It’s hard to imagine a filmmaker like Yorgos Lanthimos (“Poor Things”) would ever attempt to dip his toes into the world of studio franchises, as he’s been mostly focused on adapting books and crafting his own original material. However, as Lanthimos tells it, he debated the idea of tackling a “Bourne” film (the Matt Damon-led action franchise at Universal Pictures).
Speaking on “The Louis Theroux Podcast,” the Oscar-winning director reveals that during the hype surrounding 2009’s “Dogtooth,” he considered the idea of working on a “Bourne” movie, but isn’t entirely sure it got as far as a true-blue meeting with the studio. For some context, Lanthimos earned a Best Foreign Language Film of the Year nomination at the 2011 Academy Awards for the film, which led to all sorts of interest in his next project.
“It felt fake in a way [the meetings]. Well, I mean, a lot of it was fake. Those meetings are mostly superficial at times,” Lanthimos said when asked about studio meetings and interest in franchises. He would go on to name-drop “Bourne” as one of those would-be projects. “I wasn’t really [into the idea of franchises] at the time, like May, after having made ‘Dogtooth,’ and being nominated for an Oscar, it was like there was an interest in what it was that I wanted to do next. And I did entertain the idea, like going back to my roots as a teenager and go like, ‘Should I make a Bourne movie, for example?'”
When pressed by Theroux about taking a meeting for “Bourne,” the director responded with, “I don’t think I did a specific [meeting], but I think my agents were asking like, ‘What is it you want to do?'”
While the group of films based on the Robert Ludlum novels was first launched by Doug Liman (“Mr. & Mrs. Smith”), other directors such as Paul Greengrass would tackle three sequels, and franchise co-writer Tony Gilroy ended up helming the 2012 spinoff “The Bourne Legacy.” In recent years, there has been an attempt by the producers, Damon and Universal, to court Edward Berger (“Conclave”) for the next installment. But it remains to be seen if that will ultimately come together.
Fans of the “Bourne” movies will have to be patient to learn about what the future holds for the franchise and if they’ll end up rebooting for a new generation of audiences by getting a new actor or simply stick with continuing with Damon in a modern landscape of spies, which likely would be increasingly difficult for creatives given the advances in technology like AI facial detection.
Feel free to watch or listen to that full exchange between Lanthimos and Theroux, below.
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