As The Bourne Ultimatum explodes onto DVD, Blockbuster.co.uk's Mal Simons enjoys an audience with Hollywood heavyweight Matt Damon.
"Basically it saved my ass," he laughs. "The weekend it opened I was doing a play in London's West End, and I hadn't had a film offer in six months because I'd had a couple of movies tank. Word was the first Bourne was going to tank too, as it had been delayed so long and been through so many rounds of re-shooting. It had all the hallmarks of a turkey."
Despite the gloomy outlook, director
Doug Liman's Bourne Identity was a significant hit, a cutting edge thriller that all but re-invented the spy genre, opening to rave reviews and raking in the megabucks worldwide. "I went from the Friday night of my final weekend of doing this play," remembers Damon, "to the Monday morning when I returned to New York and had something like twenty or thirty movie offers, just based on the opening weekend of The Bourne Identity. So it's pretty easy to understand why these movies have been a great boon for me."
Working hard for the success he's enjoyed with the Bournes, prior to the first movie Damon spent six months preparing to play an amnesiac spy with mad killing skills. "Doug had the idea of casting me, and at the time nobody had put me in a movie like this, and our big fear was that people wouldn't accept me as the character. We decided the best way to overcome that was that if I over-trained like crazy for everything - for the fighting and the firearms - so I could actually do them. Audiences are smart enough to know when you're cutting away to a stunt man, so we dedicated ourselves to making sure I could do as much of it as possible, as much of it as was safe. I think that actually went a long way towards selling me as the character and I just kind of stuck with that approach."
Initially Damon's training saw him working with martial artists, marksmen and, less predictably, a boxer. "I learned to box because Doug had a theory that I thought was really interesting and turned out to be right. He wanted Bourne to walk like a boxer because he felt there was a real economy of movement in the way those guys carry themselves, an assuredness in their posture. I'd never boxed before but I had six months to learn. I went and trained and it really changed my body and even the way I walked a little bit."
Damon hardly has to state he's a fan of the Bourne flicks as his enthusiasm for the franchise is apparent in everything he says. "I enjoy them because we're allowed to make them the way we want to," beams the star, "and we're not asked to do any of the conventional things you'd normally see in movies like this. Basically we're given more money than we'd normally get, to go and do a big movie the way we want to make it and I don't think you get that chance very often."
On top of his game with an unbroken string of critical and commercial successes, Damon is clearly ecstatic with the way things are going. "I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop for like ten years," he admits, "but things literally couldn't be going any better. I just want it to keep going."