THE BOURNE LEGACY – Production Notes - I Watch Mike

“We did a lot of scouting by helicopter,” recalls
Thompson, whose locations included remote
mountaintops, a frozen lake and a riverbank beside
which his crew could build a log cabin, a heavily
wooded area and a waterfall. “We looked all over
Canada and found most everything within a 30-minute
radius of Kananaskis.”
One element of the Canadian shoot remained a
wild card: snow. “Our location manager, who’s done
a million movies there, said, ‘I can’t guarantee you
that there’s going to be any snow,’” Crowley recalls.
“So we had snow machines standing by, and we were
ready to make our own.” But the Bourne crew enjoyed
some luck: Plenty of snow arrived just in time for the
shoot. “The day after we left, there was a warm wind
called a Chinook that came through and melted all the
snow,” he adds. “We didn’t hear about it until about a
month afterward…and I’m kind of glad we didn’t hear
about it until then.”
The Bourne Legacy opens with an echo of the
image that introduced Jason Bourne to filmgoers in
The Bourne Identity: seen from below, a man floats
motionless in water. However, unlike Bourne, who had
been left to drown in the Mediterranean Sea in the first
film, Aaron Cross is uninjured. After a brief moment
of stillness, Cross reveals his incredible stamina: He
has deliberately submerged himself in frigid waters in
order to retrieve a canister left for him at the base of a
freezing waterfall.
To shoot this scene, the filmmakers did everything
they could to keep their lead actor safe in the cold
water. “We were concerned from the very first time
that we saw the location,” says Crowley. “Even for just
going in to his waist, we had a helicopter bring a hot tub
there. We had a dry room that was heated. We had an
ambulance standing by, and we had three or four people
on the set whose specialty was hypothermia.”
The initial plan was to shoot only part of the scene
in Canada, with Renner in a full wet suit and in the cold
water only up to his waist. However, just before rolling,
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Renner removed the wet suit’s top. “He said, ‘Are you
guys really ready?’” remembers Crowley. “And we
said ‘Yup,’ and he said, ‘Okay, let’s do it.’” As cameras
rolled in below-freezing temperatures, a bare-chested
Renner dunked himself into the icy water for a shot of
Cross emerging. Fortunately, Gilroy and his DP got the
shot in one take.
Renner was game for the challenge. He recalls:
“Cold is cold. If it’s 39 or 29, it doesn’t matter.” He
was more unnerved that there was no way to acclimate
himself to the experience without simply going through
it. “That’s why I was so stressed about it. How do you
prepare? I can prepare for a jump or a stunt. I can work
out or do whatever stretch. But with this, you just go get
cold. That’s it. You have to mentally go there.” Turns out
that the water’s bark was worse than its bite. “Actually
it wasn’t so bad; it was so bad up to the moment.”
Cross is capable of supreme agility and endurance.