Behind the scenes of ''The Bourne Identity''

Image credit: The Bourne Identity Photograph by Daniel Smith

Adding to the tension was the threat of an actors' strike and Damon's commitment to a February start date for Ocean's Eleven. Gilroy, finished with Proof of Life, flew to the set to get the script back on track. The last-minute rewrites, says Potente, ''scared everyone for a moment.'' A pivotal 18-page scene at a farmhouse where Bourne faces down an assassin was in the movie, then out, and now back in. (Marshall and Liman decided to move the scene from Paris, where production cost $250,000 a day, to Prague, a relative bargain at $100,000 a day.) Meanwhile Liman was shooting action sequences with handheld rather than conventional dollying cameras, and expressing a certain lack of tact with the studio. Says a source close to the production, ''They gave $60 million...and they wanted to be part of the decisions -- hardly an unreasonable thing. But he was pretty flippant about the whole thing.''

''At the end of the day, the less money you have the easier it is to make a movie,'' Liman told EW in an earlier interview. ''The way I see it, the expensive people who get hired when you have money are the fancy people who tell you what you can't do.''

By the time production wrapped in February 2001, the filmmakers were fairly sure the third act — in which Bourne quietly resolved his situation — still wasn't working. Last summer, test audiences agreed. ''I had thought there was an opportunity to surprise audiences and not have a piece of action at the end,'' Liman says, ''and that it would be more original, but...well, it was more original. But audiences are never wrong.... I mean it!''

In January 2002, with an extra $8 million from the studio and yet another ending written by Gilroy, the cast and crew reassembled in Paris for a week of additional photography. ''If you analyze the film from a strictly film-school theoretical level,'' says Liman, ''it's where the movie should always have gone.''

If Liman adapted to the idea of studio filmmaking faster than he did to studio politics, the director now seems contrite about the latter. ''I think that I learned a studio system prefers a sort of professionalism from the director,'' he says slowly. But, he adds, ''People don't talk about how hard it is to make a movie. Nobody does. Ever. Movies aren't glamorous. When we were making ''Go,'' we're scouting locations in these alleys in downtown L.A. that are covered in human feces, and we're sitting there discussing, 'Do you steam it off? Do you wash it off?' And I'm thinking, 'This is the reality of making a movie.'''

Which may explain why, even after all the Sturm und Drang, Liman is flirting with the idea of directing a sequel. Damon, for one, would be on board. ''If Tony wrote the script and we got everybody together again, I would do it,'' says the actor. ''The stuff that goes against convention is why I wanted to do it in the first place. And why I'd do it again.''