Bourne Again: Berger Sent the Pages
Matt Damon said the words out loud, which means we're past the rumour phase.
Bourne Again: Berger Sent the Pages
Matt Damon said the words out loud, which means we're past the rumour phase. Edward Berger — the man who turned *All Quiet on the Western Front* into an Oscar machine and then quietly became one of the most interesting directors working — sent Damon the first act of a new Jason Bourne script, and Damon's exact words on the Dan Patrick Show were "it's really good." That's not a polite deflection. Matt Damon has spent fifteen years saying polite deflections about Bourne. This is different.
Here's what makes it interesting: Berger is not a franchise director. He is a filmmaker who happens to have made a war epic that won four Oscars, and now apparently wants to resurrect a twenty-year-old spy property. Which sounds like a mismatch until you remember that *All Quiet* is essentially a Jason Bourne film — a man running from an institution that created him, trying to survive a system that would prefer him dead. Berger already made that film. He just set it in 1918.
Meanwhile, Adam Wingard has confirmed at Comic-Con that *Onslaught*, his upcoming A24 film with Adria Arjona, Rebecca Hall, and Drew Starkey, exists in the same universe as *The Guest*. "A spiritual sequel," he called it. The Guest from 2014 is one of those films that lived on word of mouth for years after its moment passed — the kind of thing people find on a Sunday night and then immediately text three friends about. A24 attaching itself to that energy is smart. Wingard knows his audience has been waiting.
And then there's Na Hong-jin, who took *Hope* — a film that rocked and polarised Cannes — and recut it into something that IndieWire is now calling an action-movie triumph. Two cuts of the same film, one for the festival jury and one for everyone else. The version that survives will be the one that connects with audiences at scale, which is usually not the version that won the conversation in the Palais. Na Hong-jin knows this. The re-edits, the sound work, the CGI adjustments — all of it in service of one question: what does the film need to be to reach the people it was made for?
The industry is also mourning Chuck Russell, director of *The Mask* and *A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors*, who died at 74. Two films that are genuinely part of the cultural architecture of the nineties. Jim Carrey became *that* Jim Carrey partly because of what Russell built around him.
The Bourne news, though. Sit with that one. Berger sent the pages. Damon said they were good. That's a film getting made.
