Where to watch The Bourne Identity (2002)

Trivia & production notes

• Doug Liman fell in love with Robert Ludlum's novel in high school and began developing a film adaptation in 1996, but couldn't proceed because Warner Bros. still controlled the film rights.
• Brad Pitt, Russell Crowe, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Cruise, and Sylvester Stallone all turned down the role of Jason Bourne before Matt Damon was cast.
• Matt Damon trained for three months in stunt work, weapons handling, boxing, and the Filipino martial art eskrima, and performed a significant portion of the film's stunts himself.
• Franka Potente's casting as Marie resulted in the character being rewritten from a Canadian economist to a German drifter.
• Screenwriter Tony Gilroy initially rejected the project because he thought Ludlum's novels were poorly suited to film, but agreed to write the screenplay after Doug Liman convinced him to strip the story down to its core premise.
• The real-life capture and imprisonment of Carlos the Jackal by the French government in 1994 meant the character could not be used as an antagonist in the film, forcing significant rewrites to the plot.
• Concerns about the film's relevance following the September 11 attacks led producer Frank Marshall to reshoot an alternate ending, which was ultimately excluded from the theatrical release.
• Matt Damon and director Doug Liman demanded the abandonment of screenwriter William Blake Herron's rewritten script just before production began, despite extensive preparations already being made to film it.
• Liman insisted on shooting in Paris rather than the cheaper option of Montreal, which created a language barrier since the French-speaking crew could not understand the English-speaking cast and director.
• The acclaimed car chase sequence was primarily shot by a second unit directed by Alexander Witt, with locations around Paris edited together to create a coherent journey despite not actually connecting to each other.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article The Bourne Identity (2002 film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.