Role: Noah Vosen
Filming: October, 2006 - March, 2007 (New York City, London, Madrid, Paris)
U.S. Release: August 3, 2007
Director: Paul GreengrassTHE BOURNE ULTIMATUM SOUNDTRACK!
(See Press Release)Synopsis: All he wanted was to disappear. Instead, Jason Bourne is now hunted by the people who made him what he is. Having lost his memory and the one person he loved, he is undeterred by the barrage of bullets and a new generation of highly-trained killers. Bourne has only one objective: to go back to the beginning and find out who he was. Now, in the new chapter of this espionage series, Bourne will hunt down his past in order to find a future. He must travel from Moscow, Paris, Madrid and London to Tangier and New York City as he continues his quest to find the real Jason Bourne--all the while trying to outmaneuver the scores of cops, federal officers and Interpol agents with him in their crosshairs.
Cast:
Matt Damon ... Jason Bourne
Joan Allen ... Pamela Landy
Julia Stiles ... Nicky
David Strathairn .... Noah Vosen
Paddy Considine ... Ross
Edgar Ramirez ... Paz
Favorite Quotes:
• "Jesus Christ...that's Jason Bourne." - Noah Vosen
• Noah Vosen: "When we're finished with Daniels, send the asset after her. We find Parsons, we find Bourne."
Pamela Landy: "Noah, what are you doing?"
Noah Vosen: "Not now."
Pamela Landy: "I want to know what's going on."
Noah Vosen: "I said not now!"
Pamela Landy: "What basis are you continuing this operation on?"
Noah Vosen: "The basis that Nicky Parsons has compromised a covert operation. She is up to her neck in this."
Pamela Landy: "This is about Daniels, not Nicky!"
Noah Vosen: "She has betrayed us."
Pamela Landy: "You don't know the circumstances, Noah."
Noah Vosen: "She's in league with Jason Bourne, for Christ's sake!"
Pamela Landy: "You do not have the authority to kill her!"
Noah Vosen: "Oh yes I do! And you had better get on board."
Pamela Landy: "Noah, she's one of us. You start down this path, where does it end?"
Noah Vosen: "It ends when we've won."
• Noah Vosen: [in car, on cell phone] "Perhaps we can arrange a meet."
Jason Bourne: "Where are you now?"
Noah Vosen: "I'm sitting in my office."
Jason Bourne: "I doubt that."
Noah Vosen: "Why would you doubt that?"
Jason Bourne: "If you were in your office right now we'd be having this conversation face-to-face." [hangs up]
Notes:
• David's scenes were shot in London in December, 2006 through June, 2007 in New York City.
• David plays the leading agent, Noah Vosen, of a secret operation called Blackbriar which is hunting for Bourne (Matt Damon). For detailed script information, as well more indepth details on David's character, visit Latino Review.
• The Bourne Ultimatum is the third film of the successful spy franchise series based on the Robert Ludlum novels.
• The Bourne Ultimatum broke the series' previous blockbuster record with $70.2 million in its opening weekend. This also marked the biggest August opening in film history, as well as the highest-grossing film of David's career (which, previously, had been The Firm).
• David previously starred in Speakeasy, which was produced by Matt Damon's company Project Greenlight. He also previously worked with co-star Joan Allen in the TV movie Without Warning: The James Brady Story.
Production Notes:
(Excerpt from Universal Pictures Press Release:)
• David Strathairn was approached to play Vosen, who operates the umbrella black-ops program of Blackbriar. Crowley, who first worked with Strathairn on L.A. Confidential, notes that the filmmakers were interested in Strathairn because his "strength comes from his softness. There's a depth of intelligence that he brings to whatever he's doing."
Strathairn was eager to become part of the Bourne players. Of his agency, he explains, "Blackbriar is an operation whose primary responsibility is to gather information and take action against a previous threat. Vosen is part of--and maybe even responsible for--this operation formed to perpetuate what Treadstone put in motion."
Posters:
Copyright Universal Pictures.
Critical Praise & Commentary:
• "...there are newcomers, most notably David Strathairn as a dazzlingly oleaginous New York honcho." -Amy Biancolli, The Houston Chronicle
• "David Strathairn joins the cast as CIA bigwig Noah Vosen. Strathairn performs well as the detestable man in charge who is out for Bourne's blood." -Rachel Buccicone, The Lantern
• "...a high-ranking CIA bad guy (the menacing David Straitharn)..." -Bob Driver, Tampa Bay Newspapers
• "Bourne has an excellent foil in a new character, Noah Vosen (David Strathairn), head of a CIA "black-ops" program called Blackbriar. He's a boob, but a boob with the niftiest surveillance technology, a green light to assassinate anyone who might expose him, and the Nixonian certainty that everyone wants to. Being cast as Ed Murrow was the best thing that ever happened to font color="#660000">Strathairn. He was always good but a little lightweight. Now he has gravitas Americanas. When the cool, sensible, Bourne-ophilic Pamela Landy (Joan Allen) tells Vosen he doesn't have the authority to kill another CIA agent, font color="#660000">Strathairn rises up on his high horse and sputters, "Oh yes I do!" And it's obvious he's right: He has an A-list ham's executive privilege." -David Edelstein, New York Magazine
• "...David Strathairn is mesmerising." -The Evening Post
• "...CIA Deputy Director Noah Vosen (David Strathairn in a role about as far removed from Good Night and Good Luck as you can get), to bring Bourne down." -Jenny Fallon, ABC Alice Springs
• "As Bourne gets closer to the answers about his identity, he faces off against a government agent (David Strathairn, being really bad) who wants to kill Bourne before letting him uncover secrets." -Bob Grimm, Tucson Weekly
• "The always reliable, can-do-any-genre David Strathairn is equally on target." -Caroline Kepnes, E!
• "It couldn't have been easy to step into the slippery shoes of Chris Cooper (who played the bad guy in 2002's The Bourne Identity) and Brian Cox (who took over the ruthless honors in 2004's The Bourne Supremacy), but David Strathairn (Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck) proves himself more than up to the task in Paul Greengrass' brilliant concluding chapter of the trilogy, The Bourne Ultimatum. As a CIA boss who regards himself as above the law, Strathairn wears impeccably tailored clothes and a silver mane, and he rarely raises his voice--he's like Meryl Streep's Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada, except even more deadly." -Christopher Kelly, Star-Telegram
• "Strathairn stands out as the evil Vosen, a bureaucrat who has stumbled upon absolute power and is perfectly happy to let it corrupt him. There's an undercurrent of fussiness to his character--watch him order the "heart-healthy omelette" at a breakfast strategy meeting--but he also has a hard edge and obviously spends time in front of a mirror practising his CIAspeak. 'The asset is diverting,' he's told at a crucial moment, and responds crisply: 'Let it play.'" -Chris Knight, The National Post
• "...franchise newcomer David Strathairn (an Oscar-nominee for Good Night, and Good Luck) cold-heartedly plays the black-ops leader who vows to take him down once and for all." -Scott Mantz
• "A low-key Strathairn proves mightily effective in an against-type turn as the quietly seething heavy..." -Todd McCarthy, Variety
• "Strathairn comes into his own in the picture's final act, as Vosen's mounting fury at Bourne's ability to elude every killer he throws at him develops into one of the movie's most acute pleasures." -Bruce Newman, The Mercury News
• "David Strathairn has a great turn as a high-ranking CIA official who will stop at nothing to protect his secret black operations programs." -Mark Nielgelsky, Winston-Salem Journal
• "Beefing up the plot are Strathairn and Allen, who dig into the government stooge roles with relish." -Brian Orndorf, OhmyNews.com
• "Their change in philosophy comes with the introduction of CIA deputy director Noah Vosen (David Strathairn), who is now leading the charge against Bourne. Vosen is a bad man, and Strathairn (I pray you know who he is by now) revels in the role and is a blast to watch work." -Phil Owen, The Crimson White
• "The supporting cast of David Strathairn and Joan Allen is excellent as well." -Andy Paugh, Ottumwa Courier
• "Strathairn as Vosen is evil incarnate..." -Caitlin Petrakovitz, The Daily Aztec
• "Here the smugly unctuous pooh-bah of power is played by David Strathairn, governmental shadow operation incarnate. At one grimacing moment in a breakfast meeting with Joan Allen, his intel inferior but in every way his superior, Strathairn's character orders a "heart-healthy omelet." Why? For his non-existent heart? Good line; good actor, making the most of a role spun out of exposition and twigs." -Michael Phillips, Metro Mix
• "It all boils down to something of a Roadrunner-vs.-Coyote scenario, with David Strathairn in fine seething form as a chief-operative mastermind whose escalating campaign to whack Bourne lends a current of grim, almost comical, frustration." -Michael H. Price, Fort Worth Business Press
• "What's different in Ultimatum is Bourne's chief nemesis. As Noah Vosen, David Strathairn takes the title from previous antagonists Brian Cox and Chris Cooper. The role is essentially the same--a CIA executive who needs Bourne dead to keep covered a dirty secret of the agency--but Strathairn delivers his menace colder and more rigidly than Cox or Cooper did." -Mike Richmond, Fond du Lac Reporter
• "Adding even more thespian muscle to The Bourne Ultimatum are David Strathairn and Scott Glenn as the head of black-ops and CIA director respectively." -Vicky Roach, NEWS.com.au
• "Allen and Strathairn don't exactly get to shine as actors in these parts, but their experience translates on-screen, bringing grit and gravity to what lesser actors would have rendered as caricature." -James Rocchi, Cinematical
• "Which means Bourne walks into the scope of Noah Vosen (David Strathairn, gracefully easing back and forth from command presence to sniveling exasperation), who heads a top-secret program--code name: Blackbriar--that answers to nobody, not even Washington." -John Serba, Everything Michigan
• "...Strathairn is mesmerising as the task force chief willing to except any amount of collateral damage and bloodshed to conceal his guilt. He spars marvellously with Allen's impassioned fellow CIA operative, the latter forced to choose sides when it becomes clear she is not party to all of the information." -Damon Smith, Gazette & Herald
• "Through his investigation, Ross stumbled onto Treadstone's remnants and replacement operation, Blackbriar, headed up by the cold and statuesque Noah Vosen (David Strathairn). Vosen seems to be the film's resident Alexander Conklin (as portrayed by Chris Cooper in The Bourne Identity) until the narrative reveals his deeper and more fibrous connections to the events of the series. Strathairn's performance is so honed, so doused in impenetrable realism that one nearly wonders if the actor has some level of experience with tracking and detaining a renegade soldier of espionage... The surrounding cast puts forth a performance befitting the most revered of ensemble work. As mentioned, David Strathairn is a self-guided missile with pathological panache to spare." -Kristopher Tapley, InContention.com
• "Cheers to Joan Allen, Julia Stiles (especially good in her one-on-one scenes with Damon), David Strathairn, Scott Glenn, Paddy Considine, Edgar Ramirez and the dozens of other actors who make it all seem sharp and true." -Jeffrey Wells, Hollywood Elsewhere
(David On His Role:)
• "We came to sort of settle on the fact that he's not a consciously evil mastermind. If he were to be, that might tip the tone of the film out of the plausibility, the authenticity, the sort of gritty realism that is one of the great things about the Bourne movies. He's sort of to the manor born. He may have grown up within this system, and for better or for worse, he is the point person now. Maybe how he's implementing the methodology can be considered evil, but to stay within the delineation of a corporate clerk for a company whose interests are sort of high stake interests. There's a lot of pressure on him but he's one of these guys who probably never was in the field. He was in administration, in policy, and he went down that alley to get to where he is. And where he is now, he has ascended to a place where he might feel now he is a bit of a Napoleon." -David Strathairn, 2007
• "[I prepared] by watching the other two films, to see what sort of niche this character occupies, what this character contributes. And the back story as to whether he takes his kids to school or what is his favorite hobby, that really wasn't pertinent to what I had to do: basically stay on point with the chase. Your stakes are high, you've got to get this guy. If he gets home he can burn your house down. All those things could be applied to anybody in that kind of situation. So I didn't do a lot of biographical work like when I was researching Edward R. Murrow. That was a different creature altogether in that film." -David Strathairn, 2007
• [on getting the role] "Yeah, this is different from Edward R. Murrow for sure. I don't know how they decided or thought of me or how I got on the list. It was certainly a privilege to be asked. It was sort of a surprise to begin with for me, because usually I'm more involved in kind of character-driven dialogue and I've never really been in an action so to speak picture, so I don't know how the dice rolled my way, but I'm certainly glad to be a part of it." -David Strathairn, 2007
• [on the film] "There are a lot of allusions, and the fact that there is a display of technical toys available that are probably the ones they have discarded to the public, I think that in a way is topical. One of the reasons I think the film succeeds is that it awakens all this plausibility and potential topical terrain. Therefore it's entertaining on more levels than just a cut-to-the-chase good guy gets bad guy. To Paul's credit, it's that he has managed to evoke all these things in this film, and that Matt has made this man so human that you have various kinds of entertainment in this film. You've got the great chase, you've got the great actions, you've got all the plausible technology, you have people you care about, and you have a wonderful camera. The camera is a character in and to itself. But in terms of topical, what about all the cameras that London has, and CCTV and all the surveillance cameras that we see in our world today? It rings a lot of bells." -David Strathairn, 2007
• [on the film] "I love that these questions are happening over an action picture. It's really great, and it's kind of a testament to what Paul has achieved and what Matt has achieved, what this trilogy has achieved. It's great. The use of force, use of violence, use of trained programmed assassins to compromise a perceived threat for the sake of what? And I think that's where the equation for the discussion begins. For the sake of what? In this story, it is excessive and reprehensible because all he is looking for is himself. It's kind of mythic, kind of Greek, that here is a hero who is returning from the wars, who has been spewed out of some system to do its duty, and he is now becoming awake, and he is returning home. It's quite mythic, really great. He's not a threat, but they don't know that, but they should know that." -David Strathairn, 2007
• [on the long filming schedule] "I was told it would take three to five weeks, with a little bit around the corner, back in November. I'm not done yet. I think there's still some stuff to be shot." -David Strathairn, 2007
• [on the New York car chase] "We were running up and down the streets of New York without it being shut down! We had a couple of guide cars, but it was up to the driver to negotiate through real traffic. And I was trying to do lines on camera...it was really deer-in-the-headlights stuff! Actually, I think that's what we're going to be reshooting a little bit of in a month..." -David Strathairn, 2007
• [on Joan Allen's character and Vosen] "Oh, it's great. Her contribution to this--not only just the Ultimatum but also to the Supremacy and throughout--is that, in my opinion, she's the only other real heart that has real blood in it in these films, and to have her present that with all her intelligence and the cache that we've succeeded in bringing her in to use, and then Vosen realizes there's something about her that threatens him, and what is that? I think that she--much like Matt--has invested their characters with a humanity which threatens a man, Vosen, who I think basically is a shell. He's either forgotten about his heart and soul or whatever and so she offers this threat--not only a threat to the system but a threat to him. And I think it's great. I think it's a piece of the puzzle that is so essential and what she brings with her laser intensity. She is an operative. She is close to being able to implement the stuff that Vosen does. She would have that choice. She's intelligent enough. But why is she behind a desk? It's because she is who she is and I think that gives the film something that people can taste. And having her stand across the desk from me, slowly just (he makes a slashing sound), and I'm sitting there [going], 'Oh, I'd better get a good lawyer.' It's great." -David Strathairn, 2007
(Matt Damon On David:)
• "Well, I mean the theory always was just get the absolute best actors that we could to fill in the other roles, and the biggest downside for me is that we have, you know, these movies with actors like Chris Cooper; David Strathairn; Joan Allen and Brian Cox, and I don't get to do a lot of scenes with them, so I'm off on my own doing my side of the story, and then they're off having all the dialogue. ...and then for this movie, when Brian got killed--because he was a big part of the first two movies--so now with him gone, we had another vacuum, so we filled it with the best actor we could find, and none of them were available, so we got David (Laughing). No--so David, who was our first choice obviously--I'm sure you guys all saw Good Night, and Good Luck--along with many other things that he's done. I've known him for a long time, and started watching him on stage...I don't know...15 years ago, so we were really lucky to get him, and the movie is better for it. It's one of those things where you just feel you're on a classier-type movie just by the fact that those are the actors that are laying out the plot for the audience--it's David Strathairn, Joan Allen and Albert Finney--it's just unbelievable." -Matt Damon, co-star (Jason Bourne)
(Joan Allen On David:)
• "He is so gentle and kind. We are both New York actors and he is so low key and sweet and unassuming. It's fun as actors to get to pretend you are having all this conflict, but after they say, "Cut!" we say we had such a good time (laughs). So it's fun, it's not a bad way to make a living. There are a lot of worse ways." -Joan Allen, co-star (Pamela Landy)
• "David is an actor whom I had wanted to work with for many years, so when he got cast, I was so happy. We kind of had a similar career. We both started out doing theatre in Chicago and New York. I remember when I first moved to New York, I saw a one-act Broadway play that David was in, and I still remember it vividly." -Joan Allen, co-star (Pamela Landy)
• "Landy, in this particular case, has another antagonistic relationship with a CIA co-worker, Vosen, whom David Strathairn plays so well." -Joan Allen, co-star (Pamela Landy)
(Master Sgt. Brian Bailey On David:)
• "Also, hanging out with David Strathairn, Paul Greengrass, Corey Johnson and Joan Allen was very exciting. It also was nice to just see these actors and actresses as everyday people, just like myself." -Master Sgt. Brian Bailey, co-star
Related Links:
Official U.S. Site (off site)
Official U.S. Soundtrack Site (off site)
Official French Site (off site)
