The movie Matt Damon said “had all the signals of being a disaster”
While the early 1990s saw a handful of acting roles for Matt Damon, it was in 1997 that he announced himself as a key figure of modern Hollywood with Good Will Hunting. As an actor and a writer, Damon has continued to establish himself in American cinema as one of its contemporary greats.
Looking through the performances that Damon has given throughout his career, one finds absolute quality at all corners. From the likes of The Talented Mr. Ripley and Saving Private Ryan to True Grit, The Departed and Oppenheimer, it’s fair to say that Damon has always delivered his talent in the most brilliant of manners.
Damon has such an impressive an extensive filmography that it can sometimes be easy to forget some of the titles that he’s performed in, even some of his more notorious ones. With the Bourne movies, Damon delivered some of the 2000s most iconic action thriller moments, an American analogue to Britain’s James Bond, perhaps.
The franchise began in 2002’s The Bourne Identity, directed by Doug Liman and based on Robert Ludlum’s 1980 novel of the same name. For the first time, Damon played Jason Bourne, a man in the throes of amnesia who must discover his true identity and reveal the mystery behind his seeming connection to the CIA.
As far back as 1981, producers and directors had been interested in bringing Ludlum’s novel to the big screen, but it took until 1996 for Liman to get attached to the project, with Damon finally joining in the lead role in 2000. However, the production of the first Bourne movie was troubled, to say the least.
In fact, Damon had once told Total Film that The Bourne Identity “had all the signals of being a disaster because we shot so many times, and it was delayed like a year coming out.” The actor added, noting how the film’s potential failure might have impacted his career, “The phone had stopped ringing completely. And you could really feel it. In Hollywood, by any measure, I was cold – cold as ice.”
The film’s slow development caused an issue between Liman, writer Tony Gilroy, and distributor Universal Pictures, beginning with the abandonment of William Blake Herron’s rewritten script. Of course, The Bourne Ultimatum had already been in development for several years, but as soon as things got going, they threatened to stall immediately.
Before long, producer Richard N. Gladstein quit the project, and a number of reshoots not only took the movie $8million over its original budget of $60million, but the original release target date of September 2001 was pushed back to June 2002, worsened by the film being in a constant state of rewrite and reshoot.
So, as Damon notes, it looked for all intents and purposes that The Bourne Identity was going to be an absolute car crash. “So that’s how shooting became a struggle,” he had also once told Movie Habit, “and when I hear people saying that the production was a nightmare, it’s like, ‘A nightmare? Shooting’s always hard, but we finished.’”
Thankfully, the shoot was finished and Damon was pleased to find that the first Bourne movie was not only well critically received and brought in a huge box office, but went down as one of the most influential action movies of the 21st century, easing his worries that it might have all gone so wrong.
