Besides, Liman saw in Damon the opportunity to create a different kind of action hero – one younger, more conflicted and more apt to strategize than the likes of James Bond. The latter opted to make the thematically similar Spy Game instead. Damon urgently needed a hit.īefore Damon, a number of other actors had been considered for Bourne, including Russell Crowe and Brad Pitt. After breaking through with the Oscar-winning Good Will Huntingand Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, the dramas All The Pretty Horses and The Legend Of Bagger Vancehad failed to make much impact. If Universal knew it was taking a chance on a Doug Liman, actor Matt Damon also knew that a lot was riding on The Bourne Identity. Liman hit back that Gilroy was “arrogant” and later had the script rewritten by William Blake Herron – a decision which, as we’ll soon see, brought headaches of its own. Gilroy became irked when Liman, who he said “didn’t have any sense with story” and changed elements of his script. Liman was on board with this idea, but the pair continued to clash throughout the production.
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“I guess your movie,” Gilroy told Liman, “should be about a guy who finds the only thing he knows how to do is kill people.” When Liman pressed Gilroy for ideas, the writer replied that they should keep the central premise – that of a secret agent with a serious case of amnesia – and throw pretty much everything else away. “It was, a huge, you know, fifteen gunmen on the Metro blowing the fuck out of everything kind of movie,” Gilroy later said. It was an early victory, only slightly marred by Liman almost running out of fuel during his flight home. When Liman finally touched down near Ludlum’s home in Glacier National Park, however, Ludlum was so impressed by the director’s entrance that the two became friends, and the writer was eventually brought on board as a producer. Liman had failed to accurately work out how long it would take to reach his destination, so that by the time Liman reached Montana, the National Guard – fearing that something terrible had happened – had been dispatched to try to find him (“I didn’t understand I had to slow down to cross the Tetons,” Liman later explained). “I had just become a pilot,” Liman told Entertainment Weekly, “and it was my first solo flight.” But even this act of bridge-building created an unexpected drama. As a result, it took about two years for Liman to gain the film writes to Ludlum’s books – in the meantime, the filmmaker flew out to the author’s home in Montana to talk about the project. Warner Bros had originally made The Bourne Identity for television in 1988, with Richard Chamberlain playing a somewhat haggard Bourne. Liman’s interest in the Bournenovels reached back to his teenage years, but it wasn’t until the success of Swingersand Gothat he finally got the chance to bring the thrillers to the screen. Sure enough, the making of The Bourne Identity would prove to be a wild ride from beginning to end. Actress Sarah Polley, who’s still a close friend of Liman, once described the director as “This complete mess who can barely keep track of his possessions.” And suddenly, at the start of the 2000s, Liman found himself responsible for making a $55 million summer movie. There were hints, even on the set of Go, however, that The Bourne Identitywasn’t going to be the easiest of shoots. Liman’s rising profile soon saw him land the kind of deal that a few dozen other hopefuls would have sold their souls for – Universal signed him up to make a film based on Robert Ludlum’s spy thriller, The Bourne Identity. Urgent and effervescently told, they were the product of a young, talented filmmaker on the rise. His films Swingersand Go, released in 19, were made cheaply and recouped healthy profits. Then aged eight, Liman “Picked it up, started making movies with it, and never stopped.”īy the time he’d reached his early 30s, Liman’s ambitions had finally paid off. Like so many budding filmmakers of his generation, Doug Liman got his start in movies by fiddling with his father’s Super 8 camera.