"When I signed up for this film (BOURNE IDENTITY), Doug (Liman; the director) and I were both panicking, because I was not the natural first selection for a role like this," Matt Damon said back in 2002, when he was wet behind the action star ears and anxious to share about his newfound "trained for 3 months" martial arts skills and shape to those of us entrenched in the martial arts. "Liman took a chance on me and when I signed on, we agreed that the best thing for the film would be for me to do as much of my own action as I can," Damon continued, "which included all the fights and some car stunts. Audiences are smarter and they can tell if you are really doing your own stunts, plus if you do your own stunts, that is also more believable to the audience. In a way, I guess you could call it the Jackie Chan factor, people appreciate he puts it all out there on the line for everyone to see, and now so many of us (actors) train to give the film a little bit of a more believable edge."
Damon now returns 5 years after the original installment to reprise Jason Bourne in BOURNE ULTIMATUM, perhaps the last showdown in a franchise that has so far earned well over of $500 million. Although English-born director Paul Greengrass arrived in this world on a Friday the 13th in 1955, he struck it lucky when he was asked to take over the directing reins for BOURNE SUPREMECY (2004), and now he also reprises his roll as director in ULTIMATUM.
His Surry, English accent still in full display, Greengrass summarizes the franchise. "The first two films were very good at being powered by questions. 'Who am I?'
'Who killed my girl?' And the answers that he gets in the first two movies are satisfying, but not complete. Ah, but in this third film, it has got to be about answers and by the end of this film, you've got to understand how Jason Bourne became Jason Bourne."
For those who came in late, we find Bourne living as a man without a country or a past. Subjected to brutal training he doesn't remember by people he can't identify, Bourne was turned into a sophisticated human weapon?the toughest target the CIA has ever tracked. Since his discovery floating in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Italy several years ago, he had been on a desperate quest to learn who he was and discover who taught him how to kill. However, after his lover, Marie, died from an assassin's bullet, all Bourne wanted was revenge. Once Bourne found his revenge, what he craved was to forever disappear and forget the life stolen from him. That took us through two movies.
But a front-page story in a London newspaper that speculates about his existence kicks off the third movie even as it ends Bourne's hope for peace, and he finds himself once again a target.
Treadstone, the top-secret black-ops program that created this super-assassin, is now defunct. It has been reimagined as the joint Department of Defense program Blackbriar, with a new generation of trained killers?hidden from domestic or foreign oversight?at the government's disposal. To them, Bourne is a $30-million malfunctioning threat who must be taken out, once and for all. To him, they are the only link to a life he has tried in vain to forget.
Bourne has reached the end of the line. This time, he will not stop at his former masters' empty promises or even with the killing of those who relentlessly pursue him. With nothing left to lose, he will use each nuance of his training and every finely-honed instinct they instilled in him to come after his creators and finish it all, or die trying.
His quest will take him from Moscow, to Paris, Madrid, London and Tangier?evading, outsmarting and outmaneuvering Blackbriar operatives, federal agents and local police every step of the way?in a desperate quest to find answers to questions that haunt him. Bourne's journey will ultimately lead him to where it all began and where it must end: the streets of New York City. It's this need for closure that made Greengrass want to return to the series.
"Bourne is a real man in a real world in pursuit of a mythic quest," he reflects. "What's wonderful is that it's an oppositional story. Is he a killer, or was he made to be a killer? There is an underlying feeling that Bourne is one of us, and he's running away from 'them.' He's trying to get the answers, and he doesn't trust them. They're all bad, and the system's corrupted. To convey that with a sense of excitement in a very contemporary landscape is great fun.
"Also, we have to resolve the outstanding issues, his quest to find his identity. He's been searching for answers all over the world, but now he's back in the USA, where he has got to end his quest at his final destination and that final destination is New York."
The films are all based upon a character created by American author Robert Ludlum in his first Bourne spy-thriller novel, "Bourne Identity" (1980). "Bourne Supremacy" and "Bourne Ultimatum" were written in 1986 and 1990, respectively. Before he passed away in 2001, several of Ludlum's other works, which all seem to center around the paranoia associated with the idea of government conspiracy theories, were also adapted to the big screen, including THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND (directed by Sam Peckinpah, 1983) and HOLCROFT CONVENANT (directed by John Frankenheimer, 1985). A fourth book in the series, "Bourne Betrayal", written by Eric Van Lustbader, just hit the bookshelves two months ago.
Ultimately, the character Jason Bourne (and Bourne movies in general) is about behavior modification, and in a sense that is what has happened to Damon in his transformation from the mild-mannered dweeb and intellectual characters he's been almost typecast as in other films, into to this super-efficient killing machine that moves in a simple, effortless, and emotionally truthful way, without trying look cool, spinning and rolling over everything in his path like Jackie Chan on crack. Possibly this is why audiences can associate with Bourne more than, say, the likes of James Bond or Bruce Wayne, because he is basically a common man who believes in his country, only to have his country hang him out to dry.
Bourne lives in a world of action choreography, chase sequences and intricate plot reversals, where the audience demands intelligent espionage stories complete with heart-wrenching emotion and mind-boggling action. Greengrass contends, "The best way to make the audience feel that Matt is Jason, is to have him do as many of his own fights and stunt work as possible. As Matt would say, to take a "dippy" actor and put him in these different scenarios, make him accessible to the audience, which Matt as an actor can reveal the emotional layers of his character very effortlessly, then with the action, make him come off looking good. To do this is a really a reflection on the stunt crew, stunt coordinators and second unit directors"
Overall the film employed about 160 stuntmen, 13 different stunt coordinator, 3 fight choreographers and one very good second unit director (who also doubled as one of the stunt coordinators), Dan Bradley. "Dan did a great job on this film and helped to bring forth the vision I was seeking," Greengrass enthuses. "To me, it is important to create action that was textured, where one piece of action can lead to another piece of action and then that is an ally to the storytelling, and that is what can give us a sense of a ride in a film."
For the martial arts enthusiasts, ULTIMATUM does indeed have more of Damon's Filipino martial arts training that he did for the first film, and which has essentially been filtering down through all three films.
"There also needs to be a visual continuity between all three films and I want the viewers to feel like they have never seen those places in the way you're presenting to them now and that it's dangerous wherever you are," Greengrass says. "The camera is there to record and observe and the films are about paranoia and there's always someone out there trying to kill Jason.
"So, without sounding like a tape recorder, this film is an exciting, suspenseful thriller and it's got great action," he continues, "but it's got to have this labyrinthine, conspiratorial plot set in European locations. It requires a lot of handheld camera and hands-on filmmaking to capture that urgent feel."
Undoubtedly the best hand-to-hand combat scene that arises out of Greengrass' cinematic action philosophy is the Tangiers sequence, specifically in the walled city of Medina, which is comprised of a myriad of narrow streets lined with thousands of shops and houses stacked one on top of another. The lens of Greengrass' camera was on the daily life of a bustling Arab port city, as he followed Bourne and Nicky (Julia Styles) and their determined nemesis, Desh (Joey Ansab), through the winding streets of old Tangiers.
The quick-moving, tight action of Bourne darting through the narrow streets of the Medina was creatively captured through the use of multiple, strategically placed cameras. In addition to Greengrass' signature handheld cams, which gave the sequence an almost documentary feel, and the use of a crane and dolly tracks, the company outfitted a rig on a cable that slid a camera across the city's rooftops and closely followed Bourne throughout the heart-stopping chase.
Stunt coordinator and second-unit director Dan Bradley found a series of three large houses in the Jewish quarter and hit upon the idea of Bourne jumping through windows into these buildings and continually running through other people's lives, and then over balconies to other houses. Actually it looks more like a combination of building jumping stunts and chases, ala David Belle's work in DISTRICT B13 and Jackie Chan's apartment leap stunt in RUMBLE IN THE BRONX (which was actually done by the film's director Stanley Tong, in case you didn't know).
Eyes ablaze, Greengrass reminisces, "So we have this whole pursuit sequence over the rooftops of Tangiers, and I have to tell you, it was insane. We set up a flying camera rig on cables that goes sweeping across the tops of these building and pans alongside Jason as he's running and jumping from roof to roof. Then we have this stunt cameraman, all tied up tight in a harness and attached to cables who pursues Jason, Damon's stunt double, and so when Jason jumps off the roof and crashes through the window of a kitchen one story down in the next building over, the stunt camera jumps off the building with the actor to give us a very cool shot."
The chase culminates in brutal hand-to-hand combat between Bourne and the highly skilled operative Desh, who as it turns out was doubled by Damon?not Matt, but a friend of mine from my MARTIAL LAW and SPY GAMES days, Damon Caro, an expert in Filipino martial arts who just so happened to do the fight choreography and train the actors in THE 300. In a recent TV interview, Jeff Imada, one of the film's choreographers, had this to say about the fights: "It's really about being able to take care of your opponents as quickly as possible, so we use Filipino kali, Bruce Lee stuff and tie it all together. It really hasn't been photographed a lot, its execution is very fast and it has been proven in actual combat."
But what really makes the fights most impressive is the way they were filmed. Similar to SPIDERMAN 3 and BATMAN BEGINS, the fights were shot tight, and even thought the editing was quick and snappy, the audience could still follow the action. Each shot looked like a master shot rather than trying to shoot a punch from 6 angles and then pick the best. The tight sets also put the audience in the midst of the action. Greengrass finally posits, "Again, this comes down to having Matt do his own stuff, not just because it's a trend, but because, like himself, the action was all real and physical, there was no green screen, no CGI, it's all real people doing these real things and so it feels and looks more real?and that is, after all, the best way to do action."
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Dr. Craig Reid :
Written by Dr. Craig Reid for KUNGFUMAGAZINE.COM
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