Word: greengrass
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They just finished their second and probably last Bourne film together. This one answers the question Bourne has been asking since the beginning: How he got so good at killing. "It's not about looking at a woman in a bikini coming out of the sea," says Greengrass. (Take that, James Bond!) "You get the dark past and this powerful search for redemption." And, fear not, plenty of hairy-chested action sequences too, including a car chase in midtown Manhattan, a shootout in London's Waterloo train station, and a sweaty foot chase and fistfight in Tangier, Morocco...
Outside the multiplex, these guys have kept it real as well. By marrying a civilian--a bartending single mom--instead of an actress and raising his family quietly in Miami instead of Hollywood, Damon lives a pretty grounded life for an A-lister. After attending Cambridge University, Greengrass spent the 1980s aiming his handheld camera at global hot spots for the British documentary series World in Action. Before moving to dramas, he co-authored Spycatcher, a book that so controversially depicted the British intelligence service that the British government banned it and attempted (unsuccessfully) to ban it in other countries...
...language and choose to do it again and again onscreen. The Bourne movies, unlike most meticulously planned and elaborately staged action pictures, are filmed guerrilla-style in the chaos of the urban world, a process that demands more than the usual team mentality. "It's like going to war," Greengrass says. "Who's going to be there? You want to know that someone's there every step...
...Doug Liman in 2002's The Bourne Identity. That movie minted a gritty new kind of action film, but its nail-biting production left Universal Studios looking for a new director who could somehow combine edge and efficiency. At a 2003 meeting at the studio, writer Tony Gilroy suggested Greengrass. "There was a grunt of approval," remembers Damon, sitting across from Greengrass in a poolside cabana at the Four Seasons Beverly Hills. "I was the one idiot in the room who hadn't seen Bloody Sunday." After the meeting, Damon watched the documentary-style drama about the 1972 massacre...
...finish the story," Greengrass interrupts. "I was in Los Angeles, and I got a phone call saying Would I like to do The Bourne Supremacy?" Enthusiastic about taking his first crack at a mainstream Hollywood project, he agreed to attend a meeting at the studio later that day. Not familiar with the city--"I was a small, little European director"--he accidentally took a taxi to the nearby Universal Studios Theme Park instead of the studio. Realizing his mistake, "I turned into Jason Bourne's overweight older brother, trying to get from the Universal Studios Theme Park to Universal Studios...