Filming ‘The Bourne Legacy’ in Manila began in the San Andres neighborhood, its ramshackle houses and dark alleyways typical of the city’s lower- and middle-class areas. The San Andres neighborhood has grown organically over the years as locals have kept constructing additions to existing buildings. The casual visitor will find many a residential area that resembles a rabbit-warren maze of alleyways that have been cobbled together.

With its tangled web of utility lines and drying laundry overhead, and pleasant cooking smells merging with other odors of the city, the labyrinthine San Andres neighborhood is where the main characters Aaron and Marta find a place to hide from their pursuers: this time, the Philippine authorities.

San Andres was also the setting for a stunt in which Aaron, to save Marta from capture after she is cornered by the police, makes a daring slide three stories down a narrow opening between two buildings. Because of very specific requirements, this set, a narrow three-story structure that the filmmakers called “the chasm,” had to be built by production designer Kevin Thompson and his team.

Explains the production designer: “We needed a stretch that was about 100 feet long, only 20 to 24 inches wide and three and one-half stories high for the drop. ‘The chasm’ was the highlight for the art department because it incorporated so many things. It had to aesthetically work for Tony [Gilroy, director]. It had to work for stunts to drop down. It had to work for the camera department to have the jib on, and the technocrane arm had to be able to fit inside. We had to manage all the dressing and the platforming around it. It was a complicated, multifaceted set to build.”

Using the wall of an existing building, Thompson’s team built another wall next to it. Rather than employing scenic artists to “weather” the wall, the crew bought old siding from locals’ homes and installed new walls on their houses in return. The designer recalls: “We would often say, ‘We’ll redo the siding on your house or corrugated rooftop if we can have your old materials.’ Some San Andres locals also received new roofs when the team prepared for the filming of a major chase sequence. Much to many neighbors’ delight, approximately 50 roofs that were found to have holes or were otherwise deemed unsafe were replaced by the ‘The Bourne Legacy’ crew.

The production’s metro Manila locales also included the Ninoy Aquino International Airport; the historic Intramuros district, known for its Spanish colonial architecture; the Manila Yacht Club; the Marikina covered market; and the Metropoint MRT train station in Pasay City. The crew also traveled approximately an hour by plane from Manila to El Nido, located on the stunning Philippine island of Palawan, for scenes that take place amidst the magnificent islands of the South China Sea. The dramatic islands, with their limestone cliffs that emerge directly from the water, are more often associated with the landscapes of Malaysia and Thailand.

In Palawan, Thompson also found a 100-foot-long wooden-hull fishing boat, the Sabrina, for a critical scene. The working fishing boat goes out for three months at a time and houses up to 20 people along with chickens, goats and pigs. Offers Thompson: “We power-washed the entire thing because it was unbelievably smelly. Then we took off all the dressing and dressed it from scratch while keeping much of the character that was there.” Despite their best efforts, the production ended up filming alongside some of the fishing boat’s original tenants: a sizeable rat population.

For several days the crew also filmed part of a chase at Navotas Fish Port, known as the fishing capital of the Philippines, situated north of the city on Manila Bay. In the evenings, the location is a working fish market—1,000 feet long and 200 feet wide—that sells more than 100,000 fish every night. Every morning during the shoot, the crew had to scrub, steam and dry the market. Thompson and his team removed hanging tarps, added skylights and supporting posts, and scrubbed the floor to lessen the overpowering fish smell. This also served a practical purpose: to make the location safe for the complex stunt work that was to be performed there.

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No ‘Bourne’ film would be complete without its fair share of action and still rings true even for the new installment ‘The Bourne Legacy’. Still, emphasizes producer Frank Marshall: “Our rules that we have been very consistent with through all the movies is that we don’t have action for action’s sake. We don’t have a formula where every 10 minutes there has to be a fight scene or an action scene. The action has to be driven by the story. That’s what makes this series unique: These characters get into situations that lead to an action scene or a chase scene, but it all has a story point.”

The architect behind the stunt work on ‘The Bourne Legacy’ is 2nd unit director Dan Bradley, who returns after making his mark as the creator of the dazzling action sequences in ‘The Bourne Supremacy’ and ‘The Bourne Ultimatum’. After the first unit wrapped its work in Palawan in the beginning of February 2012, Bradley’s unit filmed for another month in Manila, with actors Jeremy Renner and Rachel Weisz joining them there.

Renner is the first to admit that the stunt work wasn’t easy. He says: “This was very, very demanding. I was lucky enough because many of the fight coordinators, the stunt coordinators and Dan Bradley were on ‘The Avengers’ and the three movies I did back-to-back right before this movie. Working with them was seamless. I had learned hand-to-hand combat on ‘Avengers’, so I took that over to this and actually used patterns. I had a nice running start.”

“Having Dan Bradley involved in the ‘Bourne’ movies has been an enormous part of their success,” producer Patrick Crowley raves. “People love the locations, they love the characters, but they really love the action. Dan invented action for these movies that nobody had ever seen before, and action that people have imitated after it was done.”

Director Tony Gilroy is just as effusive in his praise: “Dan’s the Michelangelo of action. He’s an amazing guy, an imaginative nut who has found this incredible job for himself helping out directors like myself to make us look tougher than we really are. I made sure to get with him early on, and I told him, ‘Dan, if I’m going to do this, I need you there with me.’”

Of course, Bradley traveled to Manila months before shooting began in order to tailor the action sequences to the locations. “When we looked at the locations, he was with us, and then he said, ‘I’m going to stay behind for a week,’” Crowley recalls. “We waited for Dan to just sit and meditate and come up with great ideas. He’s come up with some things that have never been done before.”

Bradley’s biggest task was to choreograph a motorcycle chase that takes place on the crowded streets of Manila, much of it filmed with Renner in the rider’s seat. “When you’re doing something in which there’s somebody on a motorcycle and they’re not wearing a helmet, you have to have the principal actor do that,” says Crowley. “So we had Jeremy very much involved, and Rachel as well.”

Luckily for the production, Renner is an avid motorcyclist. “When I first met Jeremy, we were going to have some practice sessions, and he showed up on one of the fastest motorcycles in the world, which was one of 10 that he owned,” remembers Crowley. “We felt comfortable that we didn’t have to train him. He has the bones of an action hero. When I see him, I see that silent strength of Steve McQueen. When he gets on a motorcycle, then he becomes even more like him.”

Renner also put Weisz at ease as they worked with Bradley. “Being on the back of a bike with Jeremy, I felt completely safe,” she says. “He was doing wheelies, skids and slides—those kind of stunts that he’s very good at.”

The filmmakers were also impressed when Weisz displayed a previously unseen side: that of an action star. “She’s a great actress and has shown all this incredible talent playing characters who are typically not action characters,” says Crowley. But Weisz insisted on as much rehearsal on the motorcycle as possible and performed much of the stunt work herself. Laughs the producer: “Your heart still goes into your throat when you see her going 45, 50 miles an hour on the motorcycle with Jeremy.”

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In ‘The Bourne Legacy’s opening sequence, Aaron Cross is dressed like a speed climber, posing as one of the few brave souls who might be found alone in the Alaskan wilderness. “He’s in a brilliant red-orange jacket because climbers going solo know that they may not make it and they’ve got to be visible in case a helicopter needs to find them,” explains costume designer Shay Cunliffe. “It’s the opposite of being undercover.”

However, after Cross arrives at the appointed spot, a log cabin where another agent known as #3 is based, his Alaskan mission is brought to a violent end, one which he barely survives. The tables suddenly turned, Cross is now the target of the most sophisticated technology and weaponry on Earth. He returns to the mainland U.S. to find the character Marta, one of his few contacts in the program who may not be out to kill him. Their journey of survival ultimately brings them to Southeast Asia, where the production would travel next.

Unleashed in Southeast Asia: Racing Across the Philippines

During preproduction, director Tony Gilroy and producer Patrick Crowley toured Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) in Vietnam, Jakarta in Indonesia, and Manila in the Philippines. Ultimately, Manila’s history as a shooting location won over the team. Major Hollywood features, such as ‘Apocalypse Now’, ‘Platoon’, ‘Born on the Fourth of July’ and ‘Brokedown Palace’, were shot in the Philippines in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. “They had a 25-, 30-year run of making movies there,” says Gilroy, “and they have this huge infrastructure that was built up from all the films made about Vietnam.”

The filmmakers called upon Lope V. Juban Jr., president of Philippine Film Studios, who has worked on most of the films that have come to the Philippines over the past few decades, to give them a tour of Manila. Not only could Juban—who came on as a line producer—offer locations that Gilroy was looking for, but his contacts with government entities would also be vital for a shoot that involved major stunts on city streets. “Juban said, ‘We can talk to the president about that,’ or ‘We can talk to the minister of transportation and the police department about that.’ They’re all people that he knew,” Crowley explains. “I couldn’t have gotten that in Jakarta or in Ho Chi Minh City.”

In fact, ‘The Bourne Legacy’ would be the first Hollywood film in which Manila plays Manila. “The Philippines has played almost any country—Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Panama,” says Juban. “It is only now that we are filming Manila as Manila, which is great for us.”

It was important to the locals to show off the progress the country had made and their big new areas of development. The Philippines also offered the advantage of a mainly English-speaking local crew. English, the legacy of the American presence for 50 years before World War II, is widely spoken in the country.

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After 12 weeks of filming in the New York area, the production of the upcoming action sequel ‘The Bourne Legacy’ decamped and left the city for an environment where the Bourne series had never before ventured: the untamed wilderness. For two weeks in December 2011, the cast and crew filmed in Kananaskis Country, a system of parks renowned for its spectacular scenery, in the Canadian Rocky Mountains west of Calgary. The dramatic Canadian landscape filled in for the Alaskan Yukon, where Cross finds himself as the story begins.

“We did a lot of scouting by helicopter,” recalls production designer Kevin Thompson, whose locations included remote mountaintops, a frozen lake and a riverbank beside which his crew could build a log cabin, a heavily wooded area and a waterfall. “We looked all over Canada and found most everything within a 30-minute radius of Kananaskis.”

One element of the Canadian shoot remained a wild card: snow. “Our location manager, who’s done a million movies there, said, ‘I can’t guarantee you that there’s going to be any snow,’” producer Patrick Crowley recalls. “So we had snow machines standing by, and we were ready to make our own.” But the Bourne crew enjoyed some luck: Plenty of snow arrived just in time for the shoot. “The day after we left, there was a warm wind called a Chinook that came through and melted all the snow,” he adds. “We didn’t hear about it until about a month afterward…and I’m kind of glad we didn’t hear about it until then.”

‘The Bourne Legacy’ opens with an echo of the image that introduced Jason Bourne to filmgoers in ‘The Bourne Identity’: seen from below, a man floats motionless in water. However, unlike Bourne, who had been left to drown in the Mediterranean Sea in the first film, Aaron Cross is uninjured. After a brief moment of stillness, Cross reveals his incredible stamina: He has deliberately submerged himself in frigid waters in order to retrieve a canister left for him at the base of a freezing waterfall.

To shoot this scene, the filmmakers did everything they could to keep their lead actor, Jeremy Renner, safe in the cold water. “We were concerned from the very first time that we saw the location,” says Crowley. “Even for just going in to his waist, we had a helicopter bring a hot tub there. We had a dry room that was heated. We had an ambulance standing by, and we had three or four people on the set whose specialty was hypothermia.”

The initial plan was to shoot only part of the scene in Canada, with Renner in a full wet suit and in the cold water only up to his waist. However, just before rolling, Renner removed the wet suit’s top. “He said, ‘Are you guys really ready?’” remembers Crowley. “And we said ‘Yup,’ and he said, ‘Okay, let’s do it.’” As cameras rolled in below-freezing temperatures, a bare-chested Renner dunked himself into the icy water for a shot of Cross emerging. Fortunately, Gilroy and his DP got the shot in one take.

Renner was game for the challenge. He recalls: “Cold is cold. If it’s 39 or 29, it doesn’t matter.” He was more unnerved that there was no way to acclimate himself to the experience without simply going through it. “That’s why I was so stressed about it. How do you prepare? I can prepare for a jump or a stunt. I can work out or do whatever stretch. But with this, you just go get cold. That’s it. You have to mentally go there.” Turns out that the water’s bark was worse than its bite. “Actually it wasn’t so bad; it was so bad up to the moment.”

That scene in the frigid river was also of special concern to costume designer Shay Cunliffe, who returns to the Bourne series after having designed ‘The Bourne Ultimatum’. “Shooting in this kind of extremely cold climate becomes a double job for the costume department,” she says. “The costumers who took care of the actors on the set were responsible for their well-being, quite apart from the costume being maintained.”

In freezing temperatures throughout the entire Alberta shoot, Cunliffe’s team had its work cut out. “They were carrying huge dive coats along with them, and because of the snowy locations, the costumers were actually dragging them in on sleds—extra blankets, extra coats,” she shares.

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Director of photography on new ‘The Bourne Legacy’, Robert Elswit, and 2nd unit director Dan Bradley could shoot all the footage in the world, but if it wasn’t cut together correctly, there would be no scene. Joining the team as editor was another member of the Gilroy family, John Gilroy, the director’s fellow collaborator on his last two films. Notes John Gilroy of his working relationship with his brother Tony: “I work with Tony essentially the same way that I work with other directors.

I try to understand their vision of the film and get on that same wavelength. If I can make their vision my own, I have a real compass to navigate me through the editing process. With Tony, that sort of deep understanding between director and editor came very early on and has stayed with us and grown through all three films. We have very similar sensibilities, and most of the time we see eye to eye on things.”

Tony Gilroy, the director, returns: “John is a machine. It’s a complex movie, and we shot in a weird order. The pace is relentless, and we were shooting a great deal of film. The need to know exactly where you stand and what you owe is essential. But he’s not just cutting and reviewing material as we go; he’s building sequences and road testing scenes that are coming at us with a consistent level of detail that’s shocking sometimes. He’s a total filmmaker. I can’t imagine even trying this without him beside me.”

War Rooms and “Southern” Mansions: Filming in New York 

After two days of filming in Seoul, South Korea, principal photography began at Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens, New York, where all of the movie’s stage work—including D.C. interiors—was shot. Filming began with scenes involving the character of Byer and his team at the Virginia-based NRAG, the group that designed the government’s program of killer spies.

As Bourne’s exploits go public, Byer’s experts use every mode of technology available to minimize the damage. Here, Thompson’s crew built the crisis suite, the small amphitheater where Byer’s team holes up for days. Producer Patrick Crowley describes the film set as “like 25 people playing high-speed chess.”

At Kaufman, production designer Kevin Thompson built the lab where the character Marta engages in her pioneering work. The designer’s biggest set, however, was three stories high on Kaufman’s largest stage. Here, he created Marta’s home in the Maryland woods, which he didn’t initially plan to build. “We started by trying to find a real location that would either inspire us or lead us to what we were looking for,” Thompson recalls. “Tony wanted to have a house that was a bit of a fairy-tale fantasy: a larger-than-life decayed mini-mansion that Marta invested in when she was in a relationship, a place she hoped to someday restore.”

The kickoff to Marta and Aaron’s journey, the house is where the two realize that they must team up. “We found the magical house up in the Hudson Valley about two and a half hours north of New York City,” Thompson recounts. “It was built in 1815 and had a romantic, picturesque style. Although we looked at 150 houses, this one was by far the one that spoke most to us.”

Unfortunately, their prized location, the national historic landmark known as the Plumb-Bronson House in Hudson, New York, was in need of even more rehabilitation than Marta’s fictional home. “About six weeks from shooting, the owners association told us that it was going to be impossible to allow us to shoot there,” says Thompson. It turns out that the structure could not support the equipment and crew necessary for filming.

Thompson’s team quickly set about re-creating the interior of the house in precise matching detail. This included reimagining its parlors and vestibules, magnificent three-story elliptical staircase, peeling paint and faded wallpaper on the stage at Kaufman Astoria. While unanticipated, building Marta’s house on a stage did offer several advantages, including greater flexibility and control with lighting and camera placement for DP Elswit’s equipment. “Having the three floors on the stage provided some great sight lines for action,” says Thompson. “It was a pretty photogenic set.”

In the end, the production traveled to Hudson to film the exterior of the Plumb-Bronson House for a key scene with Aaron, but other scenes outside Marta’s home were filmed at William H. Pouch Scout Camp, a 143-acre site in Staten Island, New York. Unlike Plumb-Bronson’s surroundings in Hudson, the Staten Island location offered the thick woods that surround Marta’s home in Gilroy’s story.

Among the many other New York area locations where the film shot were JFK Airport, The New York Times printing plant in Flushing, Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan, and residential areas of Syosset and Old Westbury in Long Island.

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In November 2010, while writing the screenplay, Tony Gilroy journeyed around the world to visit the locations where his story for ‘The Bourne Legacy’ would be set, just as he did for the other Bourne films. From the Canadian Rockies to Southeast Asia, he tailored the action to the specific locales. He reflects: “The great ride for the past 12 years has been getting on a plane and taking these incredibly specific and unusual tours of places that no one else would ever see because you’re looking at them from a Bourne point of view.”

According to producer Patrick Crowley, who once again accompanied Gilroy on the tour, the series has been unique in the manner in which it showcases parts of the world rarely seen in cinema. He notes: “We were one of the very first big movies to shoot in Berlin, and there had only been a couple of contemporary Hollywood shows before us in Moscow.”

‘The Bourne Legacy’ would be no exception. Gilroy chose to broaden the story to a setting beyond Europe, where much of the previous three films had taken place. “Pat and I traveled all over Southeast Asia and scouted,” Gilroy continues. “And then I wrote into the specific, real locations. That’s how we’ve always done it. There isn’t an action sequence in any of these films that hasn’t been written into the place itself.”

As ‘The Bourne Legacy’ rockets from Washington, D.C. and Manhattan to Alaska and Southeast Asia, Gilroy retains the spirit of the previous Bourne films. “It wants to feel like the world we really live in,” the director says. “We go to exotic places, but we don’t glamorize them. It’s a realistic approach to action, and it will be familiar in all those ways.”

Producer Jeffrey M. Weiner appreciates the detail the writer/director gives to this story. He offers: “Some of the locations for this movie are not places people go to every day. The fact that it is real and gritty and that we are close and in-your-face gives a perspective that you don’t find in the guidebooks.”

Helping Gilroy to construct this world were key contributors to the film’s visual style: production designer Kevin Thompson, who crafted ‘Michael Clayton’ and ‘Duplicity’ with Gilroy, and cinematographer Robert Elswit, the Academy Award-winning DP for ‘There Will Be Blood’ whose previous work also includes ‘Michael Clayton’ and ‘Duplicity’, as well as ‘The Town’ and ‘Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol’, both with Jeremy Renner.

Discussing Thompson, Gilroy commends: “Kevin’s built up a very, very strong body of work, and we formed an essential collaboration over the course of Clayton and Duplicity, but I think Legacy is going to show a lot of people that there’s nothing he can’t tackle. Legacy was a huge design project that went from big-time stage work through location building and then into Manila and all of its challenges—all of that with the mandate of staying absolutely photo-real at all times. It was the highest degree of difficulty, and he crushed it.”

The director was just as pleased to join Elswit for another project. Gilroy says: “Working with Robert on these three films has been about the best collaboration I can imagine. He’s the remarkable combination of deep experience, imaginative freedom and sled-dog endurance. We’d been through the shit together so many times before this film started, and thank God, because I can’t imagine trying to do something this long and large with someone who wasn’t at your side in every way.”

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As Aaron and Marta prove elusive in the new installment of ‘The Bourne Legacy’, news of a government subcommittee investigating Blackbriar adds to the tense atmosphere in the crisis suite where Byer and his staff are holed up. Likely most disturbed by the program becoming public is Terry Ward, the head of a company with intimate ties to Outcome.

Ward is played by New York theater actor Dennis Boutsikaris, the Obie Award winner for Sight Unseen. Boutsikaris describes Ward’s relationship with Byer as contentious, with Ward ultimately outgunned. “Ward wants to think that he’s Byer’s superior, and he clearly is not,” the actor shares. “Ward wants to be a leader without any leadership qualities.”

At Tony Gilroy’s suggestion, Boutsikaris had his hair cut and trademark beard shaved in order to play the corporate suit. “We talked on the phone, and Tony told me that the hair and everything had to go,” Boutsikaris remembers. “The whole feeling was how slick he wanted to make my character.”

As tension escalates in the war room, Ward also clashes with the imposing ret. Adm. Turso. The military commander who oversees Outcome is played by veteran actor Stacy Keach, who describes his character as “a patriot and a man whose authority is there.” Turso speaks to his team in an intricate language that is quite specific to the work. Reflects Keach: “Tony is an extraordinary talent because he creates his own language. The ‘Bourne’ franchise has one of its own. It’s intelligent, human and very personal. The trick with this kind of dialogue is to make it conversational and just sort of throw it away without making it too melodramatic.”

Keach acknowledges that the scenes with Turso, Byer and the NRAG team were especially engaging. “The great thing about this franchise is the amazing balance between action, adventure, intrigue and suspense,” he says. “You have two very different environments: the outside environment where you follow Cross and his exploits over the world, and then you have the crisis room or the surveillance environment. As an audience member, that combination keeps you on the edge of your seat because you are seeing something at the same time the people in the movie are watching it.”

Rounding out the cast members who are new to the ‘Bourne’ franchise are Oscar Isaac and Louis Ozawa Changchien. Isaac describes Outcome #3’s early interactions with Aaron Cross as “like a Western.” He shares: “My character has been living in a cabin for a month by himself with zero communication with the outside world…other than the occasional drop by of one of these guys.” When Cross arrives at #3’s remote base several days early, #3 is suspicious; similarly, Cross doesn’t trust his counterpart. “They’re like these dogs that are circling and sniffing each other,” suggests Isaac. They’re not necessarily posturing so much as they are uncertain. It’s dangerous.”

It turns out that #3 isn’t the only one that Cross (aka #5) should be concerned about. Byer hedged his bets that Outcome would not be the endgame. He has another program in motion, and it is known as LARX.

Changchien, who, in the role of LARX #3, an operative based in Bangkok, had to be comfortable with speed and with great heights. “I think of LARX as the decathlete of spies,” laughs Changchien, a theater actor who recently starred in Predators. In order to prepare for the role, Changchien traveled from his native New York to L.A., where he rehearsed with 2nd unit director Dan Bradley’s team for several weeks.

In this boot camp, Changchien learned the fundamentals of parkour—how to move around obstacles with speed and efficiency—practiced jumps from great heights and completed an intensive course in stunt driving. That would come in handy as his character chases Marta and Aaron through the narrow, crowded streets of Manila.

Fans will also be treated to cameos from several characters from earlier Bourne films, including series favorites Albert Finney as Dr. Albert Hirsch, Joan Allen as Pam Landy, David Strathairn as Noah Vosen and Scott Glenn as Ezra Kramer.

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The narrative architect behind the ‘Bourne’ film series, Tony Gilroy, takes the helm in the next chapter of the hugely popular espionage franchise that has earned almost $1 billion at the global box office: ‘The Bourne Legacy’. Building on the foundation of the Bourne universe created by Robert Ludlum, the writer/director expands the saga with an original story that reveals a larger conspiracy.

Twelve years ago, audiences were introduced to Jason Bourne when he was pulled unconscious from the Mediterranean. Over the course of three films, they followed his journey to survive and discover his identity. They watched his CIA handlers mount an increasingly desperate worldwide manhunt.

They learned about the Treadstone program and Bourne’s special skills and abilities, and at the trilogy’s conclusion, they may have even felt the story was complete. ‘The Bourne Legacy’ pulls back the curtain to expose a darker layer of intrigue, a deeper mythology, and a new hero who must battle to stay alive when his program suddenly becomes a liability.

‘The Bourne Legacy’ is exactly that—the legacy— the aftermath—of what’s come before. Bourne’s public exposure at the end of ‘The Bourne Ultimatum’ sparks a bonfire that threatens to burn down decades of research and development into the building of better spies and warriors. Audiences will discover that there are actually a variety of intelligence programs, that the CIA’s Treadstone was but one of the early developments and that Bourne’s actions are creating a tremendous anxiety that other programs may be exposed.

Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner of ‘The Hurt Locker’, ‘The Town’, ‘The Avengers’, ‘Mission: Impossible— Ghost Protocol’) is one of six agents in a program called Outcome. Unlike the CIA’s Treadstone, Outcome agents have been developed and trained for use by the Department of Defense. More than assassins, Outcome agents are designed for use in isolated, high-risk, long-term intelligence assignments.

The behavioral science that was suggested as the underpinning of the Treadstone agents has been upgraded and advanced, but it’s the shared origins of these two programs that makes Outcome so vulnerable as Bourne’s story becomes public knowledge.

Edward Norton (‘The Illusionist’, ‘The Incredible Hulk’) plays ret. Colonel Eric Byer, the director of a black-line agency, NRAG (National Research Assay Group), at the heart of the Bourne universe. Byer is the man who’s built these programs, fought to keep them funded and shopped them to a variety of eager U.S. intelligence services in the vast, post-9/11 espionocracy. Pulling back the curtain, we realize he’s been there all the while, watching as the three previous films have played out.

It’s Byer’s world that’s being threatened as the CIA fails to contain Bourne and, with the realization that Treadstone’s fall will expose the close working relationship between two of his chief medical directors, Byer has no choice but to sacrifice Outcome. That means eliminating everyone involved, including the science and medical researchers who helped to create it. He must now bring to bear every resource possible and erase the infected program to preserve the rest of his work.

‘The Bourne Legacy’ is premiering in New York City on July 30, 2012.

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To play the role of ret. Col. Ric Byer, the ruthless head of NRAG—the organization in the new behind the secret program of agents that began with Treadstone, evolved into Blackbriar, and now operates Outcome, among several others—the filmmakers of ‘The Bourne Legacy’ cast Oscar nominee Edward Norton. When Outcome is in danger of being exposed to public scrutiny, Byer cuts his losses by deciding to shut it down and move on.

Executive producer Jennifer Fox explains how the Byer character illustrates Gilroy’s nuanced approach to characterization: “Tony explores how individuals within organizations give themselves license to behave in unscrupulous ways: Tilda Swinton in ‘Michael Clayton’, both Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti in ‘Duplicity’, and now Edward Norton and his team in ‘Legacy’. They’re powerful antagonists because they hold their conviction and rationale about the greater good they believe to be serving. The familiar movie trope of the individual against the machine is made much more complicated, messy and real because he dramatizes the reality behind individual motivations.”

Tony Gilroy expands upon why the selection of this antagonist was so important: “We were casting the mastermind of the entire franchise. We knew we’d be saying to the audience that this is the guy that’s been sitting beside you in the theater for the last 12 years watching the CIA screw everything up for him. We needed a world-class actor; we needed weight. We needed someone with the kind of intelligence that’s in the room before the scene starts, and above all I needed an actor I could collaborate with to make sure that Ric Byer’s worldview wasn’t painted entirely black. He believes he’s one of the very few people who can bear the moral weight of the darkness necessary to keep his country safe.”

Norton describes his interest in joining a film with a story rooted inside the chambers of government-funded intelligence: “I see a theme running through all of Tony’s films that I think is timely and smart. He’s been digging into the way that corporations have permeated our culture and threaten to compromise us from different angles. I liked that in this film he was exploring the way that power is exercised in the nexus between corporations and government…questioning who’s working for who.”

The performer appreciated that Gilroy colored his characters in moral gradations. Though Byer is hell-bent on erasing Outcome, his motives (in his mind) are sound ones. Shares Norton: “All of the characters in this film are painted in shades of gray. Tony hasn’t woven a web of heroes and villains. Everybody’s made certain compromises and certain rationalizations in and around what they do…my character certainly, but Rachel’s too and even Jeremy’s. He’s digging into how people have their best ideals and impulses co-opted by a system in many different ways. I like that kind of complexity.”

Producer Frank Marshall was impressed by Norton’s ability to straddle the line between a man of his country and a cold-blooded executioner who sees the emergence of Bourne as an infection that must be contained. The producer commends: “Edward kills it. He’s just a spectacular actor and is terrific at playing the ‘villain’ in the piece. But Byer is not simply a villain. He’s just the guy who’s after Aaron Cross. Though we’ve had several of these types along the way, Edward is a particularly tough one.”

To cast the roles of Byer’s staff—the scientists, intelligence and surveillance experts who hunt down Aaron and Marta from their hub in Washington, D.C.—Gilroy delved into the world of New York theater. “Tony’s a New York guy,” shares producer Patrick Crowley. “He knows both theater and New York film very well. It’s exciting to draw from that pool of people.”

Tony Award winner Donna Murphy (of Broadway’s Passion and The King and I), was cast as Byer’s dedicated second-in-command, Dita, the “nun” to Byer’s “priest.”

“She’s his wingman, or wingwoman,” Murphy explains. “She’s got a background with the CIA; she’s an extremely good scientist. The biggest part of her job is to be so tuned in on Byer that when he needs something, she’s three steps ahead.”

Image Courtesy of  cinemafestival / Shutterstock.com

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In keeping with Tony Gilroy’s previous screenplays for the Bourne series, the script for new ‘The Bourne Legacy’ diverges dramatically from the plotlines of Ludlum’s Cold War-era novels but retains the author’s themes of conspiracy and government programs run amok. According to producer Ben Smith, this film offered the chance to build upon what had been established by the series creator, who died in 2001.

“What’s special about Robert Ludlum’s work and about these movies is that they talk about the power of an individual,” says Smith. “In these times of massive corporations and governments and multinational interests, the films make us feel that we can make a difference.”

Fellow producer Jeffrey Weiner shares Smith’s belief that Gilroy was the right filmmaker to take the mantle. He says, “We were thrilled that Tony not only wanted to write ‘The Bourne Legacy’, but also wanted to direct. He’s one of the few people who’s been with the entire series since the beginning. His understanding and feel for this world is invaluable in this process, and I think he’s given the people who will go to the movie exactly what they want out of a Bourne experience.”

Joining the team as executive producers are Henry Morrison and Jennifer Fox, Gilroy’s longtime production partner. Fox reflects on their working relationship and Gilroy’s sensibilities at blending action and suspense with piercing drama. She says, “When Tony Gilroy writes, he can see the film in his mind down to the smallest detail, and his ability to focus and capture that vision is a testament to his instincts and to his creative stamina.

Also, within Tony’s work there is always the essential desire for explanation of human drama. The depth of his complicated characters stem from that search for truth from character to character and scene to scene.”

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As the filmmakers of the Bourne franchise pondered the next chapter in the series, they faced a conundrum: At the end of ‘The Bourne Ultimatum’, the protagonist had been involved in a shootout in London’s Waterloo Station and then an even more high-profile car chase gunfight through the streets of New York City.

Jason Bourne had gone public in a big way. He was poised to expose the U.S. government for its litany of crimes when he vanished. Producer Frank Marshall explains the hurdle: “The challenge was ‘Where are we going to go now?’ Jason Bourne knew who he was, didn’t want to be in the same business anymore and wanted to go off on his own. We had to create a new set of circumstances for the story to go forward.”

Despite the hesitancy, Patrick Crowley, who, alongside Marshall, produced the three previous entries in the series, admits that it was the fans’ interest in additional stories that kept the franchise alive. “We touched a nerve with people who would come up to us and say, ‘I like those movies so much. I hope you’re going to be doing another one,’” offers Crowley. “If you’ve done three of them and then people want to see a fourth, you’ve done something right.”

In April 2010, several months after Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon opted not to participate in this chapter of the series, producers Jeffrey Weiner and Ben Smith met with the franchise’s narrative architect, Tony Gilroy, and asked him if he might spend some time thinking about how to move forward. Gilroy was intrigued and agreed to see if he could find an exciting way to continue this world that he had helped to create—one that had launched a new kind of spy thriller.

Several weeks later, Gilroy came back to the producers with a concept for how to approach the material. He notes: “The thing that separated Bourne most clearly from the action films of the moment was the depth and complexity of the character’s problem. The idea of an assassin ‘coming to’ with no recollection of his dark past and paying the price for recovering his memory by realizing that he’s not the person he wants to be was an incredibly compelling motor. In the hands of an actor like Matt Damon, there was no limit on how honest and detailed those ideas could be expressed.

“It was fun to think of ways to stage the Legacy story, but until there was a new character with a new problem that felt as powerful there wasn’t going to be a script. When that last piece fell into place—when Aaron Cross came into focus—when the thing that he needed became as clear and soulful to me as what we’d gone after with Bourne, that’s when everyone decided it made sense to move forward.”

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Tony Gilroy, creative hand behind the storyline of the ‘Bourne’ movies, then began work on a treatment for the new project ‘The Bourne Legacy’ even as he outlined a blueprint for where the story might go after ‘Legacy’. He began an in-depth research process that would serve as the underpinning for both documents.

He looked most particularly at the secretive U.S. government agency known as DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) that is hard at work trying to figure out how to make better soldiers. DARPA and its intelligence counterpart, IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity), fund many research programs with the objective of enhancing the cognitive and physical performance of American soldiers and spies.

Gilroy notes: “There’s no drug testing in war. There’s a very real appetite to have soldiers with increased energy, higher pain thresholds and less need for sleep. The warrior who heals, learns and processes information faster is the dream of every commanding officer. We’re in a place now where the science has begun to make real that dream in a very unpredictable and terrifying way.”

Just as in ‘The Bourne Legacy’, DARPA and its counterparts are working closely with the pharmaceutical industry, medical researchers, Silicon Valley and others to find ways to make humans into better warriors. Gilroy found that there was a burgeoning post-9/11 marriage of biology and warfare: a top-secret America that has proliferated, funded by the U.S. government and staffed by scientists often working for large corporations. It has, in fact, become so large that it is impossible to fully oversee by any one branch of the U.S. government.

Offers the director: “This was an odd story to research because I was doing more confirmation than prospecting. I kept finding that my imaginative ideas for Outcome and Candent and NRAG were already there and in play. Every hint that we’d laid along the way in the trilogy about Treadstone and its science-medical background fit perfectly into the existing reality. Then it was just a matter of asking what would happen if everything went wrong.”

After finishing the treatment for ‘The Bourne Legacy’, Gilroy decided he would be interested in making this his next directorial effort. Although he began his career as a screenwriter, Gilroy has become an accomplished director with two features to his credit: 2007’s Best Motion Picture nominee ‘Michael Clayton’, starring George Clooney, for which Gilroy received Oscar nominations for both directing and writing, and ‘Duplicity’, the 2009 romantic caper starring Julia Roberts and Clive Owen.

The producers and the studio agreed immediately and were enthusiastic about this turn of events. Says Frank Marshall: “One of the best things about the movie was getting to work with Tony as a director. I’ve been involved with him on the other three movies as the writer, but way back on ‘The Bourne Identity’, I knew that someday he was going to direct. He was in the cutting room and making the kind of suggestions and solving the kind of problems in the way that a director would think about them. So, it’s not a surprise that he’s directing this film but it didn’t start out that way.”

To collaborate on the screenplay, Gilroy called upon his brother, fellow screenwriter Dan Gilroy, for their first professional teaming in many years and they began work. Notes Dan Gilroy of the collaboration: “Tony and I actually co-wrote several unproduced screenplays when we were first starting. It was an easy fit then and pretty effortless now.

Our process is outlining the story together and then leapfrogging scenes or sequences. When we’re working, it’s seven days a week—long hours. I’m in L.A, and he’s in New York, but these days distance doesn’t matter. There’s no ego involved. Whatever works gets used, and there were no disagreements or arguments. It was a blast. We were both on the same page and committed to tuning every element to the highest possible degree.”

The two writers expanded upon the research that Tony Gilroy had done for the treatment, while also developing the intense drama of the story. Continues Dan Gilroy: “We hope ‘Legacy’ lives up to its title by expanding the mythology in smart, imaginative and absolutely realistic directions. All technology referenced in the film is either in development or in use by the U.S. intel community.

The hardest part of the job was creating a character with a need that makes the film personal, and Tony had the core of that before I came on. Aaron Cross has a primal need that creates constant intimacy with the audience. The emotional journey is always in the foreground, which for me is the hallmark of all great action movies.”

Marshall was thrilled with the resulting script. He commends: “The genius idea was Tony and Dan’s: Expand the world that Bourne lived in and see what else was out there and who is controlling whom. This way, we could build upon the world the audience had discovered via Jason Bourne and then have an opportunity to see new characters and the bigger picture.”

Patrick Crowley agrees that the writer/director and his brother nailed it. The producer marvels at their crafting of a language specific to this series and how they connected everything in this world: “Tony’s obsessed with the intelligence community. He lives and breathes it, asking, ‘How would these people think, how would they act, and what are the relationships that you would have in the intelligence community?’ It thrilled me that we have a writer who is the soul of the whole series—who shows that he is an amazing director with two well received movies—come on board to direct this one.”

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Unlike Jason Bourne, the new agent-on-the-run in the new installment of the Bourne series, Aaron Cross, is well aware of who he is and where he came from: a soldier wounded in the Middle East several years ago. Once he escapes from the Yukon, Cross journeys back to the U.S. in order to find one of his few contacts in Outcome, and the only person who can help him stay alive, Dr. Marta Shearing.

Says Patrick Crowley about an issue that has perplexed the team since the beginning of the first film: “One of the biggest challenges we’ve had is how to deal with a leading lady in the movie. With the pace and intensity of the films, it’s difficult to take the time to properly develop a relationship, plus getting hooked up with Jason Bourne is usually the kiss of death. Because we have a fresh start, we can introduce a woman into the story without it feeling contrived.”

The role of Marta required not only a talented actress, but also one who would be willing to take on the special demands that the part required. Explains Gilroy: “Marta is an accomplished research scientist with some real emotional chaos in her private life. She’s been ignoring some pretty heavy moral contradictions in her work for Outcome, and when things explode she’s launched into about as hardcore an odyssey as any character I’ve ever written. And by the end of the film she’s not just surviving, she’s kicking ass. It’s a demanding role.”

Much to the filmmakers’ delight, Academy Award winner Rachel Weisz, known for her powerful performances in such films as ‘The Constant Gardener’, ‘The Lovely Bones’ and ‘The Whistleblower’, was eager for the challenges that lie ahead and the results were more than they had hoped for. Gilroy recalls: “The bar for credibility is very high in this franchise, and she gave us more than we ever dreamed of. I knew how good she was, but I was still astonished by what she brought to the film. She pretty much surpassed my expectations every day.”

Marta is a workaholic, utterly devoted to her groundbreaking research as a biochemist at a top-secret lab in Maryland. Reflects Weisz: “She’s at the cutting edge of science, and she thinks she’s contributing to her country. But at the same time, she does secretly know that what she’s doing has great moral ambiguity to it.” Marta’s choice to ignore the potential consequences of her trials on patients intrigued the actress. “I would be less interested in her if she were just doing something good and saving the world. What she’s doing is a little dubious.”

Marta’s mundane life is turned upside down and she becomes a target when Outcome is rapidly shut down and she is perceived as simply residual cleanup. Aaron—a man whom she has examined multiple times in four years but doesn’t know well—appears in time to save her, and the two quickly form a relationship out of necessity. “Marta is hesitant to go with him, but she doesn’t have any other alternative,” Weisz explains. “The people who represent law and order in her country just tried to kill her. She is a regular woman who happens to be good at science, but not good at evading the police authorities of the globe.”

Weisz was intrigued by the backstories that the Gilroys had created for these two characters. “They’re incredibly driven in very different ways,” adds Weisz. “Marta and Aaron come from completely different backgrounds, and they end up relying on one another for different reasons. That’s a really fascinating way to create a story.”

While filming in New York and in Southeast Asia, Weisz discovered that she and Renner had similar approaches to their work. “We’re very different people, and we come from different backgrounds but we have a similar way of working,” the actress observes. “Jeremy’s very free and loose and pretty wild, and wonderful to work with. I’ve loved every minute opposite him.” Weisz also sees a bit of a rebel in her director: “Tony has a very rock ’n’ roll spirit, which is ‘Let’s find chaos and abandon, and let’s go,’ which is great for acting. He’s an unusual combination in a writer/director, and I’m happy to be in his band.”

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Academy Award-winning actress Rachel Weisz (‘The Constant Gardener’, ‘The Mummy’) stars alongside Jeremy Renner in the new film ‘The Bourne Legacy’ as Dr. Marta Shearing, a research scientist with top-security clearance and a high-paying job in the Maryland laboratory of corporate pharma-giant Candent. It’s the groundbreaking science developed in her lab that’s responsible for Outcome, a division similar to Treadstone, and her job includes monitoring the Outcome agents on the rare occasion that they pass through the area.

She knows Aaron Cross (Renner) as she knows the rest of them: as a number, as a clinical subject, as a guinea-pig. She’s ignored the ethical conflict of her work, but when the entire program needs to be terminated and it’s her life in jeopardy, she’s forced to confront the morality of her choices as she fights to stay alive.

Colonel Byer (Edward Norton) has built his NRAG network at the Beltway nexus of the intelligence, military and corporate communities. Stacy Keach (‘W.’, ‘American History X’) plays ret. Admiral Mark Turso, Byer’s chief advisor and link to the Pentagon. Dennis Boutsikaris plays Terrence Ward, the CEO of The Candent Group, the big-pharma giant working beyond the cutting-edge of science and medical ethics under the banner of national security.

The appetite for enhanced warriors—a very real military/intel dream over the last 60 years—has finally met the moment where breakthroughs in biochemistry and genomics are making things possible. We learn very early in ‘The Bourne Legacy’ that Treadstone was but one of Byer’s early programs and, as the film progresses, we discover that even Outcome has been upgraded. But just as each of these programs carries the promise of more perfect agents, so do they each present their own unique bugs and flaws.

Aaron Cross’s physical enhancements will feel familiar to fans of Jason Bourne. His cognitive lift, however, makes for a more adaptive and provocative skillset. It also holds a great danger: The Outcome agents have proven difficult to control, and Cross, once cut free of the leash, makes for an even more dangerous threat to his creators.

Oscar Isaac (‘Drive’, ‘Robin Hood’) plays Outcome #3, and in his handful of scenes in ‘The Bourne Legacy’, Isaac has a chance to explore with Renner these tensions with the clear, raw perspective of two men who’ve signed up for more than they bargained for.

With ‘The Bourne Ultimatum’ playing in the background of the first two reels, ‘The Bourne Legacy’ has the opportunity to follow through on the storylines left hanging in the previous films. The story invites several franchise veterans to reprise their roles from earlier ‘Bourne’ chapters.

They include five-time Academy Award nominee Albert Finney (‘Erin Brockovich’, ‘Big Fish’) as Dr. Albert Hirsch, the medical director behind Treadstone, and Joan Allen (‘The Notebook’, ‘Nixon’) as Pam Landy, the CIA’s internal investigator whose relationship with Bourne has erupted in ‘The Bourne Ultimatum’. David Strathairn (‘Good Night and Good Luck.’, ‘L.A. Confidential’) returns as Noah Vosen, head of the black-ops security program Blackbriar, and Scott Glenn (‘Training Day’, ‘The Silence of the Lambs’) appears as Ezra Kramer, the director of the CIA. They too will find their previous positions shattered as Cross defies the odds and refuses to be terminated.

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For director Tony Gilroy, finding the ideal performers to give life to the screenplay was the most crucial element in putting together ‘The Bourne Legacy’. “Everything else can be pushed and fixed or wrangled in some way,” he says. “Acting is magic. I learned that a long time ago.”

To play the part of Aaron Cross, the filmmakers turned to Oscar nominee Jeremy Renner, a performer as comfortable with drama as he is with action. “The reason Jeremy’s such an amazing actor is that he is a complicated guy,” underscores Gilroy. “He’s sweet and he’s hard, and he lets himself draw on all of that, all the time.”

The director says that he’s a longtime admirer of Renner’s work: “I must’ve watched ‘The Hurt Locker’ 18 times. In every scene, he is molecularly involved with the physical aspect of what’s happening at the moment. This integrity that he has, this feet-on-the-ground awareness and this surprising, explosive intelligence, made Jeremy the perfect cousin for Bourne.”

Any concerns that the filmmakers might have had about Renner’s ability to transform into an action star were instantly assuaged. In fact, the director calls his leading man a “movie athlete.” Gilroy says: “Jeremy came to us at a really high learning curve. When they took him out to the track the first time, the reports were: ‘Oh my God. Wow. He can do this and this…and this…and this. We don’t have to double this!’ Jeremy’s so good that he actually was at the level where the insurance company got nervous.”

“Jeremy is an actor of such intensity and intelligence,” adds Smith. “We’ve seen in his performances that he comes out of the screen, grabs you by the throat and takes you on an incredible journey.”

After his Academy Award-nominated roles in both ‘The Hurt Locker’ and ‘The Town’, Renner went on to make his mark as an action hero in the blockbuster ‘Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol’ and this summer’s global juggernaut ‘The Avengers’. He says that he was a fan of the Bourne series and of one man’s performance in particular: “What Matt Damon did, and what the previous directors have done, was great.

For those who love the franchise, I’m not replacing Matt, nor would I want to. It would never have been interesting if I was taking over and playing the same character. Matt is always the face of Jason Bourne and always should be. I liked this script because it was a very interesting way of continuing the story while honoring what came before.”

The performer elaborates on Gilroy’s underlying premise that, although Cross travels in a world that is parallel to Bourne’s, Cross is not aware of Bourne. Renner reflects: “They don’t know each other, so this has a whole new spin on why these supersoldier spies are the way they are now. I hope I can bring a fresh perspective to it.”

Renner goes on to share that ‘The Bourne Legacy’ retains the realistic tone of the earlier films. “It doesn’t veer into the CGI world or massive explosions,” he says. “It stays authentic. It was important for me to want to find humanity within this character.” He found his filmmakers were just as interested in these concepts. “What matters is that there is believability in everything we do in the film. No matter what the stunt is or the setup, it’s all based in reality, truth and the potential of science. As an actor, that’s easy to grab onto.”

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