All great art comes from a place of emotional honesty. The story might be false, but the feelings are true.
The Bourne Identity is one of my favorite movies. Its gritty, handheld look and kinetic action sequences redefined the action movie genre and inserted a sense of realism to a somewhat stale, overproduced trope. In my mind the film was revolutionary and breathed new life into a tired, stale format. Prior to Bourne, the “action spy movie” was defined by characters like James Bond. The slick talking, perfectly dressed peacock who pranced around exotic locations sipping martinis and chatting up beautiful women. There’s nothing wrong with that per-se, but after a certain point it stopped feeling real. Anyone who has any experience in the intelligence community will tell you just how ridiculous of a character James Bond is. A British spy who is absolutely terrible at blending in and seems to be a lot more interested in getting drunk and womanizing than actually collecting intelligence. It was cool for a while, but as time went on the James Bond character became more and more of a cartoon. A characterization of himself, devoid of any connection to reality. Jason Bourne came to set him straight.
What I like so much about Bourne (aside from the realism and implementation of real-world CIA tactics in the movie) was the insane backstory of how the movie got made. When you look at some of these shaky, handheld shots in Europe and go “wow that feels so real” it’s because it was real. Filmed by a young, inexperienced director who didn’t understand that things like “film permits” were necessary to shoot on location, the frenetic energy captured on screen came from the real-world place of a director desperately trying to capture his shots before the police showed up and shut down his production.
Sometimes, you have to be bold. And if you can’t be bold, just to be too stupid to know that “you can’t do that”. The director had come from a series of small budget indie films, and “Bourne” was his first big budget production. He didn’t know the rules, and thus, he wasn’t constrained by them. In his own words, the director (Doug Liman) stated: “when I started shooting Bourne I had all these people telling me what I couldn’t do. In all my previous movies, we couldn’t afford to pay the person who would tell us what we couldn’t do.”
That energy came across on screen, but it wasn’t without a cost. Frequent on-set rewrites of the script, battles with the studio over rising production costs, and a reputation for being a “prima donna” prone to flights of fancy caused the director’s relationship with the studio to sour. So much so that near the end of filming when trying to stage a set piece that involved the explosion of a building his request was denied because the studio no longer trusted him with pyrotechnics. Imagine that. Being the director of an action movie with a multimillion-dollar budget and the studio that financed you no longer trusts you to handle explosives.
In the end, the movie became a classic. Forever changing the landscape of the action spy movie. Despite being significantly delayed in production and necessitating multiple re-shoots, the film was eventually released in 2002 to critical acclaim. Four years later, in 2006 James Bond came back on screen in Casino Royale with a darker, much more subdued and grittier tone, no doubt heavily influenced by Bourne’s effect on the genre.
What does this all mean? Well, for one, I’ve always loved Jason Bourne because he embodies a lot of characteristics I truly admire. Adaptability, improvisational skills, working with what you have and thinking quickly on your feet. Using your environment to your advantage. Reading a room. Blending in. I could go on and on. I think the director captured that essence so wonderfully because he had experience with those emotions. Maybe he never killed anyone before, but he knew what it felt like to be under pressure and forced to improvise and deliver while external forces were applying pressure on his life. In his case, those external forces were the studio threatening to shut down his movie. And just like Jason Bourne, he was forced to draw upon his instincts to get the job done, which he ultimately did.