While Jason Bourne tends to get casually lumped together with James Bond in the realm of contemporary, big-screen secret agents, the pair couldn’t be more different. 007 has a handy stockpile of weapons, clothing, and vehicles at his disposal for his worldwide adventures, while Bourne is often left using disposable cell phones, his fists, and MacGuyver-like ingenuity to get himself out of situations. James Bond doesn’t mind making himself the center of attention in any given situation, and while Jason Bourne, across the trilogy of movies so far, has had to stay off the grid for survival, even if that weren’t the case, it’d be safe to assume he’d be the guy hanging out in the corner at any party. His taciturnity is a trademark, and in the upcoming “Jason Bourne,” we’re not going to hear him speak all that much.
In an extensive profile in The Guardian, Matt Damon reveals that he only has about 25 lines of dialogue in the upcoming completed picture. And it’s not just an stylistic choice, but one that comes out of Jason Bourne’s arc across the series.
“Well, I’ve done it three times. In the first movie, the Marie Kreutz character is still alive, so Bourne has a sounding board and he’s more confused about who he is and a lot more chatty. Once she dies in the first act of the second movie, it’s really a very lonely character,” Damon explained. “And we talked about that mostly on the second one. I remember [screenwriter] Tony [Gilroy] writing me an email saying, ‘You do realize what this means? You do realize you’re not going to talk in this movie.’ I said, ‘No, I love that.’ ”
However, even when playing someone who can’t always say explicitly what he’s feeling, director Paul Greengrass admires Damon’s ability to convey a complex range of emotions without the aid of monologues, and cites a particular scene from “The Bourne Supremacy,” when Bourne has to face the daughter whose two parents he killed.
“When you think about that from an acting point of view, the proposition that he’s got to go to this young woman whose parents he murdered and he’s got to say ‘I’m sorry’, and he’s got to do it in a way that you buy that he means it, but [he’s] also got to do it so that you feel Bourne’s pain,” the filmmaker said. “You’ve got to sell two things that are absolutely contradictory but are truthful and that’s incredibly hard. And I think you absolutely do feel his shame and guilt but you totally believe he’s genuine. Even though it’s absolutely preposterous.”
“Jason Bourne” is back in action — without much talking — on July 29th.