The movie that saved Matt Damon’s career from the scrapheap: “It had all the hallmarks of a failure”
Within the rapidly changing film industry, Matt Damon has managed to stay the course as a movie star in the classic mould. Starting out as a fresh-faced prep-school kid in School Ties in 1992, his breakthrough came five years later when he starred as a maths prodigy of humble origins who bonds with an MIT professor in Gus Van Sant’s surprise hit, Good Will Hunting. At just 27 years old, he won an Academy Award with childhood friend and co-writer Ben Affleck, and the two became the toast of Hollywood.
Knowing what we know now about the illustrious career that Damon has cultivated since then, it’s easy to gloss over the fact that his longevity wasn’t always a certainty. Having spent the late ‘90s playing earnest young protégés and upstarts in movies like Rounders, Saving Private Ryan, and The Rainmaker, he struggled to find a new lane towards the end of the millennium, and a string of flops didn’t help matters. Speaking to The Telegraph in 2016, Damon revealed that he had hit a dead-end around 2000, and if it wasn’t for the unexpected success of one movie, he might not be one of Hollywood’s top-billed stars.
“I hadn’t had a job offer in six months,” he said. “All The Pretty Horses had opened, The Legend of Bagger Vance had opened and both had underperformed and been critically panned. The third movie in the line was The Bourne Identity and it had all the hallmarks of a failure”.
He added: “It was postponed, it was delayed, there were reshoots and everybody went, ‘Oh this one’s going to be a turkey.’ It finally got released and everybody discovered it. Suddenly it put me on a short list of people who could get movies made and so directors called me and I was able to make movies I wanted to make.”
From the moment it was released, The Bourne Identity was a hit. Directed by Doug Liman and starring Damon as the titular Jason Bourne, it follows the main character after he wakes up on a fishing boat in the middle of the Mediterranean with no recollection of who he is or why he has bullet wounds in his back. It’s a clever plot device that adds heightened drama to an already tense thriller. It offered a refreshing deviation from the CGI-laden disaster movies of the era, embracing a spare, tightly-plotted approach that set the tone for 21st-century thrillers.
Off of a modest budget of $60million, The Bourne Identity made $214m at the box office and spawned an inevitable franchise. Practically overnight, Damon went from being a promising ‘90s actor whose star was on the decline to a major action star of the new millennium.
Bourne may have been the film that brought his faltering career back on track, but it was Damon’s savvy instincts that kept it soaring in the ensuing two decades. Balancing big-budget franchises like Bourne and the Ocean’s movies alongside standalone, auteur-driven projects like The Departed, True Grit, and Oppenheimer, he’s shown how Hollywood stars can play the industry’s game without abandoning their craft.
