Filming in one of London’s busiest rail terminals was one of the many challenges facing producer Patrick Crowley and the crew on The Bourne Ultimatum.

Waterloo Station, near London’s South Bank, provides the bustling back-drop to a pivotal scene in the third instalment of the highly acclaimed Bourne series featuring Matt Damon, as former black ops assassin Jason Bourne, and Paddy Considine who plays a British investigative journalist.

Crowley, who has served as one of the producers on all three films, explains: “It’s a scene of incredible tension in which Paddy Considine’s character, who has some information about Jason Bourne, has come here to meet him and suddenly he finds people are here to kill him.

“And so it’s the growing awareness that he has been targeted in a public place like this with all the noise and all the faces and the fear that there is someone who is walking towards you and you don’t know whether that’s the person who is trying to kill you. Jason Bourne is trying to help him stay alive and Waterloo is a great place to set up that kind of tension.”

It is indeed, but it also presented a logistical nightmare for the Bourne crew as they filmed on the concourse of one of the busiest railway stations in Europe – more than 1.2 million passengers use it every week – with commuters rushing on to and off of trains all around them.

“It’s as difficult as we expected and anytime that you do a sequence like this in a large public place in which you have a certain amount of control you have to anticipate there will be problems and that it will be tough going,” says Crowley.

“You cannot close the station down, so you have to live with the people who are coming to use the trains. We are restricted to shoot between 10am and 4pm, which is essentially when the rush hour is over. There are a lot of people anyway – and a lot who have just come by to watch the filming.”

The sequence will be well worth the effort, he adds. And anyway, the Bourne crew are battle hardened veterans of exotic and unusual locations which, over the three films, has taken them from Russia to Germany, to Goa and to Tangier and many other places, too.

Crowley believes that these far flung destinations are an essential part of the appeal of the films.

“When we do audience evaluations and ask them the things they like about the movie, usually in the top three is that they like the locations,” he says. “And I think it’s particularly American audiences.

“And we don’t do the picture postcard version of places. If you see the Eiffel Tower in our movie it’s deliberately really small in the background. I think when people watch the Bourne films they feel like it’s an insiders look into places that they don’t go to.”

Another Bourne tradition is the way that the creative team – the producers, director Paul Greengrass, Matt Damon and the writers – are always prepared to make last minute adaptations to the story if necessary.

The end of the last film, The Bourne Supremacy, is a good example. The closing scenes feature Jason Bourne spying on secret service boss Pamela Landy (Joan Allen) in what was regarded as a superb ending to the film.

But Crowley revealed that those scenes were a last minute addition, filmed just a few weeks before the film went on general release in America.

“The Bourne movies are constantly being re-written. Constantly. And Paul (Greengrass) is always looking for a better way to do a sequence. He is very relaxed about approaching something from a different angle and that means you might have to re-write it or re-stage it. Right now I’m changing stuff every day.”

Crowley’s producing credits include Sleepless in Seattle, Legends of the Fall and Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle as well as all three of the Bourne movies. This interview was conducted on location at Waterloo Station, London.

Q: You’re here filming in Waterloo, one of London’s busiest railway stations. What’s that like?
PC: It’s as difficult as we expected and anytime that you do a sequence like this in a large public place in which you have a certain amount of control you have to anticipate there will be problems and that it will be tough going. You cannot close the station down so you have to live with the people who are coming to use the trains. We are restricted to shoot between 10am and 4pm, which is essentially when the rush hour is over. There are a lot of people anyway – and a lot who have just come by to watch the filming.

Q: How do you deal with that?
PC: You can get some shots where one person is just looking at the camera but sometimes you just get a whole bunch of people staring right at the camera. And the difference between this movie and when we did The Bourne Supremacy is that now everybody has cell phone cameras so you just look and you see 20 people taking pictures. At least, if they had them before they weren’t as common as they are now. This first assistant director is the guy who is in charge of making sure it runs smoothly in a place like this and he is doing a great job. And he has just come off of two and a half weeks shooting in Tangier.

Q: A different set of problems, I’m sure, in Tangier. What was that like?
PC: Nearly impossible because we were filming there during Ramadan and when people don’t have the ability to eat, don’t drink and smoke cigarettes – if they are cigarette smokers – by the end of the day the last thing they are interested in doing is cooperating with a film crew. We were shooting in these little narrow streets and at times it was almost impossible. And sometimes what you have to do is say ‘OK, we’re all going to move over here’ and stick one camera and put it over on the side and then we will send the actor and the rest of the crew off in a different direction. And sometimes we actually stage what looks like a scene somewhere else when we are actually filming in another area.

Q: Like a decoy?
PC: Yes. But you know, what can you expect? You are in a busy public place. You get incredible production value in a place like this (Waterloo Station).

Q: What’s the scene you are shooting here in Waterloo?
PC: It’s a scene of incredible tension in which Paddy Considine’s character, a journalist who has some information about Jason Bourne, has come here to meet him and suddenly he finds people are here to kill him. And so it’s the growing awareness that he has been targeted in a public place like this with all the noise and all the faces and the fear that there is someone who is walking towards you and you don’t know whether that’s the person who is trying to kill you. Jason Bourne is trying to help him stay alive and Waterloo is a great place to set up that kind of tension.

Q: How many cameras do you have here?
PC: We have four or five.

Q: Was one of the reasons you picked this station because of the natural light?
PC: It made a difference. I don’t know enough about all the London train stations but this one has more natural light than most. But it was more because of its size, it’s vast.

Q: In what way was filming in Tangier challenging?
PC: Well, as I’ve said it was Ramadan. And we had one time when we were filming and the police about a block away had clamped someone’s car and this guy got very upset and he attacked them and then the police grabbed him and started dragging him up the street. And they realised the safest place to drag him was where the film crew was because we had our own police and security and so they started dragging this guy essentially across our set. And there were about 300 or 400 people, mostly men, who were watching the filming and this guy is struggling with the police and suddenly this whole crowd starts to come alive. And we are looking at our shot and all of a sudden we see 300 people with some guy in the middle and a cop is running in the other direction and we were like ‘oh my God! What’s happening?’ We didn’t know how bad it was going to be, if they were upset with us filming there. It took two or three hours to figure out that it didn’t have anything to do with our show. Anytime you’re outside your world and something spontaneous like that happens, particularly in this day and age, you are going ‘is there a problem? Are we in trouble? Is somebody going to get hurt?’

Q: How would you define the style of the Bourne films?
PC: Doug Liman, who directed The Bourne Identity, set the original style of the films and the easiest way to define them is through Jason Bourne - because he has lost his memory, we wanted to use the camera subjectively to see things happen to him the same time he experiences them. Often times you’ll find if Jason Bourne goes into a room the camera comes into the room behind him. A more Hollywood configuration would be you are in the room, the actor comes in and you see him come in. With our films, you go into a room and there is somebody threatening him there and you are watching it with him. You are watching it happen to Jason as if it’s for the first time. In the first movie, when he had no memory at all, that was very significant - you saw exactly what he saw and the audience gets closer to his character because of that. And that has to do with the hand held style, how you place a camera in a scene. We usually have one hand held camera and then another camera which will be on a long lens and it will be on a dolly track, gong back and forth, giving us pieces to cut with.

Q: It’s a style that some other films now seem to imitate..
PC: The style is very freeform, very chaotic and a lot of people seem to like it, a lot of people feel really comfortable with it. And you have begun to see in the four or five years since we did the first one that there are a lot of other shows that are adopting this, not because of us necessarily, but that’s the style they are using.

Q: What sort of action sequences can we expect in The Bourne Ultimatum?
PC: Tangier was very tricky and I can’t give too much away but basically Bourne has to rescue somebody in Tangier. Someone is in trouble and he has to get through the Medina in order to save that person, so it’s a very elaborate construction. We had a cable cam shot in which we built two towers and had 100 metres of cable running between the two. Then we have a remote controlled camera on the cable and it goes up to 30mph as Bourne is running along the rooftops.

Q: Will there be more Jason Bourne films after The Bourne Ultimatum?
PC: I don’t know exactly what will happen with Jason Bourne. After we did the second one everybody said ‘will there be a third?’ but you generally wait to see how the movie performs at the box office. So if the movie performs well, the studio says ‘we’re going to do another one.’ And you usually have a couple of years between the movies so they aren’t coming out like a television show every year so that usually gives you enough time to do it. And you know, you have to ask if Matt wants to do another one? Would we do it without Matt? I don’t know that Paul would necessarily want to do another one. He’s a really good director and directors usually want to do something different, a different style, and a different subject matter.

Q: How many crew do you have working on The Bourne Ultimatum?
PC: It depends if you have a second unit going at the same time. Today it would be about 220 and if you had a second unit you can add another 80. And then you have office staff and carpenters building the next set so there’s constantly peaks and valleys in terms of that. This is a labour intensive set, we have a lot of people to control things. But sometimes you can send out a splinter unit with ten people.
We did that last time in Naples. It was a sequence where Bourne was on a boat going into Naples where he got off the boat, and we sent ten people down there with Frank Marshall and he directed that. And when we do audience evaluations and ask them the things they like about the movie, usually in the top three is that they like the locations. And I think it’s particularly American audiences. And we don’t do the picture postcard version of places. If you see the Eiffel Tower in our movie it’s deliberately really small in the background. I think when people watch the Bourne stuff they feel like it’s an insiders look into places that they don’t go to – because very few Americans travel, it’s like only 8 per cent of Americans have passports and they just love the locations we go to.

Q: Do you think Bourne encouraged Bond to change style?
PC: Martin Campbell is a friend of mine! [Laughs] Martin loves the Bourne movies. He thinks they are great. But he also has a different audience to satisfy. Watching a Bond movie is a different experience – the gadget and the toys. It’s a perfectly valid genre and who else has done it better than they have? They have made it attractive for 23 films. More power to them and in the market place you can certainly have both.