Trailer
Plot summary
Italian fishermen pull an American from the water with two gunshot wounds in his back. He speaks several languages but remembers nothing of his life. A small laser device implanted in his hip carries the number of a Zurich safe deposit box. There he finds cash, passports and identity cards under different names and takes the one that reads Jason Bourne. Treadstone, a CIA program, learns of the visit, and Bourne enters the American consulate, then pays Marie Kreutz, a German woman he saw at the consulate, to drive him to Paris.
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Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Bourne Identity (2002)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Matt Damon threatened to quit the role of Jason Bourne if rewrites by William Blake Herron were kept, backing director Doug Liman and screenwriter Tony Gilroy. Most of Herron's rewrites were dropped, though he still got a writer's credit because his opening scene stayed in.
- Before Matt Damon was cast as Jason Bourne, director Doug Liman approached Brad Pitt, who turned the part down to star in Spy Game, along with Russell Crowe, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Cruise and Sylvester Stallone.
- The Paris car chase was shot mainly by second unit director Alexander Witt around the city while Doug Liman filmed the main story elsewhere; the footage was cut together to fake one continuous route. Liman admitted anyone who really knows Paris would find it illogical.
- After the September 11 attacks, the studio and producer Frank Marshall cut a newly shot, explosion-heavy finale to the Paris story arc, deciding the film could not include an explosion. It had been reshot after poor test audience reactions.
- The 2003 DVD release took the record for highest DVD rentals from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, earning $22.7 million, and held it for seven months until The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers passed it.
- "Carlos the Jackal" was dropped as an antagonist from Robert Ludlum's novel in the film adaptation because the real terrorist had already been captured and imprisoned by the French government in 1994.
- The film's Treadstone program was inspired by director Doug Liman's father, Arthur L. Liman, who was chief counsel for the Senate's Iran-Contra investigation, and the villain Alexander Conklin was based on his recollections of Oliver North.
