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By Angela Dawson
Entertainment News Wire
HOLLYWOOD -- Matt Damon owes his career to two movies: "Good Will Hunting" and "The Bourne Identity."
"Good Will Hunting," co-written with longtime pal Ben Affleck, featured Damon in the title role and earned him an Oscar in 1997 for best original screenplay. "The Bourne Identity," a sleeper hit two years ago, re-established Damon as a bona-fide leading man. Both projects arrived at critical times in his acting career when he could not find desirable parts.
When Damon landed the role of Jason Bourne in the action-thriller based on Robert Ludlum's best-selling spy novel, he had just starred in two box office bombs, "The Legend of Bagger Vance" and "All the Pretty Horses." The boyish looking actor was a surprise choice to play an amnesiac CIA assassin, but Damon figured he had nothing to lose.
He was just returning from a theater gig in London when he heard the news that "Bourne" was a hit on its opening weekend. The suspense thriller went on to earn more than $121 million and put Damon back on the map.
It seems a no-brainer that Damon would enthusiastically reprise the character of Jason Bourne, but he weighed the decision carefully before agreeing to star in "The Bourne Supremacy."
"There was no reason to make it unless we thought we could make it better than the first one -- or at least as good as the first one," the 33-year-old actor says.
It all came down to the script, which picks up where the original left off, he explains. Jason Bourne, accompanied by his girlfriend (Franka Potente), is still trying to sort out who he is while avoiding CIA operatives on his trail. His journey takes him from India to Naples to Berlin to Moscow and back to Berlin.
In addition to Potente, returning performers from the first film include Brian Cox and Julia Stiles. Academy Award-nominated actress Joan Allen icily plays Bourne's new CIA nemesis.
British director Paul Greengrass ("Bloody Sunday") takes the helm from Doug Liman, who directed the original and serves as an executive producer on the sequel.
Having played the role before, Damon knew the drill. He worked out, building his muscles through boxing. Training in boxing, he learned from Liman,would give his character an air of self-confidence.
"You move around other people and it's a very subtle thing," he says. "When I found out that we were going to do the next one, I started boxing immediately, partly to get in shape but more importantly to get the movements down."
Damon has a lot of running, climbing, jumping and fighting in this spy thriller. Indeed, the actor has very little dialogue. "The movie is a pretty honest reflection of what the experience of making it was like: you're on the edge of your seat the whole time; you're incredibly tense and there's never a moment to catch your breath."
Damon arrived on the set prepared. He'd already had weapons training for the first film. He spent several hours a day at the firing range to ensure that he looked comfortable holding a weapon. It was important, he says, for him to do most of his own stunts to make his character believable. "Audiences are smart enough to know that when you cut to the wide shot of a really buff stuntman, it's a giveaway," he says humbly.
He also faced a tricky scene in which he and Potente are struggling underwater. Damon practiced for weeks with a dive master to perfect his swimming skills, performing mundane tasks like tying and untying knots and waiting until his air was exhausted before surfacing so he would be comfortable for the shoot. "I had nightmares about suffocation," he recalls, "but I didn't panic. Ever."
That was not the case for his beautiful German co-star. Potente, a certified diver, devoted less time to preparation for the scene and experienced a terrifying moment where she thought she was drowning. She quickly surfaced and began crying, an instinct she instantly regretted.
"She forced herself to go back in the water and do the scene again," recalls Damon, who witnessed his leading lady's panic attack and surfaced to comfort her. "She's pretty tough," he adds.
Filming much of the action in Berlin in winter helped Damon and the other actors get into their characters' isolated mood. "We didn't see the sun for quite some time, so I think that it was probably a subconscious aid throughout the shoot," recalls Damon. He would unwind after work each day by calling friends and family back home in Boston.
Potente says she never really saw her co-star relax. "He's focused, very, very serious and responsible," says the tattooed star of "Run Lola Run." "When we went to dinner after work, he would not stop talking about work. I was like, 'Stop for a second.' I wanted to shake him and say, 'At least for a half an hour, let's talk about something else.' But I liked his serious approach."
Damon acknowledges he was focused on his work while making "Supremacy" because his role was so physical and emotional. On the other hand, Steven Soderbergh's "Ocean's 12," the sequel to the 2001 hit "Ocean's 11," in which he co-stars with George Clooney, Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta-Jones, was much more relaxed. The all-star movie is slated for release later this year.
Damon has just returned from a year abroad shooting "Ocean's 12" along with Terry Gilliam's "The Brothers Grimm." Next he is slated to star in "Syriana," a thriller that will film in Morocco, Geneva and Washington, D.C. He's also set to star in Soderbergh's next drama, "The Informant."
Asked why he keeps so busy, Damon says he has the same insecurities as most actors. "Having struggled so long, it's kind of hard to turn down work," he says.
Born in Cambridge, Mass., Damon started acting as a teen doing commercials. He attended Harvard but dropped out in his junior year. He first came to the public's attention in 1996's "Courage Under Fire," playing a heroin addict. He subsequently landed a part in "The Rainmaker" and the title role in Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan."
Discouraged by the lack of suitable roles, he and his friend Affleck wrote and starred in "Good Will Hunting," a drama about a young math prodigy. The movie rocketed them both to stardom.
Damon went on to star in "Rounders," "The Talented Mr. Ripley," "The Legend of Bagger Vance" and "All the Pretty Horses." He most recently appeared in the Farrelly brothers comedy "Stuck on You," playing a conjoined twin with Greg Kinnear.
Busy schedules have kept Damon and Affleck from collaborating on another writing project since their 1997 hit drama, although they have been talking for years about adapting the Dennis Lehane novel "Gone Baby Gone."
While he loves acting, Damon finds his creative outlet in writing and cites "Good Will Hunting" as his most creatively fulfilling experience. "At the end of the day, a movie is the director's vision," he says. "On 'Good Will Hunting' we took an idea from the very beginning and shepherded it all the way through until it was a film."
