MATT DAMON IS JASON BOURNE - INTERVIEW

Matt Damon as Jason Bourne

Oscar winner Matt Damon has returned to play Jason Bourne, the character that put him on the cinematic map! Sure Damon has excelled at pretty much every role we've seen from him, (The Departed, Interstellar and The Martian) but let's face it, he was "born" to play Bourne!  

The latest instalment is simply called, Jason Bourne and that about says it all!  Paul Greengrass, the director of The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, once again joins Damon for this next chapter of Universal Pictures’ Bourne franchise, which finds the CIA’s most lethal former operative drawn out of the shadows. It has been nine years since we last saw Bourne and he is now in a dark and brooding place both physically and mentally.  He is unwillingly drawn back into C.I.A. action, being hunted down by a contracted killer (Vincent Cassel) and aided (or is he?) by a new cyber expert (Alicia Vikander) who works in the C.I.A.  

Jason Bourne is a fictional character created by novelist Robert Ludlum. Bourne is the protagonist in a series of twelve novels (to 2014) and subsequent film adaptations. He first appeared in the novel The Bourne Identity (1980), which was adapted for television in 1988. The novel was very loosely adapted in 2002 into a feature film under the same name which starred Matt Damon in the lead role.

The character originally featured in three novels by Ludlum, released between 1980 and 1990, followed by nine novels written by Eric Van Lustbader since 2004. Along with the first feature film, The Bourne Identity (2002), Jason Bourne also appears in two sequel movies The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), both with Damon again in the lead role. Jeremy Renner starred in the fourth film of the franchise, The Bourne Legacy, which was released in August 2012. Damon was adamant that he would not do another Bourne film without Paul Greengrass, who had directed the second and third instalments. Greengrass finally agreed to direct Damon in the fifth instalment in the franchise, Jason Bourne for which he also co-wrote the action packed script. 

Damon underwent a gruelling training regime, spending hours each day on a “rock climbing” machine in addition to an arduous exercise and eating regimen. “Paul said early on, 'Look, if we see your face and you look like you’ve lived well these past 10 years, we don’t have a movie," he told me during our recent interview in Las Vegas. "You have to look like you’ve suffered. And the only way to do that is to suffer. So, I suffered." 

His Jason Bourne co-star, Oscar Winner (The Danish Girl) Alicia Vikander was excited to be a part of the film, especially since she was a huge fan of the franchise. During our interview in Las Vegas she expressed her love for the movies and what a thrill it was to work with Matt Damon. "I have been a fan for years, I literally watched Matt as I was growing up so to be in a film with him is like a dream come true." 

Damon has been working non stop for about five years. He loves working  with top-flight filmmakers and finds it hard to say no when offered certain roles. Following The Martian for Ridley Scott, for which he was Oscar-nominated, he filmed The Great Wall - a big-budget epic set in China in AD 1100 directed by Zhang Yimou - and will soon go to Norway to begin Alexander Payne's satirical comedy Downsizing, in which he plays a man who undergoes a procedure that shrinks him to four inches tall. Then he will be making another movie with his pal George Clooney.  He says he'd like to find some downtime so that he can just play dad to his four daughters.  

He's happily married to Argentinian Lucy Barroso, whom he met in Miami Beach in 2002 while he was filming the comedy Stuck on You and she was working as a waitress.  “I got lucky meeting her,”  Damon recently told The Telegraph. “I think marriage is incredibly difficult because it’s so hard to have that one partner who is everything. Looking at it objectively, it seems an insane idea. So it’s not that I love marriage in general, it’s that I love being married to her. And that’s the difference. And I just got lucky. I sure did.”

Check out my interviews with Jason Bourne stars Matt Damon and Alicia Vikander by pressing the links below.

Jason Bourne opens in theatres nationwide on Friday July 29th.