

Plus, Damon had a charm of his own, which prevented Bourne from seeming just like a blunt killing machine. It brought the usually heightened hero to the basics of human conditions. Damon played a character that was suffering from amnesia and deceivingly ordinary in his normality while seeking to repent from his dark past. The film made an impressive global $214 million gross from an initial $58 million budget, not to mention a critical success, as the film redefined the action hero. “It's very rare that a movie comes out a year late, has four rounds of reshoots, and it's good.” But it was. “ The word on Bourne was that it was supposed to be a turkey,” Damon recalls. Production was also delayed afterward because Universal demanded the ending to be reshot after receiving several negative test screening results.

Liman was reportedly a distracted director whose disorganized mind eventually meant reshoots that went over budget by around $8M. The script received endless rewrites, as Gilroy would fax new scenes from his office to the production in Paris.
