Philippine STAR Exclusive: Bourne again: On the set in Manila

MANILA, Philippines - Manila has texture.” That’s what director Tony Gilroy — here filming The Bourne Legacy on a side street near the intersection of EDSA and Taft Avenue on a Sunday in February — is calling his surroundings. All we can see is a dark alleyway, piles of junk, people pouring out of LRT exits laden with plastic bags, eating hotdogs and fishballs, Ronald McDonald mascots jutting absurdly next to manhole covers, bus conductors fanning folded 20-peso bills while waving on passengers.

All around, signs battle for your attention: Sogo Hotel (“So Clean… So Good!”) next to Dunkin’ Donuts, Goldilocks next to Western Union, East jostling with West. Perfect chaos.

“You can look all over Asia, other countries, and you won’t find this kind of natural texture,” the director of the latest Bourne entry beams.

Think: If Gilroy had to film The Bourne Legacy in Indonesia or Malaysia instead of here, he would have had to spend millions to construct such texture — or import it from Manila!

We are fortunate enough not only to shake hands with Gilroy (thanks to Louis Changchien, the affable Taiwanese-Japanese actor based in New York who plays a villain in the movie; he’s a friend of a friend of director Marie Jamora) in a dirty alleyway that will very soon have a police car screeching down it, but to spend a day on his set, right here in the “texture” capital of Manila: Taft Avenue.

The location is key to some high-altitude, fast-paced action sequences: there’s a concrete overpass leading to Metro Point Mall, all the better for actors Jeremy Renner and Rachel Weisz to leap off of and land on the roof of a commuter bus. And there’s a kind of natural chaos to the location that can’t be faked: not even the cordoned-off extras, told when to cross the street when the cameras roll, can disguise the true “texture” that exists here 24/7.

Scott suggests as much to director Gilroy: “You guys are doing a great job of blending in.” Gilroy shoots him a look not unlike David Strathairn’s eagle stare in the earlier Bourne movies as he ponders whether Scott’s being sarcastic. Like maybe he’s joking, and his mostly Caucasian crew — dressed in typical expat gear of khaki shorts and T-shirts or polos — doesn’t really “blend in” at all. But Scott swears he was being sincere! He literally could not tell the production design from the actual street chaos all around us. That’s what he calls “blending in.” And that’s what director Gilroy calls “texture.”

Gilroy, who scripted the previous Bourne trilogy and directed Michael Clayton, motions towards the spot his director’s chair is parked in. As one director to another, he invites Marie and us to watch the dailies with him as they happen on the movie monitors. We’re privileged to meet the crew — director of photography Robert Elswit (who also worked on previous Bourne movies, not to mention P.T. Anderson movies from Boogie Nights to There Will Be Blood), second unit director Dan Bradley, who informs us his early production experience was on “a little movie called Reanimator” (which of course raises several whoops of appreciation) — and to actually sit and watch the monitors as Gilroy prowls the scene being shot, which involves Louis commandeering a police car after the cop steps out to yell at a swerving bus driver. (The kind of stuff that happens at this intersection about 60 times a day, in other words, even without a film crew capturing it.)

Elswit fills us in: “Today, we’re filming one of our big Bourne climaxes — but today, it’s in Manila! You’ve never seen Manila shot as Manila — they always pretend it’s someplace else.” We watch the crew set up the shot a half dozen times; the assistants release a stream of Manila “extras” who saunter across the scene toward the LRT; each take is subtly different, per Gilroy’s expert view, and it’s reshot for about an hour.

Louis, who is perhaps best known for his role as “that Asian guy with a katana” in Predators, has a double on the set — a dead ringer — but he’s also trained to do some of his own stunts, and at one point we’re surprised to see him climb out of the cop car after it comes to a screeching halt. He shrugs and smiles.

We get to chat with Gilroy’s wife Susan, who is happy to be traveling with her husband during the Asian shoot. She declares the Philippines “lovely,” though we doubt she’d say the same for this gritty street corner.

All this would be mere squalor, a study in poverty porn for the commercial masses, if Gilroy and Elswit seemed like they meant to portray the Philippines in the worst possible light. They don’t.

“I promise you, this will be the first movie shot in Manila that will truly say it’s Manila,” Elswit says. He notes that many films in the past have been shot here — even back to the Roger Corman-AIP grindhouse flicks of the ‘70s — but the locales are never identified as such. Just as Filipino martial arts have a secret, unspoken identity in so many action flicks (including the Bourne movies), Manila rarely, if ever, gets its day in the sun. This time, whether the light is flattering or not, it will, Elswit promises.

When we meet the director, Marie has a little gift for him: several pirated DVD versions of Michael Clayton from our local streets, each with different cover artwork — one of them seems to feature a gory photo from Saw 4 instead of Clooney’s face. Gilroy seems tickled by this. Marie lets on that she’s directing hhttp://beta.philstar.com/new/cms/frame.aspxer first feature. “We have 15 days of shooting,” she mentions. “Fifteen?” Gilroy raises an eyebrow. “What day are we shooting?” he asks an assistant. “88!”

Welcome to Hollywood.

The Bourne crew, as we get to mingle with them, are nothing short of professional and patient — never mind the heat, the endless throng of rubberneckers, the continuous traffic horns that seem to send the sound guy into his own private hell. These guys are shooting in down-and-dirty spots (like right outside our STAR offices, in front of the tiangges a week or so later) but also in Palawan and other beauteous locales. The cast and crew, according to Louis, had just finished a bit of R&R in Amanpulo before setting down in Manila again (there, they were treated like kings and queens, with stars Renner and Weisz given their own private cottages); the day after EDSA-Taft, they will fly over to Palawan to shoot beach scenes based around the Miniloc and Lagen resorts.

According to Candy Bernardo, the local wardrobe assistant for The Bourne Legacy, it’s been one hectic but friendly set. She fulfilled one personal dream — Ed Norton, her idol, dropped trou in front of her during a fitting — and also met Daniel Craig, Weisz’s hubby, on the set. She said Norton was warm, easy to talk to, and knowledgeable about travel in Asia.

We stick around until they wrap for the day, and at one point Gilroy casts a baleful eye at the clear blue skies: “We were hoping for overcast,” he says, to match the skies in the previous days’ shoots.

When Marie leaves the set, Gilroy tells her where to find Bourne Legacy producers Frank Marshall (who works with Steven Spielberg) and Patrick Crowley (producer of Sleepless in Seattle): chilling out in the Hotel Sogo lobby, where she warily approaches them to sign DVD copies of The Goonies and Sleepless in Seattle.

As we leave the set, passing up the LRT stairs through the Metro Point Mall, we have our own Bourne moment: Therese is toting presents for the big-name actors, who we happen to spot as we head through a narrow passageway to the parking lot: there’s Renner, seated in wraparound sunglasses, behind a flood of movie lights and a blockade of security people. And as Scott stands near a fishball stand, there is Rachel Weisz, in a black tank top, talking with a crewmember in front of him. His natural instincts compel him to draw a camera from his pocket and aim it at the star; a burly Pinoy security guy convinces him otherwise. Therese meanwhile spots director Gilroy, who, despite being obviously busy, is nice enough to approach us again, and she somehow convinces him to pass the gift bag — a special local-flavored shirt from Bench — along to Renner. We are then instructed to move along, as they prepare to shoot a chase sequence right inside the busy mall (a sequence that didn’t make the final cut). Therese looks up at Renner; Renner waves at her, shouts “Thank you!”, then smiles, from behind those dark glasses, which makes Therese instantly light up. Emboldened, she reaches for her camera, but Gilroy seems to possess a sixth sense about these situations. “Not a good idea,” he says, shaking his head. And we move on into the rushing crowd.