Nearly 10 years has passed since filmmaker Paul Greengrass directed Matt Damon in a Jason Bourne movie.
They both swore they’d never return to the franchise, but, lo and behold, they’ve reunited to produce a new entry into the series, titled “Jason Bourne,” out on July 29.
We last saw the character in 2007’s “The Bourne Ultimatum," and the film series about the rogue agent was more or less all wrapped up. But in the years that have passed — both in real life and the film — technology has advanced and government spying into the private lives of American citizens has mushroomed.
In “Jason Bourne,” some of the domestic spying is enabled by a big social media firm that isn’t called Facebook, but might as well be. And Jason Bourne doesn’t think that’s right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4gJsKZvqE4
In case you need a recap, Damon tells you everything you need to know about the new Bourne installation in this 90-second video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3dJLRfBtu4
The Frame host John Horn met up with Greengrass in Las Vegas recently, where “Jason Bourne” was having its world premiere. He explained that it was Damon who convinced him to give the Bourne franchise another go.
Interview Highlights:
As you're figuring out where the character is and how he has evolved in his thinking of the world, the world is changing and Julian Assange and Edward Snowden are becoming significant characters in revealing something about data mining and domestic spying.
Correct. And I would say one other thing: the crash of 2008 had happened, which I think had thrown all our politics and certainties into flux. So as we looked, [editor] Chris [Rouse] and myself, at this idea that the character reaches a tipping point, I had read a book by a man called Paul Mason called "Why it's All Kicking Off." It was a wonderful piece of journalism that tried to draw links between the Arab Spring, the Syriza movement in Greece, the Podemos movement in Spain, Occupy — a lot of the oppositional movements from both the left and the right across Europe and elsewhere. Why was this happening and what were the connections? It's exploring really the landscape of the post-crash world. That really made me think about Athens. How could you not? It was on the news every night. That connection started to be made between a character reaching the tipping point, Jason Bourne, and the world at a tipping point in Athens. Then, suddenly, now we [could] see where this story is going to start. It's going to be Bourne in the middle of one of those immense protests and we can have a big action set-piece like that. That sets us off.
Then we were asking ourselves other questions like, What is the espionage landscape of 2016? I watched "Supremacy" and "Ultimatum" before I started, and they're a pretty good take on the landscape of the mid-2000s, but the world's changed.
The surveillance abilities with CCTV.
Yeah. Now you've got metadata in the post-Snowden world, you've got these giant social media companies, you've got a wholly different landscape. And the question we asked ourselves was this: If you were in the middle of the Cold War in the '40s and '50s, where would you go to see a great espionage crossroads? Well, you'd go to a bar in Vienna or a café in the backstreets of Berlin. You could imagine spies in the corner doing their Cold War thing. Where would you go in 2016? I was reading things about CSA and NSA recruiting here in Las Vegas where we're sitting at the giant technology conventions that occur here. The reason that they were recruiting here is because these places gather together the best and the brightest of the mathematicians, the physicists, the cyber experts and all the rest of them. They come and recruit here and compete with Goldman Sachs and the large banks because they want those young people to write their algorithmic, automated trading programs. They compete with the social media companies — the Googles and the Facebooks — because they want that new generation.
You're talking about predictive behavior?
Yeah. They compete of course with the hacking underground who are also trying to recruit people. So we have an espionage bazaar in Las Vegas. and Chris said to me, And we can have a car chase too! So you get that epiphany where you have the start of Bourne's journey and the end, and then you know you're in business.
We live in incredibly violent times and there's been a tremendous amount of gun violence in recent weeks. What do you think your role is as a filmmaker in the ways in which you depict gun violence? There are people who have been cutting the guns out of your movie posters, defacing them. What do you think about that and how you want gun violence depicted in your movies?
Listen, I think that it's an issue that all responsible filmmakers have to think about, and should think about. Where I stand on it is this: I know that the films that I've made over many years are actually remarkably lacking in extreme violence. I've never made an R-rated film, with the exception of "United 93," which had a tremendous amount of, obviously, the events. But I don't make R-rated films. I certainly don't depict scenes of extraordinary graphic violence, sadism, violence against women and all of that sort of stuff. You know, Bourne is PG-13 entertainment. Yes, there are a certain amount of guns, but actually pretty mild.
The gun that Bourne wields is a gas gun and clearly stated as a gas canister. He throws down the gun that he gets and towards the end he picks up the gun with the express purpose of shooting at the bad guy to stop the bad guy doing what he's doing. With the exception of that, the bad guy wields the gun. But we're not talking here about anything remotely down the road of exploitation, sadism — any of the things that I think we do have to worry about.
I think audiences absolutely have to understand where filmmakers are coming from and where films are put. And I think that they understand when they go to a Batman movie, a Jason Bourne movie or a whatever movie, these are in a great and noble tradition of American cinematic entertainment where iconic characters reflect eternal, mythic dilemmas, and they're to be enjoyed and meant to excite you and thrill you. The best of popular entertainment has a moral purpose and audiences know that and I think they know the difference. I am wholly comfortable with where we are.