Do you feel like James Bond?

No. I think it's very different from that style of movie. [Director] Doug [Liman] wanted to make it feel more like a European movie stylistically and a little more real than the Bond movies. [Those] are fun because they're so outrageous and he's constantly topping himself whereas in this, Doug really wanted the action to drive the story and never be gratuitous, whereas the Bond movies, the fun of them is that the action is gratuitous. Suddenly he gets thrown out of a plane and he doesn't have a parachute, but he figures it out anyway.

Isn't the scene at the American consulate where you scale down the side of the building kind of a James Bond scene?

No, actually, I really like that scene still because that's one of the reasons I did the movie. I really liked the central character having these three things at his behest. Starting with a gun, throwing that away and getting out with the map and the radio, I always thought that was just a really cool thing. In the other action movies, a guy goes running out the front door with a gun. This guy is smarter than that. I just loved it when Doug described the sequence and he's never running in that scene. He's walking and he's calm and it's the person who can kind of maintain their poise and do the right thing. He doesn't even know why he's doing it, but oh wait, there's a map. All right, I'll need that and okay, oh, a radio, now I can hear what these guys are doing. Where am I going? Second floor. That's the movie to me.

Are you a fan of spy books and did you read this one?

Oh yeah, I've read the whole series and I like them, but I don't think I would have done this movie if Doug weren't directing it. I think it was a combination of a script that I thought was really, really excellent - Tony [Gilroy] did an incredible job with the script - and a director who didn't just churn movies like this out and had a different take on it and a sense of what he wanted to do stylistically and was coming out of the independent world. I thought that combination would make it really different. There was no reason to do it if it was just going to be ordinary.

Did you have to get into extra good shape for this?

I was in probably as good shape as I've ever been in because I was boxing and doing martial arts and all this weapons training. I really went overboard because I had a few months, I had like four or five months. Also, because of the way we talked about him, Doug said he wanted him to walk like a boxer, with the directness that a boxer walks with. He wanted him to move just in a very efficient way. When I first saw Doug, he said, "Pull up your shirt." And I pulled up my shirt and he said, "Oh God, oh God." I said, "No, in three months, don't worry. It's going to be hard as a rock."

What fighting style did you learn?

Kali, it's a Filipino style. It has a lot to do with clubs and knives and a trapping technique is actually what they call it. To watch these guys do it is beautiful. It's like if somebody throws a punch at you, there are these destruction movies. Where I do it is with the pen. When I take the pen out, that's kind of what this style is, which is rather than go directly for somebody's throat, you just slowly take them apart. Each of those hits to the guy are designed as that's in the bicep, that's in the tricep, that one's in the forarm, that one's in the hand. To those guys, they like that sequence because they think it's true to their style.

How much stuntwork did you do?

All of it. No, I'm just kidding. Did you ever see Ronin? I think one of the coolest parts of that movie is this whole car sequence that they did. There's this great car chase sequence and the guys who did that, the French guys who coordinated that did this chase sequence. There is actually one shot of me driving the car and what they did was they had this guy who was one of the premiere stunt drivers in the world and they put a camera and Doug was squeezed in in the back right seat and the steering wheel was on the left and I was up front and he was shooting at me. The car had two steering wheels and the stunt driver was in the front really steering the car. We went at breakneck speed with all these stunt drivers coming at us and like 360s and going all over the place. Part of it's in the movie and that was the highlight of my driving experience. I was turning a fake wheel and pretending not to be scared.

Would you do more Bourne movies if they make the sequel books into films?

I'm not contractually obligated to, but if Tony wrote another great script then yeah, sure. I really liked everybody who worked on the movie. We worked really hard on it. We were in all these interesting places and had all these adventures together. I'd do it again.

What would happen once the amnesia is gone?

Well, they'd have to take it pretty far afield anyway because the book is all about Carlos the Jackal and he's chasing Carlos the Jackal. My recollection of the other two, and I read them 10 years ago, was that it was a continuing unfolding of his saga as he's hunting this man. So, to do another one would just basically keep the characters of Bourne and Marie and figure out something else, some other trouble for them to get mixed up in.

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