Jonathan Nolan Once Told Matt Damon That He ‘Really Ended’ the Bourne Movies
Matt Damon was having a difficult time coming up with a way to continue the Bourne films after the original trilogy. So he took his ideas for a potential sequel to Christopher Nolan’s brother Jonathan, who gave Damon his honest opinion on the franchise’s future.
What Jonathan Nolan had to say about Matt Damon’s ‘Bourne’ movies
Even after The Bourne Ultimatum, Damon was curious about doing another movie featuring the action hero. But he wasn’t sure how a new Bourne film could be done given the finale of the original trilogy. Much of the first three movies followed Jason Bourne slowly uncovering new layers of his past that he couldn’t remember. Ultimatum saw the character recovering all of his lost memories, giving a fitting conclusion to the overall story. It was wrapped up so tightly that Damon wasn’t sure where the character could go from there.
“So all of that internal propulsive mechanism that drives the character is not there, so if there was to be another one then it would have to be a complete reconfiguration, you know, where do you go from there? For me I kind of feel like the story that we set out to tell is has now been told. I love the character, and if Paul Greengrass calls me in ten years and says, ‘Now we can do it, because it’s been ten years and I have a way to bring him back,’ then there’s a world in which I can go, ‘Yeah, absolutely,’” Damon once said according to Radio Free.
After years passed, Damon was ready to finally tackle another Bourne sequel. But it was difficult getting past the original trilogy’s finite conclusion. He even went to Dark Knight writer Jonathan Nolan to help him find a way out of his own ending.
“I gave it to [Jonathan] Nolan who did such a beautiful job with the Batman mythology – I mean along with Chris. I met with him and I said: ‘Would you take a look at this, because we really want to do it? [Jonathan] was great. He took like a month and really worked on it. He came back and said: ‘I can’t figure out how to do it.’ He told me: ‘You guys really ended it, you know,’ which we did. We had intended it to be a trilogy and he gets out at the end,” Damon once told Screen Rant. “Jason hasn’t been seen since 2004, so if we started writing a movie next year, we probably couldn’t get one out by 2014 and that would have been ten years since the CIA has completely lost track of him. So what has the character been up to all this time?”
Why Matt Damon decided to do ‘Jason Bourne’
He and longtime Bourne director Paul Greengrass finally returned to the franchise with 2016’s Jason Bourne. They found inspiration to continue Bourne’s story thanks to how much the world had changed since Ultimatum.
“First and foremost, we needed a good story to tell,” Damon said in a 2016 interview with Entertainment Weekly. “Everyone involved at the studio level really wanted it to happen, but none of us wanted to force it. And so Paul and I, if there was any strategy we could hit upon, it was to wait to see how the world change, or to see if anything presented itself organically. Mainly, we just didn’t want to mess it up. We were really happy with the three films and if we were going to do another one, we wanted it to fit in with the three films in terms of quality.”
Like the original trilogy, Jason Bourne would be very reflective of the times it was a part of.
“Since 2007, so much has changed. There’s been the financial collapse, the great recession, all these issues of cyber warfare and civil liberties — things that are slowly coming to into the zeitgeist as we start to grapple with what the future is going to look like,” Damon said. “And so those are kind of somewhere in the stew of our story. If you look at the first three, they are films that are product of the Bush presidency. Thematically, they touch on things people were talking and thinking about during that presidency. This one feels like a movie about today.”
