Matt Damon Once Shared the Film Industry Wrote ‘The Bourne Identity’ off as a Flop
Matt Damon’s commercially and critically successful Bourne franchise is one of the actor’s biggest hits to date. But in the beginning, Damon felt the spy series showed warning signs of tanking.
Why starring in ‘The Bourne Identity’ was a big concern for Matt Damon
Damon felt like he had a lot going against him when choosing to do the Bourne movies. The Good Will Hunting star wasn’t known for picking roles like Identity. In combination with the actor’s youthful appearance at the time, there was an element of risk involved with casting Damon.
“I look so young and this guy clearly has to have a history and he’s got a very dark past, and people who look at me don’t necessarily think that,” Damon once said in an interview with IGN. “So there was a lot of stuff physically, in terms of getting ready. We just tried to look at every different aspect of how to make this guy as believable as possible. Because the worst thing that could happen is if you have a good movie, but the central character’s just not quite believable and he’s constantly taking your audience right out of movie.”
So Damon and Identity director Doug Liman would focus on getting the actor physically ready for the role. Liman would turn to boxing to help inform Damon’s transformation.
“I boxed for about six months before the movie and that really did help. I found just the way that you move around other people. And it’s a very subtle thing. But I think the sum total of a lot of those little subtleties add up into making something either believable or not. And a lot of the weapons training, just little tips from the guy that I was training with, I put in so many hours,” he said.
Matt Damon felt that ‘The Bourne Identity’ had all the warning signs of a disaster
Perhaps what made The Bourne Identity’s success particularly satisfying for Damon was how it wasn’t expected to succeed. Damon wasn’t doing too well before starring in the movie, and went through a bit of a career slump.
“Right before The Bourne Identity came out, I hadn’t been offered a movie in a year. Because The Legend of Bagger Vance had come out and bombed and All the Pretty Horses had come out and bombed,” he said. “And the word on The Bourne Identity was that it was gonna tank also because we had pushed back the release date a couple times, and so people went, ‘Oh, well that’s always a sign that things aren’t going well.'”
Damon insisted that the delays only helped make a good movie even better.
“But the outward signals from the industry were, ‘Oh God, this thing’s gonna suck,’” he continued. “So nobody had really called and gave me any job offers for quite some time. I went and did a play in London on a Saturday night and Bourne had opened on that Friday. And by the time I got back to NY, I got back Sunday night and Monday morning there were something like 30 script offers. So in terms of any success that I’ve had, it’s always this kind of tenuous [thing]. I don’t think anyone really feels secure.”
Matt Damon once felt that Jason Bourne had one of the biggest impacts on his career
Damon considered his journey as the assassin Jason Bourne one of the most significant roles in his career. So much so the movies were only possibly second to one other Damon project.
“The movies have come out over the course of five, but it’s been seven years of my life and there hasn’t been a role that has had a bigger impact on my life, maybe Good Will Hunting did, because it pulled Ben and I out of total obscurity,” he once said in an interview with Black Film.
This was partially because the Bourne series allowed The Departed star to do much smaller movies in his career without worrying about money.
