It shouldn't take as long for Matt Damon to lose his memory again as it did for Harrison Ford to pick the bullwhip back up. Frank Marshall, who produces both blockbuster franchises, confirms a fourth thriller about amnesiac spy Jason Bourne is in the works with Damon and director Paul Greengrass expected to return for more lightning-paced mayhem.
"We're hoping it takes a few years less than Indiana Jones did," Marshall tells Sun Media during a phone interview. "We're busily trying to put it together, but it all depends on the script."
One film buff Marshall knows is looking forward to more Bourne? His longtime friend and Indiana Jones director Steven Spielberg.
"Steven loves the Bourne movies."
After the screening, the film won applause, but the biggest surprise was not that it was smart, riveting and provocative, but that Matt Damon did a cameo as a missionary in Bolivia in “The Guerilla.” Matt, speaking in Spanish, asked Benicio Del Toro’s Che and his band of goons to leave the area.
It's not often that a politician's name appears in the credits of a movie cast, especially a state politician who isn't a national figurehead. But it helps if the politician is a former soldier who served in Fallujah, and a producer wants to make a movie about the early days of the war in Iraq.
State Rep. Allen Vaught, whose House District 107 encompasses parts of East Dallas and Lake Highlands, received a call in December 2006 from a producer working on a movie dubbed 'the Green Zone thriller" as its production title. The producer told Vaught he was working on a film about Fallujah, and had seen Vaught's campaign website, which highlights his time in Iraq.
"It was supposed to be a stand-in part with one or two sentences of dialogue, but once I got there, it turned into something a little but bigger," Vaught says.
"Everyone in Matt Damon’s Humvee with him had been actual soldiers in Iraq, and just seeing the kids having so much fun doing this, it was such a tribute to soldiers who were there, the hardships that were faced, and things accomplished by those soldiers," Vaught says.
On location in London, Vaught says he filmed a 10-minute scene with Damon, actor Brendan Gleeson and Paul Rieckhoff, executive director and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. The scene involved a briefing, and Vaught says both the actors and soldiers were instructed by Greengrass to make up their own dialogue "reflective of something that could have happened." In between takes, Vaught spent some time chatting with Damon.
"It turns out our kids were born the same day in '06, so we spent 20 minutes talking about our kids. When you’re talking to the best looking dude alive, or whatever award he got, you would think that’s not what you would be talking about. But he's the most down-to-earth guy I've ever met," Vaught says.
Papa landed his first major movie role, opposite Damon, in The Informant, a black comedy about a price-fixing scam.
And, he even gets the girl over the dude - Damon - voted sexiest on the planet. Okay, maybe not the latter. "But I do get to take him down at the beginning, before he takes me down at the end," Papa says. "And I get some great lines along the way, too."
Do we smell Oscar here? "It's not that huge a role," he cracks.
The first thing to remember is that Whitacre is the subject of this film, but it's not his story. Kurt Eichenwald wrote the book, and Steven Soderbergh is directing the film, with a screenplay by Scott Z. Burns. Their imprints will be seen in the film.
(Burns, by the way, was on set in Decatur, rewriting as the filming went along. Burns also wrote a scene to be filmed at the women's prison in north Decatur, a previously unplanned scene. And the screenplay is adapting to new Whitacre news - including, apparently, the Herald & Review's lengthy April 6 story - as the shooting continues.)
