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Nov 20, 2017  The Bourne Identity is of the Bourne Trilogy. Not just this novel but the full series is so amazing that you are simply going to love it. About Author Robert Ludlum: The Bourne Identity is written by the very well known writer Robert Ludlum. This American writer is known for his thriller novels. Putlocker - watch Full HD 1080p The Bourne Identity (2002) on putlocker.to Based very loosely on Robert Ludlum's novel, the Bourne Identity is the story of a man whose wounded body is discovered by fi.

The Bourne Identity is a 2002 action thriller film based on Robert Ludlum's novel of the same name. It stars Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, a man suffering from extreme memory loss and attempting to discover his true identity amidst a clandestine conspiracy within the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The film also features Franka Potente, Chris Cooper, Clive Owen, Julia Stiles, Brian Cox, and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje. The first in the Jason Bourne film series, it was followed by The Bourne Supremacy (2004), The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), The Bourne Legacy (2012), and Jason Bourne (2016).

The film was co-produced and directed by Doug Liman and adapted for the screen by Tony Gilroy and William Blake Herron. Although Robert Ludlum died in 2001, he is credited as an executive producer alongside Frank Marshall. Universal Pictures released the film to theatres in the United States on June 14, 2002, and it received a positive critical and public reaction.

• 3Production
• 4Reception

Plot[edit]

In the Mediterranean Sea, Italian fishermen rescue an unconscious American floating adrift with two gunshot wounds in his back. They tend to his wounds, and when the man wakes, they find he suffers from dissociative amnesia. He has no memory of his own identity, but he retains his speech and finds himself capable of advanced combat skills and fluency in several languages. The skipper finds a tiny laser projector under the man's hip that, when activated, gives the number of a safe deposit box in Zürich. Upon landing in Imperia, Italy, the American goes to the bank in Switzerland to investigate the deposit box. He finds it contains a large sum of money in various currencies, numerous passports and identity cards with his picture on all of them, and a handgun. The man takes everything but the gun, and leaves, opting to use the name on the American passport, Jason Bourne.

After Bourne's departure, a bank employee contacts Operation Treadstone, a CIAblack ops program. Treadstone's head, Alexander Conklin, issues alerts to local police to capture Bourne and activates three agents to kill him: Castel, Manheim, and the Professor. Meanwhile, CIA Deputy Director Ward Abbott contacts Conklin about a failed assassination attempt against exiled African dictator Nykwana Wombosi. Conklin promises Abbott that he will deal with the Treadstone agent who failed.

Bourne tries to evade the Swiss police by using his U.S. passport to enter the American consulate, but he is caught by guards. He evades capture, and escapes the consulate, offering a German woman, Marie Kreutz, $20,000 to drive him to an address in Paris listed on his French driving license. At the address, an apartment, he hits redial on the phone and reaches a hotel. He inquires about the names on his passports there, learning that a 'John Michael Kane' had been registered but died two weeks prior in a car crash. Castel ambushes Bourne and Marie in the apartment, but Bourne gets the upper hand. Instead of allowing himself to be interrogated, Castel throws himself out of a window to his death. Marie finds wanted posters of Bourne and herself, and after agonizing, agrees to continue to help Bourne. After a chase in which Bourne evades Paris police in Marie's car, the two fugitives spend the night together in a Paris hotel.

Meanwhile, Wombosi continues to obsess over the attempt on his life. Conklin, having anticipated this, planted a body in Hoffenmein morgue, Paris to appear as the assailant, but Wombosi is not fooled and threatens to report this and other CIA secrets to the media. The Professor assassinates Wombosi on Conklin's orders. Bourne, posing as Kane, learns about Wombosi's yacht, and that the assailant was shot twice in the back during the escape; he realizes that he was the assailant. He and Marie take refuge at the French countryside home of her old friend Eamon and his children. Under pressure from Abbott to tie off the Wombosi matter entirely, Conklin tracks Bourne's location and sends the Professor there, but Bourne shoots him twice with Eamon's shotgun, mortally wounding him. The Professor reveals their shared connection to Treadstone before dying. Bourne sends Marie, Eamon, and Eamon's children away for their protection, and then contacts Conklin via the Professor's phone. Conklin agrees to meet Bourne, alone, in Paris. From a rooftop near the arranged location Bourne sees Conklin has not come alone, so he abandons the meeting, but uses the opportunity to place a tracking device on Conklin's car, leading Bourne to Treadstone's safe house in Paris.

Bourne breaks in and holds Conklin and logistics technician Nicolette 'Nicky' Parsons at gunpoint. Bourne and Conklin's conversation at the safe house clears much of the mystery. Bourne asks, 'Who am I', to which Conklin replies, 'You're US government property. You're a malfunctioning $30 million weapon! You are a total gaddamn catastrophe!'

When Conklin begins pressing him to remember his past, Bourne recalls his attempt to assassinate Wombosi through successive flashbacks. As Kane, and working under orders from Treadstone, Bourne infiltrated Wombosi's yacht but could not bring himself to kill Wombosi while Wombosi's children were present, and instead fled, being shot during his escape. Bourne announces he is resigning from Treadstone and is not to be followed. As agents descend on the safe house, Bourne fights his way free. When Conklin leaves the safe house, he encounters Manheim, who kills him under Abbott's orders. Abbott then shuts down Treadstone.

Abbott reports to an oversight committee that Treadstone is 'all but decommissioned' before discussion turns to a new project codenamed 'Blackbriar'. In the final scene, Bourne finds Marie renting out scooters to tourists on Mykonos, and the two reunite.

Cast[edit]

• Matt Damon as Jason Bourne
• Franka Potente as Marie Kreutz
• Chris Cooper as Alexander Conklin
• Clive Owen as The Professor
• Brian Cox as Ward Abbott
• Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Nykwana Wombosi
• Gabriel Mann as Danny Zorn
• Julia Stiles as Nicky Parsons
• Orso Maria Guerrini as Giancarlo
• Tim Dutton as Eamon
• Nicky Naude as Castel
• Russell Levy as Manheim
• Vincent Franklin as Rawlins

Walton Goggins, Josh Hamilton, and Brian Huskey appear as Treadstone research technicians. David Bamber has a minor role as a clerk at the American consulate who denies Marie a student visa, David Gasman has one as the deputy chief of mission, and Hubert Saint-Macary as a Paris morgue director.

Production[edit]

Development[edit]

Director Doug Liman has said that he had been a fan of the source novel by Robert Ludlum since he read it in high school. Near the end of production of Liman's previous film Swingers, Liman decided to develop a film adaptation of the novel. After more than two years of securing rights to the book from Warner Bros. and a further year of screenplay development with screenwriter Tony Gilroy, the film went through two years of production.^[3]Universal Pictures acquired the film rights to Ludlum's books in the hopes of starting a new film franchise.^[4]William Blake Herron was brought in to rewrite the script in 1999.^[5]

Of particular inspiration were Liman's father Arthur Liman's memoirs regarding his involvement in the investigation of the Iran–Contra affair. Many aspects of the Alexander Conklin character were based on his father's recollections of Oliver North. Liman admitted that he jettisoned much of the content of the novel beyond the central premise, in order to modernize the material and to conform it to his own beliefs regarding United States foreign policy. However, Liman was careful not to cram his political views down 'the audience's throat'. There were initial concerns regarding the film's possible obsolescence and overall reception in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, but these concerns proved groundless.^[3]

Casting[edit]

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Liman approached a wide range of actors for the role of Bourne, including Brad Pitt,^[4] who turned it down to star in Spy Game,^[6] as well as Russell Crowe, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Cruise and Sylvester Stallone, before he eventually cast Damon. Liman found that Damon understood and appreciated that, though The Bourne Identity would have its share of action, the focus was primarily on character and plot.^[7] Damon, who had never played such a physically demanding role, insisted on performing many of the stunts himself. With stunt choreographer Nick Powell, he underwent three months of extensive training in stunt work, the use of weapons, boxing, and eskrima. He eventually performed a significant number of the film's stunts himself, including hand-to-hand combat and climbing the safe house walls near the film's conclusion.^[8]

Filming[edit]

Filming began October 31, 2000. From the onset of filming, difficulties with the studio slowed the film's development and caused a rift between the director and Universal Pictures, as executives were unhappy with the film's pacing, emphasis on small scale action sequences, and the general relationship between themselves and Liman, who was suspicious of direct studio involvement.^[9] A number of reshoots and rewrites late in development, plus scheduling problems, delayed the film from its original release target date of September 2001 to June 2002 and took it $8,000,000 over budget from the initial budget of $60 million; screenwriter Tony Gilroy faxed elements of screenplay rewrites almost throughout the entire duration of filming.^[9] A particular point of contention with regard to the original Gilroy script were the scenes set in the farmhouse near the film's conclusion. Liman and Matt Damon fought to keep the scenes in the film after they were excised in a third-act rewrite that was insisted upon by the studio. Liman and Damon argued that, though the scenes were low key, they were integral to the audience's understanding of the Bourne character and the film's central themes. The farmhouse sequence consequently went through many rewrites from its original incarnation before its inclusion in the final product.^[9]

Other issues included the studio's desire to substitute Montreal or Prague for Paris in order to lower costs, Liman's insistence on the use of a French-speaking film crew, and poor test audience reactions to the film's Paris finale. The latter required a late return to location in order to shoot a new, more action-oriented conclusion to the Paris story arc.^[10] In addition to Paris, filming took place in Prague, Imperia, Rome, Mykonos, and Zürich; several scenes set in Zürich were also filmed in Prague.^[3] Damon described the production as a struggle, citing the early conflicts that he and Liman had with the studio, but denied that it was an overtly difficult process, stating, 'When I hear people saying that the production was a nightmare it's like, a 'nightmare'? Shooting's always hard, but we finished.'^[11]

Liman's directorial method was often hands-on. Many times he operated the camera himself in order to create what he believed was a more intimate relationship between himself, the material, and the actors. He felt that this connection was lost if he simply observed the recording on a monitor. This was a mindset he developed from his background as a small-scale indie film maker.^[8]

The acclaimed car chase sequence was filmed primarily by the second unit under directorAlexander Witt. The unit shot in various locations around Paris while Liman was filming the main story arc elsewhere in the city. The finished footage was eventually edited together to create the illusion of a coherent journey. Liman confessed that 'anyone who really knows Paris will find it illogical', since few of the locations used in the car chase actually connect to each other.^[10] Liman took only a few of the shots himself; his most notable chase sequence shots were those of Matt Damon and Franka Potente while inside the car.^[3]

Reception[edit]

Critical response[edit]

The film received positive reviews. According to the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 83% of critics have given the film a positive review based on 189 reviews, with an average rating of 7.01/10. The site's critics consensus reads, 'Expertly blending genre formula with bursts of unexpected wit, The Bourne Identity is an action thriller that delivers — and then some.'^[12] At Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 68 out of 100 based on 38 critics, indicating 'generally favorable reviews'.^[13]

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Timesgave the film three out of four stars and praised it for its ability to absorb the viewer in its 'spycraft' and 'Damon's ability to be focused and sincere' concluding that the film was 'unnecessary, but not unskilled'.^[14] Walter Chaw of Film Freak Central praised the film for its pacing and action sequences, describing them as 'kinetic, fair, and intelligent, every payoff packaged with a moment's contemplation crucial to the creation of tension' and that the movie could be understood as a clever subversion of the genre.^[15] Charles Taylor of Salon.com acclaimed the film as 'entertaining, handsome and gripping, The Bourne Identity is something of an anomaly among big-budget summer blockbusters: a thriller with some brains and feeling behind it, more attuned to story and character than to spectacle' and praised Liman for giving the film a 'tough mindedness' that never gives way into 'cynicism or hopelessness'.^[16]

Ed Gonzalez of Slant Magazine also noted Doug Liman's 'restrained approach to the material' as well as Matt Damon and Franka Potente's strong chemistry, but ultimately concluded the film was 'smart, but not smart enough'.^[17] J. /adobe-premiere-project-file.html. Hoberman of The Village Voice dismissed the film as 'banal' and as a disappointment compared against Liman's previous indie releases;^[18] Owen Gleiberman also criticised the film for a 'sullen roteness that all of Liman's supple handheld staging can't disguise'.^[19]Aaron Beierle of DVDTalk gave particular praise to the film's central car chase which was described as an exciting action highlight and one of the best realized in the genre.^[20][21]

The Bourne Identity has been described by some authors as a neo-noir film.^[22]

Box office[edit]

In its opening weekend, The Bourne Identity took in US$27,118,640 in 2,638 theaters. The film grossed $121,661,683 in North America and $92,263,424 elsewhere for a total worldwide gross of $214,034,224.^[2]

Accolades[edit]

Home media[edit]

On January 21, 2003, Universal Pictures released The Bourne Identity in the U.S. on VHS as well as on a “collector’s edition” DVD in two formats: widescreen and full screen. The release contains supplemental materials including a making-of documentary, a commentary from director Doug Liman and deleted scenes. On July 13, 2004, Universal released a new “extended edition” DVD of the film in the U.S. in preparation for the sequel's cinema debut.^[24] This DVD came in the same two formats as the 2003 edition. The supplemental materials for this version include interviews with Matt Damon, deleted scenes, alternative opening and ending, a documentary on the consulate fight and information features on the CIA and amnesia. The alternate ending on the DVD has Bourne collapsing during the search for Marie, waking up with Abbott standing over him, and getting an offer to return to the CIA. Neither contain the commentary or DTS tracks present in the 2003 edition. The film was also released on UMD for Sony's PlayStation Portable on August 30, 2005 and on HD DVD on July 24, 2007. With the release of The Bourne Ultimatum on DVD, a reprint of the 2004 version was included in a boxed set with Supremacy and Ultimatum, entitled The Jason Bourne Collection. A trilogy set was released on Blu-ray in January 2009.^[25]

Soundtrack[edit]

The score for the Bourne Identity was composed by John Powell. Powell was brought in to replace Carter Burwell, who had composed and recorded a more traditional orchestral score for the film, which director Doug Liman rejected. Since a lot of the music budget had been spent recording the rejected score, Powell's score was initially conceived to be entirely non-orchestral, making extensive use of percussion, guitars, electronics and studio techniques. However, a string section was later overdubbed onto many of the cues to give them a 'cinematic' quality.^[26]

The Bourne Identity: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack was released on June 11, 2002 by Varèse Sarabande. In addition to the score, the film also featured the songs 'Extreme Ways' by Moby and 'Southern Sun / Ready Steady Go' by Paul Oakenfold. The soundtrack won an ASCAP Award.^[27]

Sequels[edit]

The Bourne Identity was followed by a 2004 sequel, The Bourne Supremacy, which received a similar positive critical and public reception,^[28] but received some criticism for its hand-held camerawork, which observers argued made action sequences difficult to see.^[29]The Bourne Supremacy was directed by Paul Greengrass with Matt Damon reprising his role as Jason Bourne. A third film, The Bourne Ultimatum, was released in 2007 and again was directed by Paul Greengrass and starred Matt Damon. Like Supremacy, Ultimatum received generally positive critical and public reception, but also received similar criticism for the camera-work.^[30] Liman remained as executive producer for both films as well as for the fifth film Jason Bourne, once again directed by Greengrass and released in 2016.

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The fourth film of the Bourne franchise, The Bourne Legacy was released in 2012. Neither Damon nor Greengrass was involved.^[31][32] Both returned for the fifth film in the franchise, eponymously titled Jason Bourne.

See also[edit]

References[edit]

1. ^'The Bourne Identity'. British Film Institute. London. Retrieved June 11, 2012.
2. ^ ^abc'The Bourne Identity (2002)'. Box Office Mojo. IMDb. Retrieved May 16, 2009.
3. ^ ^abcd'The Bourne Identity' DVD Commentary Featuring Doug Liman (2003).
4. ^ ^abMichael Fleming (March 9, 2000). 'Pitt giving books look for Par & U'. Variety. Retrieved May 25, 2015.
5. ^Michael Fleming (June 24, 1999). 'Lopez after 'Angel'; Kumble surfs the Web'. Variety. Retrieved May 25, 2015.
6. ^Staff (May 25, 2000). 'Inside Moves'. Variety. Retrieved May 25, 2015.
7. ^Hanrahan, Denise. 'Interview with Doug Liman'. BBC.co.uk. Retrieved March 14, 2007.
8. ^ ^ab'The Birth of the Bourne Identity' DVD Making of Documentary (2003).
9. ^ ^abcKing, Tom. 'Bourne to be Wild'. Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on October 15, 2012. Retrieved March 12, 2007.
10. ^ ^abWells, Jeffrey. 'Bourne on His Back'. Reel.com. Archived from the original on February 17, 2007. Retrieved March 12, 2007.
11. ^Wadowski, Heather. 'Interview with Matt Damon'. MovieHabit.com. Retrieved March 19, 2007.
12. ^'The Bourne Identity (2002)'. Rotten Tomatoes. Fandango. Retrieved April 19, 2019.
13. ^'The Bourne Identity Reviews'. Metacritic. CBS Interactive. Retrieved April 19, 2019.
14. ^Ebert, Roger. 'The Bourne Identity Review'. Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved March 8, 2007.
15. ^Chaw, Walter. 'The Bourne Identity Review'. FilmFreakCentral.com. Archived from the original on March 6, 2012. Retrieved March 8, 2007.
16. ^Taylor, Charles. 'The Bourne Identity Review'. Salon.com. Archived from the original on September 29, 2007. Retrieved March 13, 2007.
17. ^Gonzalez, Ed. 'The Bourne Identity Review'. SlantMagazine.com. Retrieved March 8, 2007.
18. ^Hoberman, J. 'Zero for Conduct'. VillageVoice.com. Retrieved March 24, 2007.
19. ^Gleiberman, Owen (June 21, 2002). 'The Bourne Identity Review'. EW.com. Retrieved March 25, 2007.
20. ^Beierle, Aaron. 'The Bourne Identity DVD Review'. DVDTalk.com. Retrieved March 8, 2007.
21. ^Clinton, Paul (June 14, 2002). 'The Bourne Identity Review'. CNN.com. Retrieved March 8, 2007.
22. ^Conard, Mark T.; ed. (2009). The Philosophy of Neo-Noir. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. ISBN081319217X.
23. ^ ^abcdef'The Bourne Identity (2002) – Awards'. IMDb. Amazon.com. Retrieved March 14, 2007.
24. ^Arnold, Thomas K. (July 26, 2004). 'Studios big on double features'. USA Today. Retrieved May 16, 2009.
25. ^Ault, Susanne (February 6, 2009). 'Universal bundles Blu-ray catalog titles'. Video Business. Retrieved May 16, 2009.
26. ^FREER, IAN. 'Empire Meets John Powell'. Empire.
27. ^'World Class'. ASCAP. Retrieved May 16, 2009.
28. ^'The Bourne Supremacy (2004)'. Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved March 14, 2007.
29. ^'The Bourne Ultimatum'. The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved May 16, 2009.
30. ^Corliss, Richard (August 2, 2007). 'The Bourne Ultimatum: A Macho Fantasy'. Time. Retrieved May 16, 2009.
31. ^Labrecque, Jeff (October 11, 2010). 'No Matt Damon in 'Bourne Legacy': Report'. Entertainment Weekly. Archived from the original on February 4, 2012. Retrieved April 1, 2011.
32. ^Serpe, Gina (October 11, 2010). 'WTF?! Matt Damon Out of The Bourne Legacy'. E! Online. Retrieved April 1, 2011.

External links[edit]

• The Bourne Identity on IMDb
• The Bourne Identity at AllMovie
• The Bourne Identity at Metacritic
• The Bourne Identity at Box Office Mojo
• The Bourne Identity at Rotten Tomatoes
• The Bourne Identity at Curlie

The Bourne Identity is a 1980 spy fictionthriller by Robert Ludlum that tells the story of Jason Bourne, a man with remarkable survival abilities who has retrograde amnesia, and must seek to discover his true identity. In the process, he must also reason out why several shadowy groups, a professional assassin, and the CIA want him dead. The story takes readers on a twisted and dangerous journey into a world of deceptions and conspiracies, offering a psychological portrait of Bourne, and giving them the chance to experience from his point of view the life-or-death decisions he makes as he seeks to piece together the dangerous puzzle of his missing past. It is the first novel of the original Bourne Trilogy, which also includes The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum.

Peter Cannon of Publishers Weekly named The Bourne Identity among the best spy novels of all time, after John le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.^[1]

The novel was the basis for the scripts of the 1988 television movie of the same name starring Richard Chamberlain and Jaclyn Smith, and the 2002 film of the same name, starring Matt Damon, Franka Potente and Chris Cooper.

Plot[edit]

The preface of the novel consists of two real-life newspaper articles from 1975 about terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, known as 'Carlos the Jackal.'

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The story opens with gunfire on a boat in the Mediterranean Sea. One man is cast into the waves before the boat explodes, and is later picked up by fishermen, who find him clinging to debris. They also find he has amnesia, apparently as a result of a traumatic head injury, with occasional erratic intrusions or flashbacks to the past, but is unable to make sense of them. The only definite evidence of his former life is a small film negative found embedded in his hip containing the information required to access a bank account in Zurich.

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When he goes to Zurich to gain access to the bank, a clerk recognizes him. From this the man concludes that his name is 'Jason Charles Bourne', that he has relations with a firm called Treadstone Seventy-One Corporation, and that his account holds 7,500,000 Swiss francs (equivalent to $5,000,000 in the novel). Circumstantial evidence leads Bourne to suspect that he should go to Paris, so he wires most of the money there. At the bank and his hotel, men suddenly try to kill Bourne, so he quickly takes another hotel guest, Canadian government economist Marie St. Jacques, as a hostage in order to escape. After escaping from Bourne, St. Jacques reports his whereabouts to men she thinks are police, but they turn out to be Bourne's pursuers and professional killers who try to rape and kill her. When Bourne rescues her at the risk of his own life, St. Jacques decides to help him.

They head to Paris to find clues about Bourne's past. Once in Paris, Bourne learns that his attackers' leader may be 'Carlos,' who is described as the most dangerous terrorist of his time, responsible for numerous killings in many countries and well connected in the highest government circles. For reasons only partly comprehensible to himself, Bourne develops a compulsion to hunt Carlos. As the story develops, Bourne follows clues that bring him closer to Carlos, leading him to places such as a designer clothing store used as relay for Carlos. Though Bourne twice briefly sees Carlos, he does not manage to catch or kill him. To his distress, Bourne also finds mounting evidence that he himself is a rival assassin called ″Cain.″ Meanwhile, he and St. Jacques are falling in love.

It turns out that Cain is an alias that had been assumed by Bourne—whose real name is not even 'Bourne'—to hunt down Carlos; Cain took credit for kills as a way of challenging Carlos as part of a top-secret American plot. The plot is called Treadstone Seventy-One, and the truth is known only to eight men selected by covert agencies of the U.S. government; everyone else assumes Cain to be a real person. Due to Bourne's six-month silence (while he was recuperating) and the unauthorized diversion of millions of dollars from the Zurich account, the Treadstone men start to believe that Bourne has become a traitor. They are entirely convinced of his guilt when Carlos has two of his operatives storm the building in which Treadstone is based and kill those inside, and then frames Bourne for the murders. The man now responsible for Treadstone attempts to lure Bourne into a meeting outside of Paris to kill him. Bourne escapes the trap, but does not succeed in proving his innocence.

In Paris, Bourne has managed to convince a French General named Villiers to help him. Bourne realizes that Villiers' wife is a mole for Carlos. When the General hears about it, he finally kills his wife and Bourne takes the blame in order to bait Carlos into following him to the United States. Only after Bourne has left do St. Jacques and Villiers manage to convince Treadstone members that Bourne is innocent, and is continuing to hunt Carlos. In New York, Bourne is confronted by Carlos. They wound each other, but when Carlos is on the verge of killing Bourne, some of the remaining Treadstone members arrive at the scene and force Carlos to retreat.

The epilogue sees St. Jacques being told about Bourne's past, most of which had been revealed in fragments already: He had been an American Foreign Service officer stationed in Asia during the Vietnam War. When his wife and two children were killed, he joined a paramilitary Special forces unit in Vietnam. During one mission, he discovered and executed the double agent Jason Bourne. He took the name years later when he was recruited for Treadstone.

At the novel's end, it is revealed that 'Bourne' has recovered from the encounter with Carlos and probably lives together with St. Jacques. He remains the only one to ever have seen the face of Carlos and may be able to recognize him as a public figure, but is unable to do so due to his erratic memory. As a consequence, he is protected day and night by armed watchmen, in the hope he will one day recover enough to identify Carlos. The plot closes with him remembering his first name.

Concept[edit]

Robert Ludlum gave two interviews to Don Swaim of CBS: in 1984 and then two years later in 1986. Ludlum discusses how he came up with the first two novels in the Jason Bourne trilogy – The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy. The idea behind the Bourne trilogy came after he had a bout of temporary amnesia. After his first book, The Scarlatti Inheritance, was published, he could not remember 12 hours of his life. This event, combined with thrilling real-life spy stories, inspired him to write the Jason Bourne trilogy.^[2]

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The name 'Bourne'[edit]

In the novel, the name is portrayed as the random last name of a double agent. Only once, in passing and without further explanation or emphasis, the homophone 'Bourne'/'born' is mentioned, during the showdown between Bourne and Carlos in the last chapter:

to stay alive he had to get (..) away from the place where Cain [i.e. Bourne] was born. Jason Bourne .. there was no humor in the word association.

ABC News speculated that the name was actually 'most likely' inspired by Ansel Bourne, a famous 19th-century psychology case due to his experience of a probable dissociative fugue.^[3] Ansel Bourne one day left his previous life and built himself a new life with a new profession elsewhere under a new name ('A. J. Brown'); after two months, he woke up with no memories of this new life, but with memories recovered up to this time and returned to his old life. The rare and controversial dissociative fugue has been described 'a state in which an individual has lost their identity' by Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter. 'They don't know who they are, and they've lost all information about their past. They go on functioning automatically.'^[3]

Publication history[edit]

• 1980, US, Richard Marek ISBN0-399-90070-5, Pub date February 1980, Hardback.
• 1982, US, Bantam Books ISBN0-553-24296-2, Pub date April 1, 1982, Paperback.
• 1984, US, Bantam Books ISBN978-0553260113, Pub date February 1, 1984, Paperback.
• 1986, UK, Grafton ISBN0-246-11121-6 Pub date June 19, 1986, Hardback.
• 1997, UK, HarperCollins ISBN0-586-04934-7, Pub date December 1, 1997, Paperback
• 2004, UK, Orion Publishing Group ISBN978-0752858548, Pub date May 6, 2004, Paperback.
• 2010, UK, Orion Publishing Group ISBN978-1409117698, Pub date February 4, 2010, Paperback.

Sequels[edit]

Ludlum wrote two sequels to The Bourne Identity: The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, forming the Bourne Trilogy. After Ludlum's death, author Eric Van Lustbader continued the story of Jason Bourne in The Bourne Legacy (2004), The Bourne Betrayal (2007), The Bourne Sanction (2008), The Bourne Deception (2009), The Bourne Objective (2010), The Bourne Dominion (2011), The Bourne Imperative (2012), The Bourne Retribution (2013), The Bourne Ascendancy (2014), The Bourne Enigma (2016) and The Bourne Initiative (2017).

Adaptations[edit]

The novel has been adapted as The Bourne Identity, a 1988 television movie starring Richard Chamberlain and Jaclyn Smith. The story was also partially adapted in the 1989 Tamil language film Vetri Vizha starring Kamal Haasan.^[4][5]

The 2002 film The Bourne Identity starring Matt Damon, Franka Potente and Chris Cooper has largely modernized the material and is only very loosely based on the central premise of the novel.

Trivia[edit]

The Dutch band Golden Earring used The Bourne Identity as an inspiration for their song 'Twilight Zone' which appeared on their 1982 album Cut. It was the group's sole Top 10 Pop single on the US Billboard Hot 100 and hit No. 1 on the BillboardTop Album Tracks chart, the band's only No. 1 hit in America. The music video, directed by Dick Maas, features a storyline with lead singer Barry Hay as an espionage agent gone rogue who is inevitably apprehended by three henchmen (played by the other members of the band).

References[edit]

1. ^'Crime Fiction Dossier: Top 15 Spy Novels'.
   'The Rap Sheet: Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy'
2. ^Swaim, Don (1984). 'Don Swaim Interviews: Interview with Robert Ludlum'. Wired for Books. Archived from the original on 2011-10-26.
3. ^ ^abLee Ferran (3 August 2007). Bourne's Real Life Identity.ABC News (retrieved November 3, 2013)
4. ^Rajadhyaksha, Ashish; Willemen, Paul (1998) [1994]. Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema(PDF). Oxford University Press. p. 97. ISBN019-563579-5.
5. ^'After Rajinikanth's Baasha, Kamal Haasan's Vetri Vizha to be digitally remastered'. India Today. Retrieved 20 January 2017.