Filmmakers also did not shy away from bringing some of the same breathless action that made the first Bourne such a wild ride into this story continuation. Second unit director/stunt coordinator Dan Bradley was brought in to helm, among other things, the challenging cross-continental duel-to-the-death chase sequence between Bourne and Kirill.
“Dan Bradley, our second unit director, is also head of our incredible stunt team responsible for a lot of the great action,” says Matt Damon. The actor notes that the culmination of one chase sequence is his jumping off of Friedrichstrasse Bridge and adds, “The joke I always made was that when you’re young, your mother always said, ‘If soand- so told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?’ And you would say, ‘No.’ But Dan is actually the one person I would jump off a bridge for…and I did.”
In order to prepare the actors for the slate of Bourne action, Bradley organized an on-set training school outside of Berlin, where they could hone their driving and other key “action star” skills.
Keeping in tone with the filmmakers’ overall aim of verisimilitude (in everything from camera work to location choices), the action sequences needed to be organic to the extraordinary situations these ordinary people find themselves in.
“Dan’s stuff isn’t ‘stunty,’ it feels realistic,” comments Frank Marshall, particularly pointing to Bradley’s work in the car crash sequence featured in the film Adaptation. “You watch his stuff and you say, ‘Wow, that’s what it would really feel like if a truck hit your car from the side.’”
In addition to Bradley’s detail-oriented supervision, one of the keys to bringing such reality to the stunt work in Bourne was the utilization of the Go Mobile—a highspeed, low center of gravity, chassis replacement stunt driving camera platform fabricated by Go Stunts, Inc. The Go Mobile’s modular bay can accommodate everything from cars and trucks to airplanes and even horse buggies; the bay’s height, width and length are fully adjustable, providing a match in height to the actual vehicle(s) in motion—a distinct advantage over the older method of executing tracking shots or talent in a car chase scenario, where low speeds and the raised perspective provided by the process trailer created problems when cutting in high speed, actual stunt vehicle footage. The self-propelled Go Mobile is piloted by a stunt driver from a moveable cockpit, allowing a myriad of camera placement around the car/truck, filming the “driver” (actor) from countless angles. The footage shot captures the very realistic forces exerted on the actor inside a vehicle traveling at high speeds while executing quick turns, fast accelerations and sudden stops—the car appears to be driven in a breathless, reckless fashion, when in fact, it is always within the expert control of the externally mounted stunt driver.
“It really creates a visceral experience,” adds Marshall. So much so, in fact, that Damon claims he “blew the first two takes, because I was having such a blast that I was smiling and yelling the whole time.”
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