I want Bourne in a body bag by sundown.

Luke, Westy and Matt tell the story behind Doug Liman’s 2002 thriller The Bourne Identity, the film that took a twenty-year-old airport paperback, threw away everything past page ten and rebuilt the spy movie from scratch. It had no business working. A studio permanently at war with its director, a script arriving by fax mid-shoot, and a leading man best known at that point for doing maths homework in a Boston accent.

We get into how Liman spent years chasing the rights, eventually getting his pilot’s licence and flying himself to Montana to the doorstep of Robert Ludlum. Then there’s Tony Gilroy, who read the novel, declared it unusable and kept only the premise. Matt Damon boxed for six months purely to change the way he walked, and did most of his own stunt work in a genre he’d never gone near. Franka Potente arrived off the back of Run Lola Run and took Marie somewhere the script had never intended.

Then there’s the production itself, which is where things get chaotic. Universal thought Liman was reckless and were probably right. He fed his ideas to Damon so the studio would hear them from someone they trusted. We cover the farmhouse showdown Universal never wanted, John Powell’s cold, metallic score built from a budget already spent on someone else’s, Oliver Wood draining every drop of glamour out of Zurich and Paris, and a release date that moved four times before landing on a $214 million hit. It’s the sort of behind-the-scenes story that makes All The Right Movies the movie podcast for anyone who wants the how and the why alongside the film analysis.

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