MATT DAMON DAREDEVIL CAR CHASE

Matt Damon has a car chase in The Bourne Ultimatum that rivals The French Connection.

One of the greatest movie car chases of all time hit the mother lode with The French Connection placing the chase amidst traffic and pedestrians on the streets of New York, until The Bourne Ultimatum.

As Jason Bourne Matt Damon gets behind the wheel of an NYPD Ford Crown Victoria crashing and careening through highways and Manhattan’s side streets in a chase that rivals Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle’s pursuit of the bad guys. And for the most part Matt did the driving.

“That’s one of the things about the action that people like with these films is that there isn’t any green screen, there isn’t any CGI. People are really doing all of these things. And it makes it real because it is real. It is me in the car slamming into other cars. Granted my steering wheel is disconnected and being driven by somebody else and there’s a stunt driver in the other car but the cars are slamming into each other though it’s totally safe. For me audiences can sense that and audiences are so smart now. You can’t really get away with much so that’s why we just train and train and practice and practice and really do the stuff.”

Matt could do some of the less dangerous maneuvers but owes it all to the stunt men who make him look good.

“And the best way to make you believe that I’m Jason Bourne is to be doing as many of these stunts as possible. So the challenge to the stunt guys is to try to put me in as many of these things whether it’s training me on how to do a fight, doing extra training driving a car so that I could do a 180 and go into reverse. All those things are just challenges to a stunt team to take a dippy actor and try to put him in all these scenarios which he actually comes off looking good. And believe me that’s a big challenge.”

The challenge to find Jason Bourne in The Bourne Ultimatum begins Friday.