Last time Matt Damon, star of the original 'Bourne' trilogy, was out doing press, he said he hadn't seen "The Bourne Legacy," this past summer's extensive reboot of the franchise that placed Jeremy Renner at the center of the action. The film upped the franchise's science-factual underpinnings by having Renner's character (part of the next generation of government-sanctioned killers) controlled by a series of drugs that would boost his reflexes and intelligence. When we spoke with Damon about the sequel/prequel yesterday, during the actor's press rounds for the upcoming "Promised Land," he did confirm that he's seen the movie but said that it might make it harder for him to re-enter the franchise.
"I did see it…" Damon said, trailing off. When we asked him what he thought of the movie, he said: "I think it's going to make it harder for us to make another one. I'm just trying to figure out like… Because they used our characters, anything that happens in that world, that's the 'Bourne' world now. So the pill popping and all that stuff happens." When we suggested that Damon's Bourne character was actually from a different era of the project, he conceded a little bit. "Right, I'm from a different program," Damon said.
When we asked if he would do one with Renner, he sounded even more skeptical. "I don't know what that story would be," Damon said. "I love Jeremy and I'm a huge fan of him and I know him personally and love him outside of work, too. But I just don't know what that story would be. I could never see Bourne teaming up with anyone. And all he said was – he wanted out, he wanted out, he wanted out. So how do you get that character going again?"
Damon said that this was a problem that he had faced before, back when he and Paul Greengrass (who directed "The Bourne Supremacy" and "The Bourne Ultimatum" and re-teamed with Damon for "Green Zone") were trying to hammer out plans for the fourth film in the franchise. "Literally, we couldn't figure out how to do it three years ago," Damon said. He then broke down why, exactly, a 'Bourne' movie came out this year anyway. "The studio had a deal with the Ludlum estate and they had to get a 'Bourne' movie out. So they said to us, 'Why don't you guys do one?' And we said, 'We don't know what to do!' So once they realized we weren't going to solve that problem, they went a totally different way."
We'll have more from our interview with Damon as "Promised Land" release date approaches at the end of the month.