The Bourne Legacy (film) - Production

Production

Universal Pictures originally intended The Bourne Ultimatum to be the final film in the series, but development of another film was under way by October 2008. George Nolfi, who co-wrote The Bourne Ultimatum, was to write the script of a fourth film, not to be based on any of the novels by Robert Ludlum. Joshua Zetumer had been hired to write a parallel script—a draft which could be combined with another (Nolfi's, in this instance)—by August 2009 since Nolfi would be directing The Adjustment Bureau that September. Matt Damon stated in November 2009 that no script had been approved and that he hoped that a film would begin shooting in mid-2011. The next month, he said that he would not do another Bourne film without Paul Greengrass, who announced in late November that he had decided not to return as director. In January 2010, Damon said that there would "probably be a prequel of some kind with another actor and another director before we do another one just because I think we're probably another five years away from doing it."

However, it was reported in June 2010 that Tony Gilroy, who co-wrote each of the three previous Bourne films, would be writing a script with his brother and screenwriter Dan Gilroy for a fourth Bourne film to be released sometime in 2012. That October, Universal set the release date for The Bourne Legacy for August 10, 2012, Tony Gilroy was confirmed as the director of the film, and it was also announced that the Jason Bourne character would not be in The Bourne Legacy.

Gilroy said he did not get involved with the project "until the rules were that Matt was gone, Matt and Paul were gone, there was no Jason Bourne. That was the given when I had the first conversation about this. So it was very important to me, extremely important to me, that everything that had happened before be well preserved and be enhanced if possible by what we're doing now." He also said, "you could never replace Matt as Jason Bourne. This isn't James Bond. You can't do a prequel. You can't do any of those kinds of things, because there was never any cynicism attached to the franchise, and that was the one thing they had to hang on to."

Gilroy "never had any intention of ever coming back to this realm at all—much less write it, much less direct it. Then I started a really casual conversation about what we could do in a post-Jason Bourne setting. I was only supposed to come in for two weeks, but the character we came up with, Aaron Cross, was so compelling." After watching The Bourne Ultimatum again, Gilroy called his brother, screenwriter Dan Gilroy, and said, "'The only thing you could do is sort of pull back the curtain and say there's a much bigger conspiracy.' So we had to deal with what happened in Ultimatum as the starting point of this film. Ultimatum plays in the shadows of Legacy for the first 15 minutes—they overlap."

In speaking about the film's storyline, Gilroy drew a distinction between the fictional programs in the Bourne film series:

On a practical level, the Treadstone program was about assassination. They're basically assassins. They live in the world—you can see Clive Owen as a piano teacher, they have covers—but they're essentially assassins. There was nothing that would be described as espionage, basically a kill squad. The Outcome program that Aaron is part of, is one of them too... The conceit is that is the mastermind of this entire franchise. We're stepping back a little bit in time here, he's been a developer, he's been at the nexus of the corporate military and intelligence communities. There's a very large corporate element, pharmaceutical corporate element...

Although a large part of the film was set in and around Washington, D.C., the real D.C. appears only in aerial establishing shots. Most of the film was shot over 12 weeks at the Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens, New York, including all interior D.C. scenes. The old house in Hudson, New York used as Shearing's house was unable to accommodate the weight of equipment and crew, so it was used only for exterior shots, and all interior scenes were filmed on a Kaufman Astoria soundstage. The scenes set in the "SteriPacific" factory in Manila were actually filmed in the New York Times printing plant in Queens.

Several scenes were shot overseas, mostly in Manila and in the paradise bay of El Nido, Palawan in the Philippines. Several train scenes at Ogeum Station on Seoul Subway Line 3 and nearby areas in Seocho-daero 77-Gil (1308 Seocho 4-dong), Seocho-gu and Gangnam-gu, Seoul, South Korea were used in some scenes. The Kananaskis Country region of Alberta, Canada was used for the scenes set in Alaska.

Gilroy said that "there are three deleted scenes—we just mixed them and color corrected them but what I like about it is all three scenes happen in the movie. One of them's referred to and they're completely legitimate parts of our story, they absolutely happen in our film, we just didn't have time to show them to you so there's nothing off to the side. I think they'll be on the straight-up DVD."

The film portrays Cross and Shearing as traveling nonstop from New York JFK Airport to Manila on board an American Airlines Boeing 747-400. That particular 747 model was introduced in 1989; American Airlines has never flown one; American Airlines has never served Manila as a destination; no commercial airline has ever flown from JFK to Manila nonstop with passenger service; the distance between the two cities exceeds the maximum range of any model 747. In spite of this incorrectness, American Airlines was actively involved in the production of the film in cooperation with NBCUniversal, and contributed its own airline employees and a Boeing 777-200 for the interior terminal and cabin shots at Terminal 8 of JFK International Airport. The airline also heavily co-marketed the film throughout post-production.