Word: greengrass
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Despite his tardiness, Greengrass won over producers with his analysis of the Bourne character and his comfort with fast-paced, naturalistic filmmaking, honed from his documentary work. Producers fixed him up on a date with Damon, who was by this point in Prague filming The Brothers Grimm for Terry Gilliam. At London's Heathrow Airport, with £15 in his pocket, Greengrass realized, "I'd better get some money, 'cause I'm taking out one of the world's great movie stars." His cash card was overdrawn. "So I spent the whole meeting with him thinking, Please don't order...
When they started work on The Bourne Supremacy in Moscow in 2003, Greengrass repaid his star with a priceless dose of artistic freedom. While filming a scene in which Bourne had just been shot, Damon was supposed to touch his shoulder, look at the blood on his hand and keep moving. "We were losing the light, and I was walking through this little tunnel," Damon remembers. He tried to position his arm in a way that would help the cameraman get his shot in time. "I didn't want to hold my bloody fingers below his frame. Paul came running...
...start of the more than 110-day Ultimatum shoot. Filming a chase scene in Tangier, a busy North African port city in the middle of Ramadan meant securing contracts with more than 2,000 businesses and shutting down production when fasting crowds got cranky. As the script shifted, Greengrass and Damon shared frustrating early-morning huddles. "The two of them would sit there and talk for hours about this character," says producer Frank Marshall. They shot ill-conceived scenes, Damon says, that they knew at the time would never make it into the film. Such as? "It would be like...
...movie. "You lay down a story, you've got to have some core objectives and some core sense of what your sequences are gonna be, and then you really have to move forward and start to make it and trust that in the process you'll find it," says Greengrass. "A film should not be an airline meal. It should not be prepacked." In other words, that edge-of-your-seat feeling of watching a Bourne movie often derives from the fact that the filmmakers are as surprised by their plot twists as their audiences are. "The camera...
Damon and Greengrass's improvisational style of moviemaking applied to the ordered world of the action franchise has produced a character, Bourne, wholly of the moment, rooted in the morality of today's landscape. "We all know we're in dangerous and ambiguous times," Greengrass says. "Bourne is not about wearing Prada. He's about essence, core, honesty and truth in a complex world." The movies work only because the director and star trust each other. "It's best not to look at it too close," says Greengrass of their relationship. "'Cause it's a bit like...