Edward Norton Felt James Bond Was a Superhero Compared to Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne Films
Actor Edward Norton was once recruited for Matt Damon’s Bourne franchise. It was an invitation he was happy to accept, since he felt Bourne was more realistic than other spy franchises.
Why Edward Norton was intrigued by the ‘Bourne’ franchise
Norton became interested in being a part of Jason Bourne’s mythology after learning Tony Gilroy would be shooting Bourne Legacy. Gilroy had a hand in writing the first three Jason Bourne films. But Legacy would be the first project he’d end up the director for. As both a filmmaker and writer, Gilroy was building up quite the filmography with features like Michael Clayton and Duplicity. Norton took notice, and was eager to work with Gilroy on Legacy.
“I think the main draw for me was Tony Gilroy, because I’m just a big fan of his films,” Norton once told Flicks and Bits (via Digital Spy). “I found over the years that I’d see a film and I’d think it was really smart, then I would see that he had written it.”
Norton was especially a fan of Gilroy’s Michael Clayton, which perhaps sold him the most on the director.
“Michael Clayton just really knocked my socks off, I thought it was a really smart, great film. And sometimes when I like someone’s work that much, I think it’s just exciting to go with them where they want to go,” Norton added.
The Fight Club star also found the Bourne franchises to be much more grounded than other superhero blockbusters. This made it easier for Norton to slip into the spy films.
“I think they’ve always pulled a little more from the authentic reality of what we glimpse in the headlines. I think that on the other end of the spectrum you’ve got sort of like the Mission: Impossible or James Bond, which I would call more in the fantasy superhero genre. Those are more spectacle and, in the Bond case, slightly tongue in cheek, even in their newer grittier form,” Norton once said in a separate interview with Digital Spy.
Norton added that Bourne movies normally didn’t have the same unrealistic and extravagant stunts that were common in Bond’s movies.
“In the Bourne films, nobody was ever going to climb a building in gecko gloves, or parachute in a car out of a plane. They were always much more lo-fi – I think trafficking in sort of a more realistic sense of how does the government actually function. I think Tony’s gone even one step further in this one, in the sense that he’s opened it up to start to include government-based science,” he said.
Matt Damon believes Jason Bourne would beat James Bond in a crossover
Damon doesn’t have the highest opinion of the James Bond character. Some of the traits that have made Bond popular over the years are the same qualities that the actor despised.
“They could never make a James Bond movie like any of the Bourne films because Bond is an imperialist, misogynist sociopath who goes around bedding women and swilling martinis and killing people,” Damon once told The Miami Herald (via The Guardian). “He’s repulsive.”
But Damon asserted that Bond’s more questionable characteristics helped make him a very lucrative brand.
“Steve [Soderbergh, who produced yet another of Damon’s spy movies, Syriana] told me that years ago he was offered a Bond movie. He told them he’d do it if they gave him creative control. Absolutely not, they said. They have a formula, they stick to it, and it makes them a lot of money. They know what they’re doing, and they’re going to keep doing it,” Damon added.
Damon not only felt that Bourne was the better character morally. He quipped in a more recent GQ interview that he was the better fighter.
“And Bourne would obviously win in a fight,” Damon said.
