CONTINGENCY PLANS MATT DAMON AND THE CREW OF 'THE BOURNE IDENTITY' DEVISED AN INTRICATE THRILLER ALMOST AS THEY WENT ALONG.

Byline: Glenn Whipp Staff Writer

There's a scene in Matt Damon's new spy thriller ``The Bourne Identity'' that gave him the chance to play an action hero in the spirit of Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger and John Wayne all rolled up into one. It's a tense moment, where a young woman is freaking out over the possibility that she and everyone else in a remote farmhouse is going to die at the hands of an assassin.

Damon, playing the voice of calm control, replies: ``That's not going to happen.'' Only he throws the line away, much to the dismay of director Doug Liman, who begged his star to deliver the words in tough-guy mode, i.e. ``That's not going to happen.'' Damon read the line that way once - off-camera - and then told Liman to forget it.

``He's like, 'No, no, no! Do it that way! Just once!' '' Damon remembers. ``And I said, 'There's no (bleeping) way I'm doing it like that. That would be terrible. I don't want to be an action hero. I don't want to have a catch phrase to call my own. That's not why I took this movie.''

The Damon Refusal

What horrified Damon is that he very nearly ended up making the kind of action movie that he has spent the last five years avoiding.

Ever since ``Good Will Hunting'' made him a star, Damon has received just as many action scripts as his longtime pal Ben Affleck. But while Affleck has had no qualms about playing the hero in everything from ``Pearl Harbor'' to the current ``The Sum of All Fears,'' Damon refused all offers, including (wisely, it turns out) one for last summer's ``The Planet of the Apes.''

``The Bourne Identity,'' a loose adaptation of the 1980 Robert Ludlum novel about a rogue CIA agent suffering from amnesia, began its life in script form two years ago as a sort of moody, restrained spy thriller in which the action actually seemed organic to the story. Think ``Three Days of the Condor'' with a chase scene straight out of ``The French Connection'' and you'll get the idea.

Damon met with Liman and, excited by screenwriter Tony Gilroy's emphasis on character over explosions, agreed to make the movie. Damon then spent the next few months learning all about boxing, martial arts and weapons. When he arrived in Paris to begin filming, he found, much to his surprise and dismay, that Gilroy's script had been completely rewritten.

``Bourne'' had been reborn - and its new identity angered its 31-year-old star.

``Now it hit all the points that you would hit in a standard action movie, with something blowing up every certain number of pages,'' Damon says. ``And I just freaked out and told Doug, 'This is not the movie I signed up for.' I mean, it was a solid action movie, but it wasn't the movie I had wanted to make. I was very frustrated. It was like a waking nightmare.''

The Liman Nightmare

Interestingly enough, Liman also frequently uses the word ``nightmare'' in describing the making of ``Bourne.'' What's remarkable is that, despite the bad vibes, the movie is far from a disaster. In most respects, the filmmakers achieved what they set out to do - make a smart, honest action movie with a stylish, Parisian backdrop and enough tension to satisfy Ludlum fans and action-movie aficionados.

How did ``Bourne'' go from nightmare to nimble? Liman gives the credit to executive producer Frank Marshall, a show-biz veteran who co-founded Amblin Entertainment with Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy. Marshall was brought in at the last minute just as production was about to begin. At this time, the movie still had two scripts - Gilroy's original and the rewrite by William Blake Herron. There was some overlap in the treatments, but also some radical differences, which made the logistics of the production a - well, let's use Liman's word again - ``nightmare.''

Says Damon: ``Paris isn't an easy place to secure shooting permits. So we were trying to get these locations, but it was like, 'Wait a minute. Is there a huge subway derailment that's going to happen with guys shooting rockets off of motorcycles or are we going out to a farmhouse in the country for the scene with the lone assassin? Which version are we going to shoot?' ''

Liman, whose two previous movies were the no-budget ``Swingers'' and the low-budget ``Go,'' admits he was to blame for much of the confusion.

``There were times where I made a decision to do a scene a certain way and looking back on it before I shot, I decided, 'You know, maybe we shouldn't do it that way,' '' Liman says. ``I made mistakes. But meanwhile, the locations had been booked. And with a big movie like this, nobody likes inertia. Everything has to be constantly moving forward. And people don't want to hear from the director that he has changed his mind.''

Adds Marshall: ``There were a lot of things that were new to Doug making a big movie, things that he had never done before. He had to make these gut decisions and sometimes you get there and have a chance to evaluate them, you think, 'Maybe I should have done this instead.' So in a couple of places, everyone had signed off on a scene and then when we did it, we realized that's not something that Bourne would really do. So we had to come up with something different.''

The Gilroy Adaptation

``Something different'' often meant going back to Gilroy's original version, the one everyone had liked in the first place. It also sometimes meant rewriting scenes on the fly, a process that actor Chris Cooper (the Marine dad in ``American Beauty''), who plays Bourne's superior, calls a ``terrible way to work.''

``Each day we were rewriting scenes on the spot,'' Cooper says. ``Often we were only being given these pages a couple of hours before we shot. It keeps you on your toes, but the frustration level can really make you mad because a lot of times you don't know where you're at.''

That frustration level reached a peak when it came time to shoot the ending, the one thing in Gilroy's original script that nobody liked in the first place. The rewrite was supposed to fix that, but, as Cooper notes, when it came time to film the action scene, ``we were still moving paragraphs around, shuffling pages, floundering around and trying to make it work.''

It didn't, and after gaining budget approval from Universal studio executives, the crew returned to Paris several months later for a second try. Having had time to think about the ending, Liman came up with a resolution that felt honest and not over-the-top.

``We had spent the whole movie trying to avoid being an action-film cartoon,'' Liman says. ``And we had kind of boxed ourselves in. So the trick was getting Bourne out of the jam, but have it be at least remotely believable.''

Despite all the heartaches, both Liman and Marshall say they would make another ``Bourne'' movie in a second. (Ludlum wrote two other ``Bourne'' novels.)

``We planted the seeds,'' Liman says. ``It would be fun to come back.''

Damon thinks so, too, but he's a little more guarded after what happened.

``I'm not contractually obligated to do another one,'' he says. ``If Tony wrote another great script, then, yeah, sure.'' He pauses, considering. ``But I think I'd keep a better eye on the script the next time around, though.''

CAPTION(S):

3 photos

Photo:

(1 -- 2 -- cover -- color) the reluctant action hero

Matt Damon latches on to a new genre with `The Bourne Identity'

(3) Matt Damon in ``The Bourne Identity''