As an assassin on-the-run in “The Bourne Supremacy,” Matt Damon can take a real punch, absorb a real car crash and wave a real gun around to terrify his co-stars — but he’s got to fake that tricky Russian dialogue.
The actor’s performance as an amnesiac government killer made a hit out of 2002’s “The Bourne Identity,” which on the eve of the sequel has been re-released on DVD with an alternate beginning and ending.
Damon spoke with The Associated Press about the grueling stunts involved in the new movie.
AP: In “Supremacy” you have a pretty ugly fight with another assassin, played by Marton Csockas. In the era of high-flying wire kung-fu, why’d you go the opposite way?
Damon: We didn’t want it to feel staged or fake in any way. That fight is really violent and really brutal. These are two extremely dangerous guys in a small space trying desperately to kill each other with every single thing that they do. It’s just a mess, it’s just violent and brutal. (Director Paul Greengrass) didn’t want it to be balletic at all, with sweeping kicks and jumping around. He wanted it to be two guys just slamming each other around.
AP: Take any real hits?
Damon: We got hurt. I threw my back out. I got punched in the face once and cut my lip open. It was a good brawl. (Laughs.) Marton worked really hard on that.
AP: Your character does a lot of vicious things — even when he’s trying to make up for past wrongs. Don’t most big-budget Hollywood movies like their good guys a little more...good?
Damon: It seemed really bold to me. Generally when the budget gets north of a certain number, the studio wants to make the characters more and more simple. They don’t want confusion, they don’t want people thinking too much saying, ‘I’m not sure how I feel about this guy’ That to them is a recipe for disaster. But to be able to come back and do it and make him still a deeply flawed character and a more complicated character in a mainstream movie ... (that’s better) than being a classic revenge story.
AP: In one scene, you menace a CIA liaison, played by Julia Stiles, with a gun to her temple. She seems to really come unglued and even you look shocked by what you’re doing. What was it like filming that?
Damon: That was a thankless thing for her. The only thing you can do to that scene is (mess) it up. You have to freak out and if you don’t go for it and don’t do it then it’s going to completely take people out of the movie...She was really, really good. It also didn’t hurt that I had a real (unloaded) gun and whenever I pressed it against her head it DID make her very uncomfortable.
AP: The “Bourne” movies have you traveling the globe and speaking Swiss, German, French, Russian. How’d you handle all the foreign-language dialogue, since you had to lose your American accent to sound like a native speaker?
Damon: That’s kind of like a parlor trick. I speak some Spanish and that’s it, and Bourne never speaks Spanish, unfortunately...When we’re filming I just learn (the lines) phonetically and move my mouth in the right way and then in post-production I go to a soundstage with a German-speaking person or a Russian-speaking person, whatever the language is, and we’ll just say it over and over and repeat it and repeat it until I say it — once — in a way that sounds to them like they’re mother tongue.
AP: Both “Bourne” movies have car-chase set pieces— but in “Supremacy” you seem to wreck into something every five seconds. How did that come about?
Damon: A lot of it was designed by Dan Bradley, who did the car crash in “Adaptation.” Remember that? It was just this completely out-of-nowhere horrifying thing that happens. The goal was to make a full car chase with moments like that throughout.
AP: How did they shoot so much footage with you in the car?
Damon: Dan invented something called “The Go-Mobile.” It’s basically this 550-horsepower, uh, rocket that attaches itself to a car and pulls the car. So you’ve got a professional driver in there, and you can do all these things with an actor in the car and a camera in the car that you could never do before.
AP: What were the crashes like for you?
Damon: They did (effects) shots where they put a driver on the roof of the car and the stunt driver in the (SUV) was slamming into me. I wasn’t really driving the car, but I was in the car getting slammed into by this car. It was totally safe. I had a seatbelt on and two of the best drivers in the world slamming into each other. The camera’s sitting on the passenger seat while this is happening, and you haven’t seen that shot before. If you’ve seen it’s been from a soundstage.