Behind the scenes was director Doug Liman.

From the indie sensation Swingers, Liman went a little bigger with Go, but The Bourne Identity is definitely his biggest film yet.

What indie sensibilities did you bring to this film?

Well, first and foremost, when I think about independent films, I think about them being as character and script driven, so I definitely fought very hard through the process to make sure that we had a movie that was consistent with my previous work in terms of attention to detail with the characters and with the script and with the relationships that are in the film, because there is a tendency if you say you're making a spy movie to sort of lower your standards. You could say, "Well, it's an action movie. All people really want to see is the action." You could find yourself cutting corners, just throw in the action, and when we started this process, we said that we want to make a movie where the action is organic to the character development and that's why I loved the book so much. It was a chance to do a spy movie that has all of the elements that an audience would expect from a summer movie, but at the same time, it's really a poignant drama about a guy trying to figure out who he is. The more action he goes through, while the action may be fun for the audience, Jason Bourne's not having fun during it and when it's over, like after the car chase, he's almost embarrassed that he knew how to do that.

Were movies like Total Recall, Long Kiss Goodnight or even Jackie Chan's Who Am I an influence to the amnesia story?

This is not an amnesia movie. It's a mystery and it's a thriller, but we're not going to address disease of the week. Tony Gilroy, when he came on board, really had a great insight in how to tell a movie that deals with amnesia which was to add the elements of almost a Manchurian Candidate kind of quality where it pokes through throughout the film. They have the headaches. There's clearly some kind of extreme training that these people have been put through. The modern way to deal with amnesia in this kind of story was to understand that these people, in order to become these super agents, have gone through extremely rigorous training that's messing with their brains. It's more in the ilk of Total Recall in that it's not a conk on the head and you get amnesia, but it's you've been manipulated and put through extreme training for five or six years. They've made him into the perfect weapon but the price you pay for that is humans aren't really meant to be machines.

Was Julia Stiles part originally bigger?

No. For history buffs, it's an homage to Fawn Hall and Iran Contra.

Did you demand Matt Damon get in shape?

He's a very serious actor. He is not somebody who just jumps from movie to movie and is like "Whatever, it'll be fun." He does a lot of research into his character. He puts in a lot of effort. He doesn't just do movie after movie because he really invests himself in the projects he does. Jason Bourne is a character who has been physically conditioned, and so Matt put himself through that and really took four or five months to get himself in that shape and also to do all the fight training. That's what Jason Bourne as a character went through.

Are there plans to make the book's sequels into movies?

Yes. We've planted some things in this film that would pay off in future films.

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