Director Tony Gilroy waits for Actor Jeremy Renner to arrive on the red carpet for the premiere of "The Bourne Legacy" in Sydney, Australia, Tuesday, Aug. 7, 2012.Rob Griffith/The Associated Press
'I have well documented issues with authority," says scriptwriter Tony Gilroy. "I'm a good boss, but a bad employee." Screenwriters seldom throw their weight around, but the writer was engaged in a creative tug of war that lasted a decade before he took over directing duties for Bourne 4, The Bourne Legacy, which opens today. He didn't want the first Bourne, The Bourne Identity, and was reluctant to meet director Doug Liman.
"For one thing, Liman passed on a script I was dying to make."
But Liman came to Gilroy, visiting New York. Civil at first, the screenwriter ultimately rewarded Liman's pilgrimage with scorn. "This script is an absolute piece of shit," Gilroy blurted. "You've got this guy with amnesia, but you're not milking the set-up ... Have him learn who he is by what he does. Here's this American kid, in trouble, but what if the things he learns he knows how to do are bad – what if what he is is a really good killer?"
Liman said he'd talk to star Brad Pitt. Days later, Gilroy came home to a dozen phone messages. Pitt was in. The combative screenwriter had a job. Gilroy would write every instalment of the $1 billion-grossing (U.S.) Bourne trilogy.
Along the way, he'd also get into as many fights as foggy foreign-service agent, Jason Bourne.
Pitt was replaced by Matt Damon. Gilroy and Liman tangled. Gilroy was fired. Damon threatened to quit. Gilroy returned. The screenwriter campaigned for British director Paul Greengrass to replace Gilroy, but had trouble with him, too.
Though often frustrated (he has a drawer of unmade movies), Gilroy has managed to a create singular body of work that draws on 1970s liberal paranoia films, movies like Marathon Man and Klute, and connects them to the modern action thriller.
Gilroy's Proof of Life, with Russell Crowe, the Bourne movies and State of Play deal with brooding, reluctant men of action drawn into a vortex of corporate and government espionage. No one is trustworthy; everyone is expendable.
The last bit could describe Hollywood. And Gilroy concedes his most personal (and paranoid!) work, Michael Clayton, the story of a legal fixer, is autobiographical. (He also directed the movie.) Aside from acknowledged work, Gilroy has made a good livelihood out of anonymously doctoring troubled films for a reported $250,000 a week.
"At first, I was unaware how much I identified with Michael Clayton," Gilroy says. "Here is a guy who missed the right exit and never became who he wanted; now he's a facilitator, never achieving ownership of anything. I know that guy. I made Michael Clayton at the last possible moment I'd be trusted to direct a movie."
It took Gilroy five years to finance Michael Clayton.
"There is a reason my work feels like seventies movies," he says. "That's the decade I was trying to be a rock 'n' roll guitarist, living in Boston. Days I took in double and triple bills at rep theatres: Bogart movies, but also Klute, The Parallax View; those movies made me a filmmaker."
Gilroy becomes incredulous when asked if the spooks in the American machine that appear in his movies are fanciful.
"Oh my God," he says, "read Dana Priest's recent 'Top Secret America' in The Washington Post. In the post 9-11 world, there are 800,000 secret operatives in America … a growing, dangerous and real military intelligence aristocracy."
That's Tony Gilroy, the hell-bent, 1970s-style messenger of the apocalypse speaking. But there is a reason he has been able to find work in modern Hollywood.
"I'd never start a film saying, 'I'm going to write a story about corporate malfeasance,'" he says. "My movies are about entertaining audiences; something cool happening every minute. Themes are sub-atomic."
Michael Clayton's success allowed producers to entrust Gilroy with writing and directing the Bourne-less, The Bourne Legacy.
"Not having Matt Damon back makes it easier," Gilroy says. "[Jeremy Renner's] Aaron Cross has none of Bourne's demons. He is the next step, a chemically altered warrior. This isn't sci-fi; we're in the crude infancy of engineered soldiers."
And how did the screenwriter who fought two Bourne directors deal with writing and directing ? Did he beat himself up?
"No," Gilroy laughs. "I would have, but I hired my brother [screenwriter Dan Gilroy] to help with the script. I knew I could count on my brother to tell me when I'm full of shit."