  Matt Damon reprises his role as trained assassin Jason Bourne in The Bourne Ultimatum. |
BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF. -- Whether it's Bourne or Bond, as Sean Connery once learned, actors should never say never again.
So while Matt Damon smartly doesn't rule out reprising rogue assassin Jason Bourne for a fourth film, he stresses trilogy-capper The Bourne Ultimatum leaves his amnesiac alter-ego in the rarest of dilemmas: Out of ammunition.
"I was talking to someone who suggested we could do the fourth movie about Bourne losing his keys -- the whole movie 'Where are my keys?' " the Cambridge, Mass.-born Damon says with a laugh during interviews at the Four Seasons.
"That kind of illustrates how out of story we are."
Out of story because The Bourne Ultimatum, opening Friday, resolves many of the mysteries surrounding the titular character's long-lost identity. (Thought the epilogue of 2004's The Bourne Supremacy did that? It did -- the exhaustively entertaining Ultimatum launches, not following the events of Supremacy, but concurrent to them.)
"The story of this guy's search for his identity is over," Damon insists. "He has all the answers, so there's no way we could trot out the same character. So much of what makes him interesting is the internal struggle: 'Am I a good guy? Am I a bad guy? What is the secret of my identity? What am I blocking out?' All that internal propulsive mechanism that drives the character is not there (anymore), so if there was another one it would have to be a complete reconfiguration. If we came out with a fourth one and I got bonked in the head, you guys would be like, 'Are you kidding me?' "
Remarks he made earlier this year swearing off further Bournes were more the product of Ultimatum's gruelling schedule than sequel snobbery, it seems. "I made that comment at Cannes when we were about nine months into shooting and I was like, 'I'm never doing this again.' "
Director Paul Greengrass, though, insists the harried, globe-trotting production process -- in which the filmmakers trekked to New York, Morocco, Paris, Berlin, London, Madrid and Moscow -- was crucial to achieving the thriller's bruising realism and you-are-there urgency.
"Unlike a lot of films, if we're in Tangier, we're in Tangier -- we're not on the backlot somewhere. And that makes for tremendous logistical difficulties," explains the director, who helmed the Oscar-nominated United 93 between Supremacy and Ultimatum.
The filmmakers, for example, couldn't shut down the Waterloo railway station in London -- where a critical chase sequence occurs -- so they waded into the thick of the crowd, shooting rapidly so that by the time Londoners realized a Hollywood production starring one of the world's leading actors was in their midst, the cast and crew had already moved on. In addition to location hurdles, cast and crew also had to contend with constant reshoots and an ever-evolving script that meant many filmed sequences never made it into the finished version. Not surprisingly, some published reports suggest Ultimatum's budget climbed to $175 million US. "The ratio of scenes we shot to scenes we used was probably eight to one," Damon says. "That's what happens when you start without a script. It's not an advisable way to make a movie, but it works for Paul."
Enough so that Damon intends to collaborate with Greengrass again on the Iraq war-themed Imperial Life in the Emerald City.
The project -- based on the non-fiction book detailing how the U.S. bungled the Middle East conflict -- would continue Damon's nimble streak of juggling commercial hits with such critical darlings as Syriana, The Departed and The Good Shepherd.
"On the face of them, they were going to be box-office misses," he recalls of those three projects. "But I didn't have to hesitate (to make them) because I loved all the scripts and I knew I had The Bourne Ultimatum off in the distance. It allowed me the creative freedom to make these movies. There hasn't been a role that's had a bigger impact on my life (than Bourne) -- maybe Good Will Hunting because it pulled (Ben Affleck) and I out of total obscurity."
Indeed, five years ago, just prior to The Bourne Identity's release, Damon's career was floundering in the wake of such costly duds as The Legend of Bagger Vance and All The Pretty Horses.
"When the first (Bourne) came out, no one had offered me a movie in six months and I was doing a play in London on the West End. The movie opened and by that Monday I had 20 offers ... That's when the rose-coloured glasses came off and I realized if you're in a hit, you have a career and if you're not, they might think you're a real nice guy, but they're not hanging a movie on you."
Along with its star's stock, the Bourne franchise, it could be argued, also revitalized the action genre, foregoing stylized slow-mo shoot-outs for a visceral, brutally understated immediacy. For evidence of this, you need look no further than the grittier Bond that materialized with the Casino Royale reboot. Not only is Daniel Craig's 007 more roughly physical, more cruelly-efficient -- more Bourne-esque -- than his suave predecessors, but he tackles terrorists, not laser-canon-wielding megalomaniacs.
The subject of the Bourne Ultimatum's overt political themes arises understandably enough when you consider the villains are not Islamic fundamentalists but ruthless American operatives portrayed by David Strathairn and Albert Finney.
Damon says he sees the Bourne entries as "of the time. The first one is very much 2002, post 9/11 ... What I love about them, you'll be able to look back and tell when they were made. In 2004, things are starting to turn in Iraq and now (in Supremacy) this iconic American figure is going apologizing for the misdeeds he's done ... Now (in Ultimatum) you have the movie ending where Bourne is pulling a gun and putting it to the head of the person who lied to him ... Bourne is saying now, 'I understand you led me into something under false pretenses.' All of these things are nods to the world we're living in."
That said, Greengrass, perhaps not wanting to scare off audiences strictly seeking a good time, stresses Ultimatum is "contemporary not topical ... We've got to be true to the character and the world he lives in, but I don't come to it to make any kind of statement. I come to a Bourne movie to have fun."
And, as far as this franchise goes, fun is defined as having the blindingly swift Bourne pummel the unholy snot out of his opponents -- something that's not nearly as enjoyable for the performers as it is for moviegoers.
"(To do those fight scenes) it takes unbelievable stamina and incredible power and courage because you get hurt," Greengrass says. "You can't smash around like that for a week in confined spaces (without getting hurt)."
For Damon particularly, being bashed and battered hasn't gotten easier with time. "On the first movie, I was 29. I was 36 on this last one, so I felt my age."
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