Tony Gilroy was a co-writer for the original Bourne trilogy, and is now helming the spin-off The Bourne Legacy, set to come out next year. But, with We Bought A Zoo on it’s way to theaters, Matt Damon had a few choice words in his interview with GQ about the upcoming reboot, especially concerning Gilroy himself.
The piece eventually turned to The Bourne Legacy, which Damon says he discovered of by one day surfing the net. But, he said that he’s “really pulling for this one, even though I don’t have anything to do with it. Selfishly, it’s bad for me if that movie doesn’t do well.”
However, then Damon begins to talk about Gilroy. He even spoke that The Bourne Identity was almost so big a flop, the writer arbitrated against himself to not be the writer with sole credit” so that Gilroy would ” have another guy take the bullet with him.”
But, the biggest bit of the interview comes here:
Then, Damon says, for The Bourne Ultimatum, the third in the franchise, Gilroy struck a deal to write just one draft of the script, take no notes, do no rewrites, and get paid “an exorbitant amount of money.”
“It’s really the studio’s fault for putting themselves in that position,” Damon says. “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.”
Gilroy’s lackluster work left the production in chaos, Damon says. “We had a start date. Like, ‘It’s coming out August of next year.’ We’re like, ‘Hang on, we’ve got to figure out what the script is.’ ” In the end, the shooting script was written under extreme deadline pressure by George Nolfi and Scott Z. Burns, with input from Greengrass, Damon says. And then Gilroy raised another challenge. “Before the movie came out, he arbitrated to get sole credit,” Damon says, disgusted. The WGA looked into it and turned Gilroy down. (He shares credit with Nolfi and Burns.) “That was just a little bit of justice, I have to say,” Damon says.
Umm…ouch. It seems Damon holds a grudge against the writer-turned-director big time. So, I guess the off-screen disrespect may just means that Jason Bourne won’t be making any kind of cameo, despite fans’ hopes.
For the full inteview from GQ, which spans three pages, click here.
The Bourne Legacy releases everywhere on August 3rd, 2012.
