Greengrass and Damon Talk “Bourne”
Maybe Damon and Greengrass can bring back an ass-kicking, geriatric Jason Bourne in about forty years.
Director Paul Greengrass and actor Matt Damon are out doing publicity for their new film “The Green Zone,” so naturally the topic of a fourth “Bourne” film came up. The publicists for “The Green Zone” must have been so thrilled to see reporters so easily diverted from the film they’re promoting to talk about a completely different movie.
Anyway, ComingSoon has Greengrass’s thoughts on why he isn’t doing a fourth “Bourne.” It’s not, he says, because he didn’t like the script as has been rumored. Rather, he just had a “been there, done that” feeling about the project. Greengrass said:
“…you just come to a point where you realize you’ve done it. You don’t have anything more to contribute to a franchise that needs to continue obviously, and in order to continue, a franchise needs to be rebooted and reenergized by new perspectives. I just felt that I’d done it, and there’s nothing unnatural about that. To make a film, it’s 19 months of your life seven days a week, 20 hours a day, you’ve got to have real… and there were just too many other things that I was interested in. I felt like I’d had a wonderful, wonderful time, I loved it and I want it to continue. In the end, contrary to reports, there was never an argument with the studio of any kind at all.”
Matt Damon has said that he wouldn’t do another Bourne film without Greengrass, but didn’t think that would be the end of the franchise:
“I think they have a good way to do a prequel with someone else, and basically make it about the Bourne Identity, the actual identity. Any studio is interested in making it an evergreen that can just go on and on and on, and it never will with our character because he’s resolved his issues now. He’s got his memory back three times now. I don’t think anybody wants to see me say ‘I don’t remember’ again, but I think what we could do is that you can do some movies with another actor, anyone, whether it’s Ryan Gosling or Russell Crowe or Denzel Washington, and he’s Jason Bourne, and at the end of his one or two or three movies, you see them getting ready to pass the identity onto me, so it just becomes like a 007, it becomes the name that they give this certain person who is uniquely positioned. So then if Paul and I come back and do a fourth one in ten years, we’ll pass it onto someone else and then the thing can kind of go on.”
Our clever Matt makes sure he doesn’t burn his bridges with this one. You can read the whole story from Damon and Greengrass here at ComingSoon.
