JASON BOURNE
PAUL GREENGRASS, DIRECTOR OF THE BOURNE SUPREMACY, THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM AND JASON BOURNE, ON MATT DAMON’S TROUBLED ASSASSIN: A VERY HUMAN SUPERSPY FOR THE MODERN AGE
How do you feel about Jason Bourne making this list?
I’m absolutely thrilled and honoured, obviously. He’s a great character, and he’s lasted a fair while. I don’t know whether they’re gonna make another one. I hope they do. But he was just a little bit different, wasn’t he, to some of the others? He came at the right time when we needed a fresh hero who spoke to the times. I’m very lucky to have been a part of it, and to have worked with Matt.
What was your first conversation with Matt about the role?
We first met in Prague, when he was making The Brothers Grimm with Terry Gilliam. We didn’t know each other, but we spent an absolutely fantastic night, and got absolutely hammered. The pair of us were still going at three in the morning. It was conversations about movies and everything. We bonded, that’s the truth of it. I haven’t seen him in a while, actually, but he’s one of the good guys. He’s a brilliant actor, hard-working, committed. And we had a lot of fun along the way.
You and Matt seemed to lock into the character very early on. What was the secret of Bourne’s appeal?
I think he was a bit counterculture, wasn’t he? He wasn’t like a lot of the other heroes. He was an outsider, he was fighting the system. He wasn’t trying to prop it up. That’s really the difference. He’s not a secret agent of the state, or a caped crusader who’s trying to cleanse Gotham City. He’s different to those characters. Not that you can’t do very interesting things, and many directors have. But Jason Bourne was sort of avowedly an outsider, on the run, and he didn’t trust Them. Whoever the Them was. The man, the system, the authorities. In a way, that reached back to the thrillers of the late ’60s and early ’70s. And yet he felt very relevant to the 2000s. And that’s why I loved him. Plus, he had a real sense of soul, didn’t he? He wasn’t just a macho man. He wasn’t trying to save the world. He was just a guy trying to figure out who he was.
Exactly. He had doubts. And anger. And guilt.
And they’re human qualities that I related to. Those are not qualities that you associate with an action hero. The measure of what Matt did to the character is that he made it all work in one rounded, complete package. You bought the action hero, but you also bought the existential angst and doubt and guilt.
Which film stands out for you?
I’m proud of all three of the ones I made, but I think Ultimatum probably is the perfect summation of that character, really. We had lightning in a bottle in Supremacy, too. There was just an intense energy around, and I think Matt and I were on a journey of discovery together with the character and the world. The closer you were to the early 2000s, 9/11, Iraq 2003, the more the character seemed to speak to those times of mistrust and paranoia. I think there was a sort of trajectory from Supremacy to Ultimatum. I’m very proud of Ultimatum. I think it’s got some real freshness about it. There’s just something hugely enjoyable about that film. When I see clips occasionally on the telly, it’s got a real energy and confidence. Élan, perhaps. The Bourne films seemed to be the perfect marriage of your more political, journalistic side, and your commercial desires.
Look, doing those big action sequences is the most
tremendous fun. It’s filmmaking at scale, but it never lost its indie-film roots. That’s also what kept him fresh. They were hugely enjoyable and shamelessly entertaining. They were adrenalinefilled, with lots and lots of detail and specificity and great character moments. I always loved that moment in Supremacy when Jason Bourne goes to the Tube map to check the subway times before he starts running. Stuff like that. It’s tiny touches, but they make it feel like the character’s thinking whilst acting. And that level of intelligence at speed, fighting at speed, working out the moves at speed, that’s what was fresh about Bourne at the time. If you think of the Waterloo sequence in Ultimatum, people often think of it as an action sequence. But actually there’s very little action in it. What it is is a tremendous amount of cat and mouse — Bourne looks there, and he sees that, and therefore he does that, and goes there. And lacing that together makes it feel incredibly exciting, even though you’re not doing balls-out running.
But there are great action sequences in your Bournes.
Well, that’s one thing I’m proud of that we crafted, particularly on Ultimatum — these long, long, long fluid action sequences, if you can call them that. They really were immersive cinematic experiences where you built slowly. I’m thinking of Waterloo or Tangier or the scene in New York. They were long, 25 minutes of what felt like sustained action, but which drove character and plot and action, all wrapped up in the present tense.
Let’s talk about the inevitable Bond comparisons. You once told Empire that Bond is “an imperialist rightwing fuckface”.
Did I really? I was obviously quite young and brash in those days. To be clear, whatever my feelings expressed then towards the character, they were not expressed towards the franchise. Good for them. It’s interesting that when Jason Bourne came on the scene, I think it was a bit of a wake-up call for James Bond. But my word, how well they’ve responded since. So fair play to them — they shoved my comments down my throat!