Heist! Stakes

TWENTY-TWO YEARS AFTER THE BOURNE IDENTITY, MATT DAMON AND DOUG LIMAN REUNITE ON THE INSTIGATORS, A MIDNIGHT RUN-INSPIRED ACTION COMEDY ABOUT TWO WANNABE CRIMINALS FAILING UPWARDS. TOTAL FILM JOINS THE BOURNE-AGAIN DUO, AS WELL AS CO-STARS CASEY AFFLECK AND HONG CHAU, FOR THE HEIST-GONE-WRONG OF THE CENTURY.

- JORDAN FARLEY

Doug Liman is diligently scouring a brimming set of shelves in his airy New York loft, searching for an important artefact to show Total Film. Just as he’s about to give up, he finds it – a framed illustration from a May 2002 Wall Street Journal story about

the chaotic production of the same year’s The Bourne Identity. The caricatured art depicts the director and Bourne star Matt Damon maniacally pushing the plunger on a detonator in order to blow up a pile of cash, to the horror of an onlooking studio suit.

‘The last time I worked with Matt, we were basically kids being yelled at constantly by the authority figures in Hollywood,’ Liman says with the grin of a man who has walked through fire and wears the scars with pride. ‘I had a moment on The Instigators when I was like: “Holy shit, there’s no studio boss. This is for Matt and Ben [Affleck]’s company. How did this happen, that we are now the adults in the room?”’

Hailing from Artists Equity, the production company Damon and Affleck set up in November 2022 to give creatives a greater stake in the filmmaking process, The Instigators is a two-decades-overdue reunion for Damon and Liman. The pair went in ‘different directions’ after Identity, but had always been looking for the right project to reunite on.

‘Doug – unfairly at times – has been labelled as somebody who is too reckless with the budget,’ Damon says, speaking to Total Film over Zoom from New York, with his fellow Instigator Casey Affleck sitting beside him. ‘I don’t think there’s a stronger signal you can send to the Hollywood community than to say my own salary and Doug’s salary are on the line [if we go over budget], because they were on this film. That’s how much I trust him and his process.’

Damon calls Liman the ‘obvious choice’ for the film, in part because of his precise control of tone. An action comedy in the mould of Midnight Run