People: He’s just a born pacifist
Matt Damon‘s Jason Bourne seemingly never met a man whose neck he couldn’t break.
But as the son of an academic specializing in nonviolent conflict resolution and the father of a year-old girl, Damon is selective about the sort of screen violence he’ll participate in.
He’s back for a third time as the amnesiac former assassin in “The Bourne Ultimatum.”
The character returns to his roots to find out how he became a killing machine so he can finally put that life behind him.
From his mother, a professor of early-childhood development, Damon, 36, was indoctrinated from an early age to look for ways to avoid the sort of altercations that are part of daily life for Bourne.
“Violence is part of the human condition,” he says. “The question is: Are you desensitizing people to violence by what you’re showing?
“The reason I’m allowed to do this movie and still have a relationship with my mother is because the character bears the responsibility for his actions … and you see the price that he pays for the life that he’s chosen to lead.”
Damon and his wife had a daughter in June 2006. Fatherhood has him thinking about doing a children’s film, something he could show his daughter – unlike the “Bourne” flicks, which he said “she’s not going to see for quite a while.”
Becoming a parent also has reinforced the values that have guided Damon in choosing roles in general.
“Those are the kinds of things where I say, ‘Well, do I want my daughter exposed, knowing that her dad makes movies like this or that?’ ” he says.
“There are so many movies that drive my mom just totally crazy, because there are these thousands of acts of violence,” Damon adds. “The movies are rated PG-13, but the toys are marketed to ages 4 and up.
“So you get these kids who are just getting pounded by this imagery from a very young age. I don’t want to be a part of that.”
With his boyish face, Damon did not seem a likely choice to play an action hero when he was cast as Robert Ludlum‘s memory-challenged terminator in 2002’s “The Bourne Identity.”
“I kind of just react to whatever’s out there, and this was definitely the best script that was out there,” he says.
“It was this kind of movie that I hadn’t really pictured myself being offered but had pictured myself doing, had hoped that I’d be able to do.”
Ludlum’s “Bourne” books were set amid the Cold War, but Damon says the movie adaptations reflect our current world.
Though the Iraq war is not explicitly mentioned, Bourne’s actions and revelations serve as a commentary on those events, he says.
“It’s this guy who has done these horrible things, but now we see he thought he was doing them for the right reasons at the time he did them, but he realizes he was sold a bill of goods,” Damon says.
“So that’s very much a movie for today.”
The birthday bunch
Jazz bassist Charlie Haden is 70. Actress Catherine Hicks (“Seventh Heaven”) is 56. Actor Jeremy Ratchford (“Cold Case”) is 42. Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan (“The Sixth Sense”) is 37. Actress Merrin Dungey (“Summerland,” “Alias”) is 36. Singer Geri “Ginger Spice” Halliwell (Spice Girls) is 35. Actress Soleil Moon Frye (“Sabrina The Teenage Witch,” “Punky Brewster”) is 31.