Matt Damon is currently experiencing a wave of critical appreciation and renewed fan love for his role as Sonny Vaccaro in Air. However, the action star of Hollywood is best known for his Bourne films that grossed upwards of $1.6 billion altogether.
However, the actor didn’t always have a great time filming those movies. In fact, Damon wasn’t pleased with the last film in the trilogy because he thought that the script was poor and blamed the acclaimed writer in a series of eyebrow-raising statements.
Matt Damon Criticized Star Wars Writer For Poor Script
Actor Matt Damon has played multiple characters in his long Hollywood career. But he got to finally embrace the action genre in the Bourne films. However, the star had an unpleasant experience filming 2007’s The Bourne Ultimatum because he hated the screenplay by Tony Gilroy. In a GQ interview, Damon didn’t mince his words and expressed that Gilroy’s writing was embarrassing. He implied that the writer had taken the job for the money and then left. The Jason Bourne actor said,
“It’s really the studio’s fault for putting themselves in that position. I don’t blame Tony for taking a boatload of money and handing in what he handed in. It’s just that it was unreadable. This is a career-ender. I mean, I could put this thing up on eBay and it would be game over for that dude. It’s terrible. It’s really embarrassing. He was having a go, basically, and he took his money and left.”
Tony Gilroy wrote the screenplays for the first three Bourne movies- The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, and The Bourne Ultimatum. He then went on to write as well as direct the fourth film in the franchise, The Bourne Legacy, for which Damon didn’t reprise his role.
Later on, he wrote and directed Michael Clayton in 2007 which garnered him an Academy Award nomination for screenplay. In 2016, he co-wrote the Star Wars prequel film Rogue One and then served as showrunner for the critically acclaimed Disney+ series, Andor.
Matt Damon Had An Unpleasant Experience Filming The Bourne Ultimatum
Production issues on The Bourne Ultimatum were not limited to just a poor script turned in by Tony Gilroy. HuffPost reported that to correct the script issues, Tom Stoppard was initially brought in to pen a new screenplay. However, even that was trashed and writers George Nolfi and Scott Z. Burns were told to start anew. Matt Damon said during a press event for the film that it was chaotic to film the project.
As reported by Latino Review:
“We were lucky enough to have George Nolfi on set with us every day. So George kept out ahead of us. He would literally be in his hotel room working on the pages for the next day while we were working on the pages he had given us for this day, and we were making our tweaks in the real location… You know, it’s not an advisable way to make a movie.”
However, the actor wasn’t completely harsh on Gilroy. In the GQ interview, he stated,
“If I didn’t respect him and appreciate his talent, then I really wouldn’t have cared. My feelings were hurt. That’s all.”
In the same interview, Damon expressed that he regretted airing out his grievances publically and said that it was stupid of him to do so. All of the drama happened more than a decade ago and both Damon and Gilroy have since moved on.
The Bourne films are available to stream on Netflix.
Source: GQ and Latino Review
