs.
I love the way in the Bourne stories the plots are tangled
and the span of the story is limitless.
It's Naples one minute, it's Goa the next. It's Berlin, London, Washington.
It's an interconnected world that Bourne's running from.
Seven years ago, $20 million...
And the arbitrary pieces of the story keep coming.
You can actually lay them down like pieces of a jigsaw.
As an audience you're struggling to find pieces that fit together.
I like the way that this film defeats you in that
for quite a long time.
You don't really understand what the connections are,
but yet you know there are connections.
There's a lot of pleasure in that for an audience, I think.
Turns out the assassin was one of our own, Jason Bourne.
Now I know Treadstone's not a very popular subject around here...
Beautifully cut scene.
Little looks bring the scene alive and make it seem real.
Essentially it's a scene of exposition,
and quite dense,
but Chris and Rick somehow put this together in a way that gives it life.
...in the amount of $760,000.
You know what his budget was?
We were throwing money at him.
Throwing it at him and asking him to keep it dark.
It was his own account. He was up to something.
This is supposed to be definitive?
What's definitive is that I just lost two people in Berlin.
So what's your theory? Conklin's reaching out from the grave
to protect his good name?
- The man is dead. - No one's disputing that, Ward.
For Christ's sake, Marty, you knew Conklin.
Does this scan? I mean, at all?
Cut to the chase, Pam.
I think that Bourne and Conklin were in business together,
that Bourne's still involved,
and that whatever information I was trying to buy in Berlin
was big enough to bring Bourne out from hiding to kill again.
How's that scan?
Excuse me, sir, but you're not gonna believe this.
Jason Bourne's passport just popped up on the grid in Naples.
That music sting's very important, I think that says...
They need to know who they're dealing with.
...the threads of our story are about to touch,
and when they do, something will happen.
No, it's nothing. Some guy's name came up on the computer.
Yeah. Hey, listen, Tom, I'm gonna call you back, okay?
I love the proposition of this scene. This was Matt's idea
that we should have a scene where he was playing possum.
Because the audience knows that, even if it's not consciously,
you know that he is one
concealed ball of energy.
You're coming out of Tangiers. Is that correct?
And this officious young CIA officer
doesn't realize that he's picked the wrong man to be officious with.
He thinks he's in control,
but we know he's not.
Look, I don't know what you did, and I don't know who you're working for.
But I promise you this,
you're gonna play ball one way or the other.
That little look there tells you everything.
This is Nevins.
This is Tom Cronin, Cl Operations Officer calling from Langley, Virginia.
- Do you have a Jason Bourne in custody? - Yes, I do.
Listen, he's an Agency priority target.
- Call me back as soon as he's secure. - I understand.
The most important thing to know about that scene
is that the punch to Bourne's left
that laid out our hapless Nevins,
the CIA officer, was real.
That actually laid him out.
And when he came round, he said, "Did you get it on camera?"
I thought he'd have broken his nose because it was a hell of a whack.
But it works. Made the scene look real.
He's been detained. Here's the number.
He's being interrogated by a field officer out of the Consulate.
This is where I wanted the film to pick up real pace, real momentum.
Almost to signal that the scattering of the threads of the story is complete.
Where do we stand?
And now it's about gathering them in.
He got away.
Damn it.
I think the transition from the end of Naples is that transition,
a transition from the story opening out
to the story starting to come together again.
It's also the moment when Bourne is thrown into action.
I want you to secure that area.
I want any evidence secured, and I want it done right now.
- Is that clear? - Yes, sir... Ma'am.
I'm getting on a plane to Berlin in 45 minutes,
which means you're gonna call me back in 30.
And when I ask you where we stand, I had better be impressed.
- Berlin? - I already have a team in place there.
I doubt that Bourne's in Naples ready to start a family.
You have no idea what you're getting into.
Do you have any idea? From the minute he left Treadstone,
he's killed and eluded every single person that you've sent to find him.
So you read a couple of files on Jason Bourne
- and that makes you an expert? - This is my case, Ward.
Enough. I want you both on that plane.
We are, all of us, going to do what we were either too lazy or inept
to do the last time around.
We're gonna find this son of a bitch and take him down.
I'm not having Jason Bourne destroy any more of this agency.
- Is that definitive enough for you? - Yes.
Jason Bourne is armed and extremely dangerous.
Last week in Berlin, he assassinated two men,
one a highly experienced field officer.
I want that area...
...he assassinated two men...
one a highly experienced field officer.
I want that area secured.
I want any evidence secured, and I want it done right now.
The flashback issue, we discussed it a lot,
whether to take the color out or put more color in
or maybe use visual effects to augment them.
But in the end, I always fancied they needed to be just real.
No different.
So we understood that whatever it was that troubled him
happened on a rainy night in a car.
An important scene because it brings you close to Bourne
in his solitariness.
It sets a template for what we're trying to do with the character.
Julia Stiles is an actress I'd...
I didn't know her, but I admired her work.
I always fancied that she had more of a role to play
in this second story,
that somehow she could make the story turn
on Bourne's encounter with her.
And I wanted to change her look.
It was a couple of years later on, she would be a woman
who had tried to put the experience of Treadstone behind her,
but one day, probably as she had always suspected,
it would turn up on her doorstep.
They had physical symptoms. Headaches, sensitivity to light.
- Amnesia? - Before Bourne? No.
The plane's ready. There's a car waiting for you.
- Good luck. - No.
This is interestingly shot. I love the composition.
Sort of informal and yet quite confident.
I always feel, when I hear this theme,
that the film started to kick in.
It makes you feel a more focused sense of two journeys,
Bourne's to Berlin and Landy's to Berlin.
And I guess you know they're gonna collide.
We shot this at Berlin's Tempelhof Airport,
an extraordinary, vast structure.
Berlin's a very flat city.
It's not a city with ready landmarks.
But, of course, it's a city with a legacy of division.
It's a city with a dark past and a bright future.
It was a great city for Bourne's next chapter to be played out,
because he's a character with a dark past and a bright future,
or trying to make a bright future.
It's not a mistake.
They don't make mistakes. They don't do random.
There's always an objective. Always a target.
The objectives and targets always came from us. Who's giving them to him now?
Scary version?
He is.
This is one of my favorite scenes.
Just an ordinary suburban street, upscale,
quite aggressively designed,
but yet still middle-class, ordinary, aspiring, yuppie.
A man arrives home,
decodes his alarm.
He's obviously a meticulous man.
You can see that by the way he takes off his coat and his glasses.
But Bourne's one step ahead.
I emptied it.
- It felt a little light. - Put it down.
I wanted it to feel like a goldfish bowl,
so that you could feel that whatever occurred in this space
would be visible if you bothered to look from the street.
There's nothing hidden about it.
It was just an ordinary house.
A great setting for a meeting
between the last two Treadstone operatives.
You still should've moved.
- What do you want? - Conklin.
He's dead. Shot dead in Paris.
- Dead the night you walked out. - So who's running Treadstone now?
Nobody. They shut it down.
It's over. We're the last two.
Great idea. The last two Treadstone operatives meet.
- I don't know. - Ever heard the name Pamela Landy?
I don't know who that is.
Bourne desperate for knowledge.
I don't know.
Why would I lie?
I thought you were here to kill me.
- What'd you do? - I'm sorry.
Did you call it in?
Get up. Come on.
- You have a car out front? - The keys are in my coat pocket.
- But we should... - What?
Go out the back. I have another car.
The fight, I wanted to be
like a cruel and vicious ballet.
I love the texture of the blinds,
sort of physical and made you feel the impact,
made you feel the messiness of it.
The fight in the first film was very pristine,
which was wonderful, but I wanted this fight to be messier,
more real and yet still feel like a structured dance.
And to have good texture: glass, venetians, paper.
Jeff, our fight coordinator, had the idea of the rolled-up magazine.
It was an absolutely brilliant and Bournesque touch.
Bourne, of course, unlike James Bond,
he doesn't have technology to get him out of trouble.
He has to improvise, and what better than a magazine?
Turn a magazine into a lethal weapon. Brilliant.
And it's a shocking moment.
And Matt is quite brilliant here.
The look of revulsion,
like a man who's fallen off the wagon.
After two years he's killed again.
Then, quick as a flash, back into Bourne mode.
Aware of the danger.
I loved blowing up that house.
Felt like a moon shot, we had so many cameras out on it.
But it looked real. It looked like a gas explosion.
Time again for another little look at Bourne.
Always trying to bring us closer to what he thinks and feels about it.
This is one of my favorite scenes in the film.
The level of detail is magnificent here.
The timing of when to look up,
the way that hand is being scrubbed, you can tell
there's nerves there
and that he knows he's got to look.
This is a look that says,
"I will do it, whatever it takes."
That little tissue in the box tells you he's resolved.
It's very interesting, on a film set,
films are the products of many hands.
Good films are generally good
because the group of people that make them
work with each other, fire off each other.
And that was certainly true of this film,
it was an extremely harmonious film.
And on any film set at any given moment,
there are problems to be solved
and generally people on set see their own problems.
The soundman will see his problem,
maybe there's an airplane close.
The cameraman will see his or her problems,
maybe the light's not falling in the right direction.
The designer will want the whole set to be seen.
The electricians will be worried about the lights.
The producer will be worried about how the director's doing.
The director will be worried about half a million things.
And all the time everybody on film sets
is looking for their problems to be solved individually.
But when you look at an actor, particularly the leading actor,
the thing I'm always very conscious of is
that the actor is the one person on a film set
who can solve everybody's problems
in one instant.
By looking at just the right moment
he or she can open the shot up and make it work,
can make the light fall right,
by speaking at just the right level can solve the soundman's problems,
by opening the body can open the set up.
It's a very special responsibility
and Matt, as an actor,
has that ability to do it time and time again.
It's the mark of a great, great actor,
that ability to solve problems instinctively, that ability
to do what needs to be done with impeccable timing
and great sense of understatement and yet presence.
To inhabit the character so thoroughly that even as in this sequence
where he's following her,
you see all the colors of Bourne.
The ingenuity by which he traces Landy.
The determination to track her down.
The implacable look on his face.
That ability to command the story without a word.
And that was the great challenge of this film.
How could Bourne dominate this film when he had so little to say?
It was a triumph
that in this performance he brought us so close to the human cost of Bourne.
Now, I wanna break this out in boxes.
Naples outbound. Check everything. Flights, trains...
It's great that this scene is intercut with what's going on in the hub,
the CIA secret location where the Bourne operation is being run from.
And I wanted this to feel real and live and as if they really wanted him.
Of course, what they don't know is he's outside.
Stay on the local cops. We need a vehicle, a parking ticket, something.
Langley's offered to upload any satellite imaging we need.
So let's find a target for them.
Danny, box four. I need fresh eyes.
Review the buy where we lost the Neski files.
Timeline it with what we know about Bourne's movements.
Turn it upside down and see what we find.
Come on, guys. We ran this guy's life with total control for all those years.
We should be a step ahead of him.
You wanna go home? Find Jason Bourne.
Crucial scene in Bourne's character development,
because our two stories,
our story of revenge and our story of doubt and confusion
that we've been sowing from the beginning through the flashbacks,
now the two are going to meet.
Because the answers
that Bourne is given by Landy
are not the ones that he expects.
Then who's planning the missions now?
There are no missions.
He realizes in this scene
that something else is going on,
something inside his mind, that he needs more answers.
You killed two people, Bourne.
Vladimir Neski.
Bourne?
I wanna come in.
It's a scene constructed out of looks.
The detail from every actor here is good.
The sense of concentration, intensity
is what sells the paranoia
of Bourne's world.
Send her alone. Give her your phone.
What if I can't find her?
It's easy. She's standing right next to you.
That moment always gets a good response
because Bourne is one step ahead.
- There's just so many of them, sir. - Here it is.
- It's the second quadrant. Kurt, pull it up. - Where is it?
Get the second quadrant, please, and pull it all the way up.
Clock is right here. Shit, he's put her right in the middle of everything.
This is a security nightmare.
There is no way we are going to get her covered.
Call a mayday into Berlin station.
We need snipers, DOD, whatever they've got.
No snipers. No snipers.
You put snipers on the roof and it'll scare him off, and I need answers.
You can't really believe he wants to come in.
He knows something about the Neski case.
And I'm not gonna pass up this chance to find out what it is.
Don't be a fool.
A lot of our pipe that we've laid here
between Landy and Abbott is going to start to pay off.
You're not hearing me. Bourne dead gives me nothing.
Now we've got a confrontation.
Can I talk to you privately?
Uh-oh.
- What? - I know how you're feeling.
You lost two men in Berlin, and you want it to mean something.
But nothing Bourne gives you will bring your men back.
Nothing in those files makes their sacrifice worthwhile.
I always feel this is the point in the film
where it's won or lost. Somewhere in this next 10 minutes
the film reaches a new level of intensity.
It starts to unfold in real time.
And that was what I wanted.
I'm interested in films when they become kinetic,
when they are no longer boulders
that you've got to push uphill,
but they seem to roll downhill,
they seem to unfold of their own accord.
And that only happens when you've assembled the pieces in the right way,
and that's often hard and painful, particularly in the cutting room,
because it's about judging pace and what's really relevant
and letting go of things that you like that work in isolation
and just creating a coiled spring.
That's basically what it is, a story mechanism
that's going to drive on and propel your characters through.
I think at this point,
this set piece is where you really feel
that this story is starting to take on a life of its own,
that it's happening right in front of you.
And I think this is an important scene, too,
because it says something about the values of Bourne.
You may not have noticed, but a few scenes earlier,
Bourne driving on his way to the station,
there's an inconsequential shot of a set of posters.
You don't notice it when you're watching the film for the first time,
but it's announcing a demonstration.
Bourne has seen that, lodged it in his mind. So, when he makes this meet,
he chooses Alexanderplatz
because that crowd will arrive at that time and will give him cover.
I wanted it to be a non-specific demonstration.
It's a student demonstration about tuition fees,
but I wanted it to say something
about the sort of division of the world
between us and them.
Bourne uses the protesting crowd
to hide him. It's his friend.
But, of course, to them, it's their enemy
and that is very important
in describing the universe
in which Bourne's story plays out.
It's a subversive universe.
It's a universe where we can't trust the authorities.
We can't trust what they're saying to us.
And we have to search for our own answers as Bourne is searching for his.
And those answers are on the street.
He's a renegade from the secret world, the world of authority.
And that makes him a quite unique hero,
particularly in modern mainstream franchise cinema,
mainstream Hollywood cinema.
- Get her out of there. - Go! Delta, move! Now!
It's interesting if you think of James Bond and Jason Bourne.
They're superficially very similar characters.
They're characters cut from the same cloth.
They're characters that originated in Cold War books,
the Ian Fleming novels and the Robert Ludlum novels,
novels of the Cold War.
They were both spies.
But on film Jason Bourne is a very different character from James Bond.
James Bond embodies a value system. He's an insider.
He loves the secrecy of it. He loves being a secret agent.
He kills without remorse or regret.
In fact, often he rather enjoys it and finds it humorous.
He's an imperialist, he's a misogynist.
He's a man who worships at the altar of technology.
He's always got a gadget
or some gun that comes out of a turret on the end of his car,
some way whereby technology will rescue him.
- That is insane. - Why are you doing this?
Why come back now?
In the end,
he protects authority and he has no doubts.
But Bourne is a different character.
Bourne is an outsider. He's on the run from authority.
He's subversive of authority. He doesn't trust them at all.
He doesn't want to kill at any cost. He would rather not kill.
He's absolutely not a misogynist.
He's a man racked with doubt and confusion
desperately searching for an answer.
And that's what makes him contemporary and youthful.
And that's why, in the end
I think that the Bourne character, the Bourne franchise, speaks to today.
Today's world, today's problems, tomorrow's problems,
in a way that Bond cannot ever do, it seems to me.
And I think that's why when you look at The Bourne Supremacy,
I think you can see, and want, more chapters in the Bourne story.
I think there are many more chapters,
contemporary thrillers.
Bourne struggling for answers in a confused and threatening world.
Because I think that's where we are now.
I think that we're in confused and confusing times.
What's interesting about this film is that it comes out at a time
when the Congressional inquiry, the 9/11 inquiry,
the various inquiries in Britain and America into the war in Iraq
have shown that our governments, particularly the secret parts,
have profoundly let us down,
have not told us the truth about very, very important things
like why we went to war.
And the consequence of not having leveled with us
is a great tide of mistrust
coursing through both my country and the United States.
I think that that tide of mistrust is floating around.
And so when you go to the cinema on a Saturday night
and you see Jason Bourne on the streets of Europe,
and he's on the run from authority, and he can't trust what they say,
and he's searching for answers,
yes, it's a fantastic ride, it's got to be entertaining,
but something about that character and the way Matt does it
speaks to where we are today.
It just has that electricity, that resonance,
that connection,
so you go, "I'm with that character. I want to know where he's going.
"I want to know what he's looking for.
"I am invested in him."
And when he walks those streets you're with him
and that's why I think this franchise will live on.
I need to show you something.
I love this scene, too. It's a simple scene.
We've seen it a million times.
It's the, "Now I'm finally making progress," scene,
"I'm starting to put these pieces together."
And I wanted it
to start to reveal a contemporary story,
a story about oil and privatization
and a good politician who'd been killed
because he was standing up for fairness and justice.
And Bourne to realize
that he had somehow been involved in this terrible thing,
this undemocratic thing, this unprogressive thing.
And how is he to make amends?
But first we need to know who our baddie is.
All right, I finished my box work...
So, we return to the electrical closet where our fingerprint was found.
I'm with you. Conklin was a nut. But a traitor?
- I just can't get there. - What do you have, Danny?
This is Gabe Mann's scene played quite beautifully.
He's got an earnestness and a sort of professionalism.
You'd find him in any government office. He's well-intentioned, he's ambitious.
He's a doer.
It's a sub-line for the breaker above.
But he's got it all terribly wrong.
In his earnestness,
he's not seen the nature of the man he's dealing with.
Is it a slam-dunk? No.
But what if somebody were trying to cover their tracks...
And there's two characters,
a young, earnest, naive government servant
and a cold warrior.
Father and son, in many ways.
You think he's killed him without compunction, then you get this look
and you know it's caused him pain.
It's tiny little bits of detail like that in a performance
that give a character depth.
It's acting of a high order.
This is a live project, and you're a go.
I'll see you on the other side.
It was wonderful to have Chris Cooper back
in a cameo from the grave.
Just kept some continuity with the first film,
reminded us of that bizarre and compelling character called Conklin.
Good evening, sir. How can I help you?
Yeah, hi. I want to get a room for the night.
- Do you have a reservation? - No.
Actually, is Room 645 available? I've stayed there before.
I love looking at Matt's face in this scene.
I'm sorry, sir. That room is occupied.
It's an extraordinary journey
because he's got that open American face,
but you look at those eyes, they're restless and troubled.
There's desperation in those eyes
and hope that he might find an answer, but fear, too.
It's washing across.
There's a lovely sense of pacing here.
A very difficult scene to play.
Think how far now Jason Bourne has been alone on this journey.
He's barely had a line of dialog
since before he fought with Jarda in that house.
And yet you know exactly what journey he's on,
you know what he's thinking, you know that he's evolving as a character.
There's ingenuity and improvisation along the way.
But it's done without dialog.
It's enacted. Not told.
I think this is a delicious sequence.
The net tightens around him.
So as Bourne gets closer to the mystery
of the Brecker Hotel, so his enemies get closer to him.
And it's suspenseful, exciting.
I wanted all the elements now to kind of come together.
A sense of visceral unfolding action,
but also a sense of a fractured mind.
The boundaries between the past and the present starting to disintegrate.
And the liquidness of the imagery
mingling with sharp detail, the syringe, the gun.
Hard, metallic, physical, sharp-edged things
that would jar and jolt,
in a smoothly flowing river of images.
And that at the heart of it would be the shocking revelation
that Bourne had killed a woman.
In cold blood.
Congratulations, soldier.
Training is over.
Tony Gilroy's first treatment for this story,
which is really where I began and came on,
always had three pillars.
The first pillar was the death of Marie at the beginning.
The second pillar
was this shocking recovered memory
of Bourne slaughtering Neski and his wife
and leaving it as a murder-suicide.
The third pillar was the journey
to their daughter at the end of the film.
We went as a group, all of us,
on a long, long journey for a whole year
to try and find the best way
to tell the story of Bourne's journey.
But those central pillars of the story never altered.
They never altered in what they were
and they never altered in where they were.
And in the end, that was Tony's...
He made many, many gifts to this film
but that was his central achievement,
to construct a story full of the darkest,
most uncompromising, most interesting elements.
And somehow we all worked
to craft a story
with immediacy and excitement, a chase, a quest.
But it was on those three central pillars that we did it.
...and check them out one by one.
That will really work.
- What the hell's he doing here? - Maybe he just wanted to stay the night.
Bourne again, always with a plan, even under pressure.
He takes the time to check the times of the subway, check his watch.
He's a man who's got to run for a train now,
but he has half the Berlin police department on his tail.
And I wanted our action to be stripped back,
not to do with effects, just a chase.
A brutal, simple, energetic chase.
Bourne on the run.
He never ran in the first film but he runs in this one.
And I love it.
You feel, somewhere, the film take wings.
I think you're with him and you wonder what his choices are.
He's got the train, but the train's not gone yet
and the police are on the platform at either end.
So, what's he going to do?
There's a train coming.
That noose is tightening ever tighter.
So he makes one last break, but he's worked it out.
The train will stop them following,
gives him 30 seconds.
He's up onto the other platform.
Over the bridge.
That must have hurt.
So now he's on the barge, but he's going to blindside them.
Because as the barge moves out from the bridge,
he's got to get back under cover.
But he's hurt his leg.
He's still got that plan.
But it all depends on timing and improvisation.
If this was James Bond,
he'd produce some stupendous device
that would enable him to fly out of trouble,
but for Jason Bourne it's a boat hook.
I love that little look from the guy on his left
as Jason Bourne jumps out of the rafters of that bridge.
The quality of the extra supporting artists in Berlin was superb.
I thought it was a very, very film-friendly city.
You take a big film like The Bourne Supremacy to a city,
you need cooperation
because things change and you need to change locations
late in the day.
You need to close streets, cause disruption,
and set gigantic lights.
But they found Nicky. She's back at the Westin. Bourne let her go.
Definitely Berlin is a place to film.
They have a passion for movies there. They love having movies in the city.
And, as I say, it's an interesting place.
A place where the future is being made.
It's not safe and suburban.
I think I'll take a cab back to the hotel.
So the room he checked into was across the hall.
Why would he come in here?
- What are you thinking? - I recognize this room from a photo.
There was a chalk outline right here around the body of Vladimir Neski.
This is where his wife killed him?
Do you still think his wife killed him?
Guess he got out through this window.
We just got word from the Berlin police.
They found Danny Zorn's body.
I want you two to stay on Bourne. Check everything that's out there.
Call Abbott. Tell him to wait for me in his hotel.
I'm coming to see him.
- Da. - It's me.
They're onto Neski.
This is not a clean phone.
They can't prove anything without Bourne.
Kill Bourne, and you kill this investigation.
I'm afraid, Ward, the time has come for us to part company.
Listen, Yuri, you bought those oil leases with $20 million in stolen CIA seed money.
- You owe me. - I gave you your cut.
We both got rich.
I don't owe you anything.
The plan can still be salvaged. Just get Bourne. Do you hear me?
He's still out there. Now get him.
Get Jason...
It's a great moment when Bourne emerges to confront Abbott.
Not much.
You killed her.
It was a mistake.
It was supposed to be you.
There were files linking me to the Neski murder.
If the files disappeared and they suspected you,
they'd be chasing a ghost for 10 years.
So we got in the way.
Is that why Neski died? Is that why you killed Marie?
You killed Marie
the minute you climbed into her car.
The minute you entered her life, she was dead.
I told you people to leave us alone.
I fell off the grid. I was halfway around the world.
There's no place it won't catch up to you.
It's how every story ends.
It's what you are, Jason, a killer.
You always will be.
Go ahead. Go on. Go on! Do it! Do it!
She wouldn't want me to.
That's the only reason you're alive.
Tape and gun.
It sort of makes the scene concrete somehow.
Dangerous point in a film, in a thriller,
because the story's been going long enough that you're wanting some answers
and you're going to have to give them answers.
The story is beginning to tie up.
Yet you have to feel that you've got a last act
that your audience can engage in.
They're not just going to feel tired "It's done now. I've seen enough."
A lot of our editing dilemmas
were how to navigate the tricky swamplands
before the beginning of the final act.
You have to pay characters and storylines off sufficiently
that you feel satisfied.
But you've got to keep your pace up.
So what do we do now?
I'm not sorry.
In a way, we were able to pick
our way through this tricky territory
because of the quality of Brian and Joan.
We wanted to know what was going to happen to those two characters.
I think the end, when it comes, is shocking.
And equally, when we come back to Bourne,
the investment we've made in his character comes to the fore
because I think we're now starting to feel
that this is no longer a journey of revenge but it's a quest
for something more mysterious, perhaps larger, more noble.
And somehow you've got to build all the pieces
so that when you hit your third act you feel a surge of new energy
and a real sense of anticipation
that there's yet one more chapter in the story to go,
and perhaps the best of all.
Who's this guy?
Platform P.
Go ahead. Go on. Go on! Do it! Do it!
She wouldn't want me to.
That's the only reason you're alive.
Got a call from Langley.
They're going through Abbott's records
and Marshall wants to know what's going on with Bourne.
I was very lucky on this film
to have Frank Marshall, my producer.
'Cause my world was the world
of small films, independent films, little European things
that could be made with the catering budget on The Bourne Supremacy.
There was Frank with all that experience
of all those wonderful films he's made.
There were times when I got a little despairing
about how we were going to navigate into this final act,
and Frank was always there
with concrete ideas as to how it would go.
An endless source of wisdom and inspiration.
This was a great gag, the nightclub that becomes a daylight scene.
One of the great things about the Bourne franchise
is that people speak in the languages they speak in.
It's in Russia, people speak Russian.
This shot tells you we've entered the final act.
This is my favorite music cue.
John Powell's score in this film is magnificent.
It's insistent and forceful and yet lyrical.
Full of the restless, questing, troubled soul
that is Jason Bourne.
It's got a pulse there,
but it's got a lyrical figure, too, that is Bourne's
sense of hope, I suppose, his yearning for the light,
his yearning to arrive.
This was actually the first thing we shot in the whole film.
We went to Moscow. It was a bitterly cold day.
I wanted Moscow, a city I know well.
I've filmed there before, documentaries in the early '90s.
I wanted it to be the Moscow that I know,
not the Moscow of the Cold War, but the new Moscow
which is an exhilarating, exuberant,
conflicted but exciting city.
Rather like Berlin,
a city with a dark past, but making a brighter future.
A great place to play out Bourne's final act.
Forces of law and order there are,
but they're grappling with the anarchy
and the Klondike culture of modern Russia.
Exuberant place. Creative place.
Magnificent sense of architecture.
I wanted to choreograph the elements
so that we would produce our final climax
as Bourne gets closer and closer to the purpose of his journey.
We don't yet know what it is.
It's in this scene that we find out.
This is actually back in Berlin, though you'd never know it.
Sections of Berlin are almost indistinguishable from Moscow.
The rest of it was in Moscow but this small piece was not.
So we know they're onto him.
But now we know
that Bourne has a noble purpose.
He's looking for the daughter of the Neskis that he killed.
It's important that we know that
because we might think
that Bourne has come to Moscow for more revenge.
But at this moment we know he hasn't,
he's come in search of redemption.
And yet, Kirill and Gretkov
and the Russian authorities
are all making common cause to prevent him.
And we root for him, we want him to succeed.
So, we want to up the ante for Bourne, give him some more difficulty.
Let's shoot him.
I wanted the film
to start to unfold again in the present tense,
to become fluid, to become purely kinetic.
That point when story and plot,
narrative, character,
they all get left behind
and it's just an elemental engagement,
a physical struggle,
the hunter and the hunted,
to feel ourselves with Bourne
as he desperately tries to escape.
So first he needs a map, socks
and a bottle of vodka, though we don't know why.
Great clothes Karl's got. Clothes are very important.
Dinah Collin designed the wardrobe
and worked magnificently well with Dominic Watkins, the designer,
to create a contemporary look for this film.
Bourne stripped back into one costume, the black coat.
That little hooded top that Kirill's wearing
just gives it a hint of modernity to play off the leather coat.
I love this part of the film.
Now you know that we're going to get the chase.
Dominic's design was unobtrusive and yet impeccable.
It gave the whole film a sense of modernity,
classicness.
Our car chase was the biggest set piece of the film.
I was very lucky, I had Dan Bradley as second unit director
whose chase this is, in many ways.
He and I saw the world the same way.
We had a liking for the real, the immediate, the kinetic.
I wanted the chase to be with Bourne
and Dan shared that.
We worked through the storyline
and Dan did a lot of lonely and brilliant work in Moscow,
getting a lot of these images.
We wanted it to be absolutely,
blisteringly real.
Not to do with special effects or visual effects or spinning cars.
Just what it would feel like
if you were in a high-speed chase through the streets of Moscow.
This is probably the most successful sequence in the film.
I think it's a testimony to the collective endeavor
that lay at the heart of this film.
It was the boldest of decisions by the studio
and by Frank and Pat, the producers
to mount this vast chase in Moscow
and to encourage us to be as bold as we could.
Dan did brilliantly to set and record
all of the most compelling images.
The acting is of a very high order here.
They're tiny little images of shards that we see of Karl and Matt,
but each one tells a story because a chase only works if it's telling a story,
if it's got beats within it that unfold.
Like here, where they see each other for the first time
and you know that he recognizes him.
And in Karl's reaction, you know he's going to try and get him.
And so all of us in this film
came together to play our parts in this chase.
I'm very proud of it.
When I look back that's what I have a sense of,
of all the many skills
that are present on a film deployed together
to deliver an absolutely visceral,
blistering five or six minutes.
Skills of technique and performance.
The stunt-driving skills alone were awesome.
And the score, magnificent,
driving, driving this thing home.
At this point, this film has become pure motion and energy.
A ride is truly what it's become.
I think Matt's performance here is quite exceptional.
It's detail.
Intensity.
They say acting is
about what lies behind the eyes
and I think you're held by those eyes, held by...
What is it?
Somewhere a sense of satisfaction
but somewhere a sense of revulsion, too.
It's finality.
As he walks off towards the light.
And so we get to the end of Bourne's journey.
It brings us full circle
because this is where Tony Gilroy began.
He always envisaged the meeting.
Jason Bourne traveling from the color and the sunlight
and the texture of India,
through to the snowy, monochromatic wastes of a winter Moscow
to meet a young woman
and give her the only gift that he had to give her,
the only gift that he had to give anybody:
the truth.
Oksana's a very interesting actress.
She was in a wonderful Russian film, Lilja 4-ever,
one of the most extraordinary films of the last five years.
I was in no doubt she could be the only person to play Irena.
I've watched this scene a hundred times or more
and I think that there's something
just profoundly unusual about this scene,
coming at the end of a mainstream Hollywood franchise movie.
It's a bold scene
and it's a scene of humanity, sudden humanity, unexpected humanity.
And it's carried,
as all bold scenes have to be,
by acting of the very highest quality.
It's nothing. It's just a picture.
No.
It's 'cause you don't know how they died.
I do.
No, you don't.
I would want to know.
Actors have to make it believable,
truthful.
And in the wrong hands this scene could have
fallen apart, been literally incredible.
It's not what happened to your parents.
But here, in that close-up...
I killed them.
...you know you're in the presence of a confessional...
I killed them.
...and that she instinctively understands that.
It was my first time.
Your father was supposed to be alone.
But then your mother
came out of nowhere
and I had to change my plan.
It changes things,
that knowledge.
Doesn't it?
When what you love gets taken from you,
you wanna know the truth.
I'm sorry.
It's a measure of peace for Bourne, I suppose.
He's done the only thing he can,
answered that question that we started with.
What can you do when there is blood on your hands?
The answer is not much. But you can atone.
You can tell, at least symbolically, the truth to someone,
do that one thing that you can do.
And that ends our story, with the exception of a coda.
This was a very difficult part of the process.
We tried two or three ends, all of which were trying to do the same thing,
which is keep Bourne alive,
keep the sense of Bourne as an iconic character
forever destined to struggle for the truth,
forever destined to hide from authority.
But it was Matt who nailed it, actually.
He had this idea that we could create
a little upbeat thing here.
Wait. Wait.
I wanted very much Bourne to discover something.
That's your real name.
And Frank wanted very much for the end not to seem cynical.
He was quite right about that.
Somewhere as a group
we got to this.
Get some rest, Pam. You look tired.
And it seemed to combine all the elements with pace
and a little humor,
but defiance, too.
And send Bourne off.
We don't know where he's going but he's certainly going somewhere.
I guess it worked. I hope so.
And watching these names,
makes me feel very lucky.
I was a very lucky director
to be surrounded by
such expertise, such wisdom.
And given to me with great generosity.
I was very lucky.
Thanks, Matt.