P: Well, as a director you always try and develop a style, and it's sort of the product of who you are and what you've made and where you've been, and your sort of temperament. And then it's about what happens when your style meets the piece that you're making, and that of course affects the style, so your style should always change. I think that is kind of my style. I'm very interested when the world moves out of control; that's what interests me. I think you can see that in quite a few of the films I've made before this one, but they're tiny, little films.

Q: Why are you so interested in that, when the world starts getting out of control?

P: I think...well it's exciting and interesting, and things that are impossible become possible, both for the good and the bad; it's change, it's motion, it's kinetic, it's visceral and immediate, and I suppose if your background is in documentaries, as mine was, if that’s where you spent your formative years. You know, I was very lucky, I was taught to make films by some very brilliant documentary makers when I was in my twenties, and you know, I was sent around the world seeing lots of interesting things and taught how to observe and record them and that was the first duty of a filmmaker. I want to observe and record the way the world is.

P: Well it's a challenge. It's interesting because it really goes to the issue of style. I think there were three challenges for me personally in this film: I think the first challenge was, there's a film there on your first day called The Bourne Identity, that had obviously been very successful, but also very good. The reason I wanted to make The Bourne Supremacy was because I had seen The Bourne Identity and I thought it was a really fresh, original, interesting and mainstream thriller, and they don't come along very often.

But it means that the stakes are very high when you walk in because you've got a film that's commercially very successful but also very good, so that's quite a challenge. So that was the first thing. In a way I think that was quite an easy challenge to meet in a funny kind of way because you are instinctively either intimidated, in which case you don't make the film, or you go, "Do you know what? We could take this on." And I always believed we could take this story on and do something interesting. I think the second challenge is the logistical challenge, just the making of a film and things, in Moscow and India and Berlin and Naples and New York, in a tight time frame on a grand scale, when I've only ever made small films. That's a logistical challenge. I mean it was a challenge but I never actually thought that challenge would be so profound because in the end making films whether they're small films or large films, in the end directing a film is about being put in a box and the walls of the box are the resources that you have; the time available, the creative challenges of the piece, and somehow you have to conjure your way out of the box to a film that works. And whether the box is the box of a low budget, or the box of a big budget, the scale of the problems are not that dissimilar in actual fact.

The third challenge is actually the one that was the real challenge, for me, personally. And it comes down to style. If you make films as I have, that are basically things that I feel passionate about on a small scale, quite obscure political films, films about the way my world is, which is the world of Britain, island of Europe, it's all about having a point of view. If you're a director you've either got a point of view or not, and developing a point of view and having the confidence to have a point of view is what you learn as a director and what you encourage young directors to think about. It's not about just where you put the camera or what happens here or what there... It's about, what are you trying to say or what is this piece about? And I'm used to having a point of view and being able to give that point of view full play, full reign. And the challenge of moving right into the middle of the mainstream, which is what a franchise movie is for a studio, would I lose my point of view? Would it become diluted? Would it still be there? And that was the challenge and when I watched this film, it feels like a film that I've made. It looks like mine. It's got my style and it's got something to say I think. I think it's a great adventure, I think it's a great ride, as Bourne films have to be, and any film that's in the mainstream has got to be worth the price of admission. You've got to get to the end of the movie and go, "Fantastic, that's been a great ride."

P: I think I was very lucky with this project and I instinctively felt that's why I came to it, that the people most involved at the heart of it, that I worked with most closely, Matt, Frank Marshall, the studio, Tony Gilroy and the other writers, I think most of us shared. we had different instincts and backgrounds, but I think there was a core understanding that it was only going to work as a sequel if we were bold and took some risks and were different. I think that's what made it much easier for me, and I think the end result is that it's a great ride, but I think that what I'm most proud of is that we’ve kept, underneath that story, this move from revenge to some kind of journey of discovery to an unpredictable end. I think that we've lived through some very profound times when the instinct for revenge has been very very considerable.

But I think now we're in different times, we're in questioning times, and I think that as this movie is about to come out and with what's in the newspapers, it's quite clear that our governments have not been telling us the truth about the important stuff like why we went to war. It's quite clear that the secret parts of our governments have profoundly let us down. The consequence of that is a great tide of mistrust coursing through our cultures now. It's gonna be a generation before that goes. And so when you have a choice on a Saturday night and you go to the movies and there are mainstream franchise movies out there, there will be plenty out there that will be about superheroes that are larger than life with magical powers and characters from cartoons, and characters who have no doubt and always get the girl and always win.

And there'll only be one movie, it seems to me, The Bourne Supremacy, that'll be about a real man wracked with inner conflict, unable to trust authority, desperately searching for an answer. Now it's framed as a mainstream movie should be as a story and a ride, but in the end when Bourne's on the real streets going "I just want to know what's going on here," he's speaking for us, that's tapping in and I think Matt's triumph, in this performance, is he articulates in a believable, mainstream, entertaining way, the mistrust that is swirling through our culture at the moment. I am very proud to have made a mainstream movie that sort of gets to that, without it being overstated. It's a contemporary film, it's about where we are now. And I think it's a great ride.

P: I think that's overstating it, do you know what I mean? I don't think the Bourne films should ever be topical, but they should be contemporary. I think it's about tapping into mistrust, tapping into doubt, tapping into questioning. I mean who can you trust if you can't trust your governments? That's the point. We're right back now where we were in the late sixties, early seventies, we're getting to that place and what were those movies at that time? They were movies of paranoia and doubt and that's why this is an interesting go around that same track - that's what makes it unique.

P: Always, yeah. From day one. There was an absolute feeling that if we were going to do a sequel that was different, you would have to announce early on to the audience that it was going to be different. You had to do something bold, that kind of shook everybody, so you go "Wow, I don't know where this is going to go now." Because the easy thing to have done would have been to have had another Bourne and Maria adventure on the road, know what I mean? And it would have been so obvious and so tame, and bear in mind the Bourne/Marie thing was the thing that was most successful in the first movie. So I think it was bold in the extreme.

But of course what it does is unlock, is the possibility that you can challenge the character much more deeply than he's ever been challenged before because otherwise you're just offering him the same challenge. "You're going to be okay because you're with her." Do you know what I mean? Once you've got bang: she's dead!, the character's in a whole new place and you can do interesting things with a character who is on a journey into revenge and out through the other side.

P: Most difficult. It was always something again, that the killing of Marie unlocks as a possibility. You can have a totally different Bourne journey. You can have a journey where he's on his own, which was one of the things that appealed to me about it, but have it in a mainstream franchise movie, a character who says very little but still be compelling and you still understand where he is, and I think that that calls for a lot of intensity from the central performance to carry it.

Dialogue can be your friend when you want to coast in a film. If you don't have dialogue you have to have intensity and you have to have detail and accuracy and you have to be able to deliver in tiny ways. When the character shifts, when he goes and washes his hands and looks at himself in the mirror, you understand the soul of Bourne, you're getting close to the humanity. The paradox is that though he has no one to talk to, I think you come much closer to this character as a real person, you feel the sort of inner conflict of the troubled restless questioning which was always the most interesting thing that I wanted to bring out.

I think when he looks himself in the mirror it's a different feeling you get. You feel that he's moved on. And there's some shame there, do you know what I mean? I could go through a thousand things he did in that film. I think it's a very considerable achievement for an actor to produce a performance that ambitious in a mainstream franchise.

P: Well, I liked what he did in The Lord of the Rings. He's a good actor. And he wants certain things out of that character, so he's not going to say very much, so he has to have the right look and have a good sense of style in an understated way. But you want an actor ambitious enough to take on that challenge because that's also changed. You don't have very much to fix the character and he's got to feel like a worthy opponent to Bourne and they've got to feel like contemporary young men that you wouldn't notice.

P: It's interesting, this, because in my point of view when I took it on, and I talked a lot about this with Matt, a big part of the fun of doing the job was making it possible to have a third. To me, I remember very clearly as a boy watching The Fugitive, the TV series, not the movie, and I just absolutely loved it because it just went on and on and on, you always got a new adventure and there'd always be a heartbreaking end when David Jansen walked off on his own; like all great heroes in this style he's destined to be alone, destined to replay the same conflicts again and again in different ways, interesting ways, and to me, just personally, it was so clear to me coming into this film that the Bourne franchise was very special.

You know, when you look at the franchises that are out there--I'm not decrying them, there are some very good ones--but it's a special one because it's real. It's all about being real, being gritty, being edgy, real streets, real world, European, but more important it's about being subversive of authority, being mistrustful of authority, it's all about being questioning and doubt-ridden and about being intelligent and contemporary, all things that I like that I don't think you find very readily in the mainstream. So if you compare, say, Bourne with Bond, which I think is a very interesting comparison because they're both similar kind of characters, both spawned out of the Cold War as literary characters, but what do you find when you look at them?

Bond is an insider, a character with absolutely no doubt, a cruel character actually, still in the movies and even more so in the books, kills without remorse, regret, doubt, actually enjoys it, quite clearly, misogynistic, imperialist, an adventurer, a lover of secrets who worships at the altar of technology, always obsessed, always gets out of trouble because he's got some easy bit of gadgetry. And then you look at Bourne and he's the absolute antithesis. He's an outsider, he's a subversive and mistrustful figure, he's absolutely not a misogynist, he's absolutely not an imperialist, on the contrary, he's coming from a quite different place. Never relies on gadgetry. You know, he's a trained guy so he's got to have all those attributes but it's about what he can make up on the spot. He's a character who you could be if you had military training, kind of thing.

It's a believable world, not a fantasy world, and looked at in that context, the character is special; the character should live on because there are other ways you can take that character and it'd just be different in the mainstream.

P: No, it was just a couple of shots.

P: It was just that there was just that one scene there that needed to be done.

M: Yeah, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t.

M: Well, what I said then was that I didn't want to do it unless we could make it as good as the first one, because there are so many sequels that are disappointing. And just for me as a movie fan, if I go to a sequel to a movie I really liked and I feel like it was made cynically, as a money-grab by the studio, I end up really resenting the studio and the filmmakers that made it, plus it's just very hard to make a good sequel.

I had a friend who said something really funny to me. He said "you have to be very careful about the sequel stuff because there've only been three sequels in history that are as good as or better than the original. He said the New Testament is better than the Old Testament, Huck Finn is better than Tom Sawyer, and The Godfather II is better than The Godfather.

M: A good friend of my family. So I did say that and I guess what changed my mind was…well, there were a couple of things. First of all that Paul Greengrass wanted to do it. Once I started to talk to Paul about what his vision of the movie was and heard not only his enthusiasm but also how he intended to do it, and keeping in mind that Bloody Sunday was one of my favourite movies of the last decade, I felt like it was something I couldn't say no to. And on the script side, just to give you a thought of where my head was, because I don't know if you can write this without giving out a lot that happens in the movie, there were three tent pole moments in the movie that I thought were really bold for a sequel like this.

One occurred in each act - in the first act it was that Franka's character died in that horrible way. In the second act it was that I shoot a woman in the face in cold blood which is not something that is commonly done in Hollywood mainstream movies. And in the third act, I go to the daughter of those two people that I kill and attempt to atone and I thought that was a good thing, to take what looks like a classic revenge story, turn it on its head a little bit, and leave with this message of this guy finding another way. And the final shot in Manhattan of a man walking into a crowd and joining humanity again in a way.

M: No it was pretty similar. It was interesting. I'd done it with a play before. I'd done a play again and played the same character on stage before, but never in a movie. And it was really helpful I guess. For the first movie I had about six months to prepare which is a really long time considering you can get a play up in a month. So six months to get all the research and all the stuff done is plenty of time. I had so over-prepared for the first one and I kind of knew what worked and what didn't really work that I had an easy time getting ready for this one.

Physically the most important thing that came out of the first one was an idea that Doug Liman had, which was that the character should walk like a boxer. He should stand and have the bearing of a boxer. And neither of us really knew how to achieve that, except for me to start boxing, so I boxed for six months and it really changed me, not only physically but I don't know if it's a more self-assured gait or the way that you just kind of stand and listen to somebody. But it really had a subtle impact on that and I thought it was really right for the character so that was the first thing I started doing. I started boxing for about three months before we started.

M: Yeah, I really like the character. I kind of feel that I'm in the same position that I was in in the last one now, where I'd like to do a third one but I don't want to do it if it can't be as good as the second one.

M: I'm considering it, but I do feel like I did last time. I'm very happy to leave it at this. I'm really happy with how it came out. It was a lot of pressure for the creative team who was behind it throughout the shoot because we all shared that feeling that we didn't want to make a disappointing sequel to a movie that we really liked, so there was more pressure than usual. So now that's gone because I feel very happy with the way the movie came out. To go and do a third one we would really have to get a great script. And it's hard because I don't personally know where to go with the character at this point. I don't know how to draw him back into that world at this point. The third book is called The Bourne Ultimatum and he feels to me very much like he's given his ultimatum at this point. But who knows. Maybe there's a rocket scientist who can figure it out.

M: I think it starts off about revenge, but I think eventually it's about atonement and about an attempt at redemption. I think it certainly starts as an exercise in revenge but shifts after the second act as he goes into Moscow.

M: Actually it was kind of an intense role and I think the impact that had on me personally sent it the other way. I felt like I had a certain allotment of happiness and sadness in any given day and I'd spend the sadness and anger at work and I'd go home and I was pretty happy.

M: I guess so, maybe a little bit. I just get excited, for instance in these studio movies, generally the larger the budget, the more simple the characters become. Once you go north of a certain number, the studios generally don't want to take risks. If they're spending a lot of money on a movie, they want everyone to understand that the good guy wears the white hat and the bad guy twists his moustache and that's about where we're going to leave it because we put a lot of money into this thing. But this is a studio that allowed us and endorsed us to make this guy much more complicated than that. He's a deeply flawed character and they didn't back off that, so I was in a good mood going to work every day because I had something to play, I had something to do. You know, rather than twiddling my thumbs through a bland good guy role.

M: The shooting went really smoothly this time. We had a lot of problems in the first one, well, not problems but Paris is a very tough place to shoot. They ask for permits. You have to file six weeks in advance. You have to tell them exactly where every truck is going to be parked. And they make it hard to shoot there and they can, it's Paris. But Berlin was incredibly accessible. We shot for four or five months there, in fact we shot a lot of the Moscow stuff in Berlin because we found it to be so accessible.

M: I loved it. The only drawback to living in Berlin at that time of year (we were there November, December, January, February) and as you know - there's not a lot of sunshine! You can start shooting there around 9:30 in the morning, Oliver Wood, our cinematographer, was absolutely in love with the light because it stayed steady. It was overcast every day. But we'd lose it about 3:15 or 3:30pm and every day he had this gleeful look on his face and he'd just go "I love it here! I love it here!" Everyone else was missing the sunshine!

M: I've been there a lot. And I did The Brothers Grimm over there this year in Prague, so yeah, I just came back after about 13 months of being there. Obviously with the first movie and with Ripley I was there, so I've spent a few years of my adult life over there but I love it. I really could spend plenty of time there actually.

M: Tough to say. I've had great experiences in a lot of the cities. Tough to say what my favourite was because they're all very different. I like Amsterdam. The canals were gorgeous. It was a great city to walk around in. Of all the cities in Europe, Berlin felt like the city that in fifty years people would be talking about the fact that they were there, because there's so many things changing there. There seems to be this cultural imperative to unify, and you see that in the architecture and the attitudes of people there, it's palpable and there's a lot of energy there. I really like Berlin a lot. And Prague, I feel like I could live in any of those places.

M: For Ripley I learned to play some songs on the piano and I never really played them again and there are a bunch of things I've learned that have been relatively useless in my life, but the good thing about this movie is that all those things, especially the driving, are all practical, they all really do help me in my regular life. I think I'm definitely a better driver than I was. Then again, there are a lot of things I learned that I'll never do, like driving a car at high speed and pulling on the emergency brake.

M: It might be useful in LA if I'm ever in a high speed chase. You never know!

M: In terms of my own memory, I don't know what to compare it to because it's the only one I have! I’m sorry I can't remember. (Laughs). I do think about memories, I try to live in the present and try to find a healthy balance between the two. In terms of films that have come out recently, I haven’t seen Eternal Sunshine yet because it wasn't open overseas when I was there. Memento I loved. There are a lot of great amnesia movies. It's an overused convention in movies, I think, because it's such a great plot device for a writer, rather than having a narrator you just rob your character of their memory and as they start to gain their memory your audience learns things with them. It's a really useful tool for a writer and that's why it gets used so much.

M: Starting with, my trainer's name is John Stalworth and he's from LA. I did as many of the stunts as I could, going back to the first movie, just because of the way I look. I never would've been my first choice for this role and I was really worried that people would feel that my being in thee movie would take people out of the movie, so we decided early on that I should try to do as many of these things as possible to make the performance more believable; to allow the audience to suspend their disbelief. 

So we carried that through on this one and the whole stunt team encouraged me to do absolutely everything that I could which was great. But having said that I don't want to be one of those actors who says 'I do all my own stunts' because those people are full of shit and if there's anything that's at all dangerous they get the professionals to do it.

M: I don't know if that was the most dangerous because you can pass out under water and survive for a couple of minutes and there were safety divers everywhere, so I don't think my life was ever in danger underwater. But that is the most nervous I've ever been shooting because to drown is a very human fear. So I worked really hard with one of Dan Bradley's team who's an expert diver, and after work we did about ten sessions in a pool in Berlin and we'd go down to the bottom and he'd take my air tank away, and I practiced doing little tasks, just little mindless things to get used to not having air and being under water.

Because the real danger there is if you panic and you plant your feet and you shoot to the top you can get the bends and that is very dangerous. So even if you're panicking you have to stay under the water if you've been breathing off a regulator. So it was a ten session mini-course in how not to panic and it worked. I never panicked. We shot that sequence in London in a special tank and I did never panic. But we shot it over two days and after the first day I woke up all through the night going [gasp] having these suffocation nightmares. So I was glad to be out of there!

M: We want to write. We've been talking about it. The problem for the last few years is that neither of us has been off work long enough at the same time to do it because Ben's not shooting right now but I am finishing Ocean's 12 and then I'm going off to do a movie called Syriana with Steve Gaghan who wrote Traffic. He wrote and is directing this one and it's very similar to Traffic in its structure - all these story lines converging around a topic but it's about oil and not drugs. I'm going to do that but Ben and I have been talking about it. I've actually seen him a bunch of times in the last couple of days because we're doing some ‘Project Greenlight’ stuff. We picked the winning script the other night and we're picking the winning director tomorrow so we keep talking about it and it is something we want to do. We've got to carve out the time and commit to it.

M: No and I'd tell you if there was. There's nothing.

M: No (there's no rivalry), because he can and Ben acknowledges that! I think The Sum of All Fears came out a couple weeks before The Bourne Identity but we were done shooting before they even started. The Bourne Identity had a very long post production because the movie had some holes in it, some stuff we had to go back and reshoot. We had two full sessions of reshoots on The Bourne Identity so the post production lasted over a year, I think it was almost a year and a half. I was the CIA guy first.

M: Sure, in Ocean's 12, I play Linus Caldwell again, the pickpocket from Chicago and the basic plot is that a master thief in Europe, played by Vincent Cassell, gives our names to Terry Benedict, Andy Garcia's character. And so we're basically all caught at the beginning of the movie and this master thief does this because he wants to challenge us, he wants to prove that he's the greatest thief in the world and we're just a fluke. So we're forced to compete with him because we have a certain amount of time to get Andy his money back or we're going to go to jail or worse, so that's the premise of the movie.

So we go off to Europe to start pulling jobs to pay back Terry Benedict. And The Informant, the Steven Soderberg movie, is based on a real New York Times best selling book that came out a couple years ago by Kirk Eichenwald. It's a true story about a corporate whistleblower named Mark Whittaker who's an incredibly fascinating guy who basically wore a wire for two years as a high level executive at Archer Daniels Midland who were in a price fixing scam with some other huge international corporations. Whittaker wore a wire for a few years and collected information. It turned out that he had a whole agenda of his own and he possibly had some mental health issues. The case is kind of built and it unravels and it's a pretty amazing true story.

M: I hope not. Uh, no. I think I'm far more benign and predictable.

M: Okay, for the first part, that's a good question and well, there are a couple things. One is, he goes through something completely different, so the emotional journey the guy goes on this time is totally different, which basically allows me to play the same character but in a totally different state of mind which is challenging. And also in this case, just structurally, I had conversations with Tony Gilroy, the writer, very early, because in the construct as it is, he wanted to clear with me that it was okay that I was only going to talk in about four or five scenes in the movie. And that to me was one of the fun challenges and I said 'that's exactly why I want to do it' because the real trick would be to do a movie where you're the central character, but you really don't talk and at the end of the movie nobody really notices that. And that was a different challenge from this one compared to the last one.

And what makes me happy? A lot of things make me happy. But I think I went home happy every day on this movie because I felt good after every day's work. I was really excited about Paul and what he was doing. It was a very different experience from the last movie where we had a lot of troubles throughout production, you know, things can go wrong in production. This production seemed kind of blessed, it went very smoothly the entire time so there was a lot to be happy about at the end of the day.

M: I'm thrilled about it. I hope that's true. It is a genre movie but I like any movie that I think is good no matter what the genre and again I felt there was a lot to play in the movie for me so I was never bored or felt like everyone else was getting to have all the fun. I really felt like every day I went to work; it was a struggle to have a through line and keep the character consistent and believable and to go on that emotional journey, so I'll be happy if people like this movie that much, that'd be great.

M: I had a lot of say in this one because I wasn't contractually obligated to do it and they couldn't do it without me, so I had a meeting and I had a really good experience with the studio on this one because they allowed us to do a second round of reshoots which was very costly for them even when the movie--the first Bourne Identity—was testing well. Which is an indication that the movie is going to do well. And we asked them, for creative reasons, if we could have more money to shoot some other stuff because we knew we could make it better and we said that "we don't know if that will make you more money, but it will make the movie better" and so they let us do it.

Having worked with some other studios, that was very rare and very good of them. In the initial meetings we had very friendly meetings talking about the possibility of doing another one and it was in one of those meetings that Paul's name came up and we all agreed that if we got Paul it'd be the best thing for the movie. We were 100% in agreement that he was the person for the job and if we were lucky enough to get him it would be a big step towards me signing on and them greenlighting it.

M: What's my opinion on being the new kind of action hero? I doubt that these two movies will mean that I only do action movies now, and I've never wanted to do the same kind of movie over and over anyway so my theory on it all is that I'm going to try to dodge the labels and keep doing what I'm doing. I really like the fact that I can do a movie like this and then turn around and do Ocean's 12 or Syriana or Stuck on You. It's that that
makes it interesting to me, things constantly changing is what makes me like to go to work.

M: It's life for us. I'm working every day this week on Ocean's and that's the first time that's happened on the duration of the shoot so far. The most I've gone is four days a week of work which compared to Bourne, we were on six day week standard and I was six days a week for the length of the shoot. So it does feel like a vacation in that sense but you have to be careful because there is hard work. I got called up and I have a 6 page scene to do tomorrow with Julie and Don Cheadle and Scott Caan, so you still have to keep your eye on the ball.

M: It's usually the exact same three things: the script, the director, and the role, and if I get two of them that's usually good enough, but definitely those are the three things, and as you mentioned, the chance to do things that are different. That's the fun part of it, but at the same time if roles are very similar, for example I did Rounders after Good Will Hunting, and some people said "it's Will Hunting playing cards", but five or six years later if you look at the movie Rounders in a vacuum, I still really like the movie and forget it's close to Good Will Hunting. So even if movies are similar I don't mind doing them back to back.

M: Well, I never learned either of them. The Russian was harder for me to get the pronunciation right. Basically I figured out on the first movie that the best way to do it was to get my mouth moving in the right way when it was photographed and then go into a studio and loop it and stand next to a person who was from whatever country who spoke, whatever language I was speaking, and that worked really well the first time, so that's what we did this time.

I speak, I think, just German and Russian in this one and we had two people come in when we looped the voice of the additional dialogue recording. I just stood there and they browbeat me with the line until I said something that sounded remotely Russian or German. But still the hardest one ever was French for me. I have the worst French accent in the world and I think it took me an hour on the first movie to say one line that the French dialect coach agreed sounded like French.

M: I speak some Spanish but I haven't spoken really for about sixteen years. I don't speak very much.

M: Well, because he was written older in the book, I thought there were a group of actors who were older than me, anyone from Russell Crowe or Brad Pitt or George, any of the kind of people who would seem to me to be more obvious choices to play him, especially given that in the book the character is 40 years old or something, and at the time Doug offered it to me I think I was 28 and I looked 14 (laughs).

M: I think it's still hard for me to turn down work if it's really good because for so many years I was desperate to get a job and couldn't, so I think it's anathema for me to turn down work if I think it's really good. I swore I was going to take a nice break between Ocean's and The Informant and then Syriana popped up. And it's not a big role I have in Syriana, I think I have about a two month commitment on that movie but it was just one of those movies that I thought was exceptionally well-written, really interesting and current, and I felt like I would have regretted saying no, as ready as I was for a break. So I don't know if it's being a workaholic as much as having common sense and feeing like these movies are really good.

And the last year I worked with some incredible directors and I think I would have regretted passing up any of those opportunities. And working with Terry (on Brothers Grimm) was exactly what I hoped it would be like. It was great. He shot mostly wide angle lenses. It's kind of mad. If you're in a close-up you can hope for a 17mm lens in your face, maybe a 21. It just absolutely takes in the entire world. And the production designer is a guy named Guy Diaz and he's going to be a superstar. He helped build the look of this world in a way that was just mind-blowing. It really is straight out of Terry's brain. And even walking around the sets, there were huge sets, we took over five of the six stages in Prague and built an indoor forest, built a village on a part of the backlot that had never been used so that Terry could shoot 360 degrees. There were trees put in places where you couldn't see the cityscape in the background. It was just a massive kind of beautifully designed set and Terry just got in there and played with it.

We shot for 110 days I think, which is long, so we were in Prague for six months total. It really was everything I could've hoped for. He's so passionate about what he does, becomes so deeply connected to what he's shooting. I think that's why some people on the studio side say he's crazy. He's far from crazy. He's a true artist I think.

M: I still owe her! I just saw my family a couple days ago. I'd say the one drawback in my job is trying to facilitate primary relationships in your life and put as much energy into them as you can. That's a definite drawback. The good news is that even though I can't come home, they come and visit, and often get a lot more exposure to the cities I'm shooting in than I do because I'm always on a set. So that's nice.

Boston's a city where people don't normally leave once they live there so I think for Bostonians to come over and check out Europe is pretty fun. For vacation, honestly if I get a vacation I'm going to go sit on my couch in New York because that's the one place I haven't been in a very long time. I feel like I've been everywhere else. This movie took us to India, Berlin, Moscow, Ocean's was in Amsterdam and Rome, Brothers Grimm was in Prague, yeah, and I'm going to New York for my vacation (laughs).

M: There's quite a few. I'd like to spend more time in Argentina. I'd like to spend time in Costa Rica. I'd love to go back to Mexico, Brazil. I've never been to Africa so I'd really like to go there…the list goes on.

M: Oh, Lance Armstrong is selling these for a dollar on his website and he's trying to raise 6 million dollars for his foundation so all the money goes to cancer research.

M: Someone actually gave this to me. No, I didn't give the guy the dollar. You have to send it in to the website.

M: You mean in the house with Marton Csokas? He got the best of me. I got whacked in the face once. In the beginning of the fight when we're thrashing against those blinds in the window we were kind of wrestling each other around and I tried to lift him up at one point and my back just went completely, so I had to sit out a couple of the shots in that fight because I was trying to stretch to get my back back in order. Marton's a big guy. He really worked hard on that fight too. I love the way Paul shot it. His style is to make everything feel observed rather than staged or theatrical and that fight's a really good example. It's really violent and brutal and messy, as it would be. But Marton came in and worked really hard on the choreography to get it right.

M: More often than not I'm disappointed with the big summer fare. The higher the budget they aim for a lower common denominator in a way. I had this conversation with my father. We were driving in New York over Christmas and we were passing all these bus stops with posters for movies and after about 20 blocks he said "I haven't seen one poster for a movie that I want to go see." And I said, "Dad, if you see a poster for a movie that you want to go see, someone in the marketing department should lose their job because they don't market movies to 60 year old men, they market them to 13 year old boys, particularly the big ones!" So when I choose a movie it's with that in mind.

In a genre movie, try to make it smarter, try to make it different, try to make it interesting and try to make it be about the character. In both of these movies we wanted to have them be character-driven action movies where the action grows organically out of the story so you're not setting your watch by the next explosion. My theory on action movies is that they're like porn movies; a porn movie's got really bad writing, really bad acting, really thinly drawn characters and they have a scene where they sit there and say, "Hey I'm the milkman," and you know what's going to happen, and then you get the action, and then when the action's over you get another stupid scene, "Hey, I'm the mailman."

M: But nobody dies and that's the difference between porn movies and action movies! (laughs).

M: I'm feeling like I can. What I want to do is a character-driven porn movie. It's all going to be about the characters. And the porn's going to grow out the characters. And it's going to serve as character development. Actually Doug once said to me that he wanted us to be the first director actor team that made the porn version of the actual movie because you know how movie titles get porn titles? Doug suggested that after the first movie, he and I make The Porn Identity.

M: A ton of them, yeah. Well, I don't want to tell you because they were all smart moves on my part but I'd feel bad because somebody did do the movie and it did come out...

M: Nothing yet. Nothing I've ever regretted turning down.

M: No, I'm sick of those movies. I don't think there's a superhero I'd really want to play.

F: I'm very good because I convinced my publicist's assistant to shave his head and he just did it and I'm so happy, he looks so much better.

F: Because I got my hair cut yesterday (it’s short bob now) and because we have a really good hair guy…it's a free haircut from a really cool guy and so we decided to give each other advice: "You should do this too! You should do this too!" and all the girls agreed that he'd look so much hotter with his head shaved and he did.

F: Yeah. I like them but I've had this t-shirt for a long time.

F: Well, in the particular case of The Bourne Supremacy, it was bold. On the other hand I have to say, having part one in mind and seeing part two, when you think about the Brian Cox’s scenes like where he kills the guy…

F: Or I love the scene when Joan Allen comes into the office and he sits there and he's, you know, "I'm a patriot," and he blows off his head. It's just so drastic. There's a decision to be made; to have a 100 million dollar movie but break the rules by doing these very bold choices and I think it's part of the quality of the films that I like, that I appreciate. And I think Marie is a victim of that too. It's drastic but you don't see that a lot in these films. This is just that choice, to just do it, and that's what it's like in reality when people die all of a sudden, we don't want that. Why would we prepare the audience for that? It's even more drastic like that.

I had ideas and when I read it I didn't want to try and make my character bigger because I think it's really annoying and lame of actors to try to do that. But my idea was that I'd talk to the director and I was like, "This is what we should do, I think she should turn around the car and be like, 'You know I'm going to kill you because you're trying to kill what I love and if it's the last thing that I do...' and then have her die. But that's very much of the movie’s idea so ... I was a victim of myself. We talked about it and I liked Paul's thoughts about it. He said, "I don't think we should do that. That's really big and it's another big action sequence" and he explained it to me and it made sense so it's like, "Okay I guess I’ll be dead."

F: Not necessarily. I think if a producer or director can free your mind from clichés, not really. People act as if there's a book of rules out there: "This is what you have to do. You can't kill that. You have to take the hero and this is what has to happen." If you look at most movies they all seem to go by the same rules, they go over and over the same thing. You can tell immediately. If you have the handsome hero and then there's some beautiful woman, they're going to be fucking in 30 minutes from now and sure enough that's what they do. It's kind of boring, so predictable. I think since it's so obvious it should be easy to go against it and do it differently. To do it well is probably the hard part, always.

F: It depends on the person, how brave you are. It's not hard for Spike Jones to be like "Yeah there's an 8th and 1/2 floor. Yeah, they get spit out by the Jersey turnpike." You know if you have the right mindset, imagine, imagine spitting out Cameron Diaz and wonderful what's his name—

F: John Cusack, and he's like "Oh let's say they get spit out by the New Jersey turnpike." Can you imagine what people were saying, like, "Alright... What?!" But it's such an awesome film because it's not hard for Spike Jones to make those choices and surprise the audience.

F: There's no conscious choice of direction whatsoever. I just want to do good films, wherever they happen. I live in Berlin and the next three projects are very very different. I shoot a historic film based on a French novel ‘Therese Raquin’ in Prague with a majorly British team. Then I probably do a movie based on Michel Wehrbach's Pieces of Elements in Germany. And then I do Che with Soderberg and Benicio del Toro in Bolivia so it's really like a buffet of films.

F: It came from Terrence Malick who I have been friends with for a few years.

F: I met him through a mutual friend at a dinner and Terry was supposed to direct the film and now it's Steve Soderberg because Terry's doing something else.

F: The Motorcycle Diaries. No, I haven't seen it but I'm dying to see it. I love Gael Garcia Bernal. I know it's good.

F: Our movie will be different.

F: We're showing the anti-hero when they were in Bolivia. I just met this guy who was training Tanya, my character, and was leading the Cuban revolution in Bolivia with Che last week. He's this really amazing 70 year old Cuban man who lives in exile in Paris and he said, "It was the time a dream turned into a nightmare." And it's really very much about a group of men, all these men, all leaders themselves, sitting in the jungle, waiting, not knowing what to do. And Che Guevara, at the time, especially being up in La Paz, he had asthma and it was devastating, so it's more about that aspect of his life and leadership.

F: I don't know why that's in there. It's actually a mistake. It was a project that wouldn't get greenlit for a long long time and I ended up not being able to do it actually, unfortunately. I have no idea why that's in there. It happens all the time. These projects come along and I was very fond of it, it was a young, very young director, and it has been so long but they couldn't get the money together. These projects fall apart all the time.

F: (Laughs) It's not a pattern. Rarely I do. I sometimes do, but not in general.

F: I don't know. At work? It's been a very long time. Probably during Bourne Identity which we were shooting in Czechoslovakia, which is a good alternative to absinthe.

F: I do, but it doesn't help, my nervousness is not linked to alcohol.

F: No.

F: I'm scared of flying. Scared of ghosts? Well, if there was a ghost somewhere I could probably be scared.

F: Yeah.

F: I have rituals. I have mantras. I have good luck charms. I try only to fly Lufthansa because it has a good safety record. I mean, there's no logic when you're phobic I think.

F: No because then I think I could not react.

F: Matt is phobic of flying too and we would have these conversations all the time. He has an uncle who was a pilot so he would feed me with inside information, little details, and we can go on and on and on and on about it.

F: Well, again, there's no logic. In one way you want to know and then you come up with your own little weird stories just to calm your mind. In the end you can't know anything anyway. You build weird systems--"I have to fly a certain type of jet because they used to be military planes so you can pretty much land them anywhere." Something that you heard somewhere. It might not even be true. It might calm your mind, you know, and Matt said one thing, he said, "You know when you're on the airplane and these stewardesses press the buttons that go DING! Or DING DING! It means something like, 'I need a Coca Cola' and if they goes five times... Four times it's "take off your shoes and pray" and five times is like "that's it." So there are stories where it's "Ding, ding, ding" and we start sweating. Thank God I've never been in an extreme situation on a plane but when I go on a plane I feel a realistic 50% chance that I will not make it to the ground, which is really horrible.

F: Probably. I read about it and ...

F: Before 9/11 I flew in the cockpit all the time. I had no problem going up. I was "Listen, I'm totally scared, can I please sit with you?" I've taken off and landed with the pilots but now you can't do that.

F: I have to have all my senses, I can't.

F: It's a ring that I bought in a Jewish Museum Berlin, and it says in Hebrew "When if not now?" and I like that attitude.

F: Not career, life. You have all the career questions, trust me. I'm not about my career that much at all, I have no plans. It's not my major focus. I'm very lucky that a lot of things happened to me. I'm very cautious about it and I do care about it but ...

F: I don't like to talk about break-ups and relationships necessarily because I want to protect the people who are close to me, like intimate things, but …no it's not true. I talk about my feelings. I think journalists are sometimes just disappointed because they tell me, "You said that last year," and I'm thinking, "Well excuse me, the parameters for my life have not changed, isn't that a good thing?" You still look the same. You're still the same person. Sorry I can't put out any horrible stories. I have no problems talking about life in general and what interests me but I think talking about it in general is not a problem for me…I just don't take it so seriously. It's nice that we can talk about movies and find ourselves immersed in Bourne Supremacy and we can talk about anything.

F: I have not seen Fahrenheit 9/11 but I find him very polemic. I think he's not a journalist. I don't know how as journalists you would define it, but thank God he's on the right side because his movies have a tendency to be propaganda. I'm definitely with the side he's on and I think it's important to show this movie and I will probably go see the movie for the footage, but the information I would recommend you get from the New York Times or other magazines because, again, a proper journalistic documentary, to me, has to show all sides. You have to be objective. And what he does is not objective. He's polemic and he doesn't give you the choice. He edits together pieces, that is to me like tabloids. And again it's propaganda and he uses the same tools as the people he criticizes. And that to me is not really good in the end. Again, it's good that they have him and that people go see it but I'm critical about it.

F: Life and to manage it and balance. I would say it's 50/50. I'm turning 30 next week and like everybody else, just kind of trying to figure out how you balance work and life and I had a very busy and quite dark two years. I got out of a big relationship over two years ago that made me decide to move here for a while and hibernate. It was a pretty big deal not being in this relationship for a while. And I decided to go back to Germany where I live again and really appreciate it.

F: No. I feel like I've been 30 for a lot of years. Especially the last few years when I had to deal with a lot of things and I felt very restricted. In Germany at times it seems everything including myself has gotten so serious and like a one-way street. Everything was so perfect on the surface whereas I felt old, for the lack of a better word, and so grown up. Everything was so important always that I felt I couldn't breathe. And I think that's why sometimes I feel I'm 10 years older than I should be.

You always talk to so many strangers and everything always matters and you have to be so smart and amazing and I think when you're not stable in your private life it's really hard to be amazing and smart and witty at all times. You know exactly what I mean. Maybe you have a fight with your husband and then you have to go to a dinner and sparkle and everyone's "Oh, my God you look so great!" and you're "Thank you! I don't feel it!" And I felt like I had that constantly for a while.

F: I know so many people who have kids at a late age. So, no, not really.

F: Not in a new relationship yet, open for it, content, travelling, looking forward to work soon again. Pretty balanced.

F: I think so. And I also think what helped or what I realized, was that I would just do this for as long as I really like and as long as it challenges me and I realized that I can as well do something else. I'm not bitter about it at all. It's a good freedom in your head to know I would maybe be as happy going to university or maybe 30, that's where the number comes in, if you say it's kind of the middle of your life, apart from maybe having a family, maybe I can recreate my career, be a photographer--I don't have an interest in photography, I don't even know about going to university -- but I like to allow myself this freedom and maybe whatever interests me about acting that has to do with art can be answered walking different paths. I enjoy it but...

F: No, but I like that feeling.

F: Maybe he was joking. I don't recall that but sometimes we were so out of our minds in India and so brain dead that I might well have done. We were instructed and would just sit there sweating with a wig on my head. And nauseous. "Which scene again?"

F: Bolivia is going to be the first time.

F: Not younger than 30. But that's not a quality, right, that's a fact. Humour. Smart. Well-read. Confident. Curious. Courageous.