In 1887 Ansel Bourne woke up one morning and forgot his name, who his loved ones were, and what it was he did for a living. Ansel Bourne had contracted a very rare disease called dissociative fugue where the patient experiences a form of amnesia where they forget everything for no reason at all. Three months later Ansel Bourne, now going under the last name of Brown, was working very hard in a convenience store he had just opened in Pennsylvania. He woke up one morning and remembered that his real name is Ansel Bourne and he was supposed to be a preacher in Rhode Island and he had no idea what he was doing in Pennsylvania. The true story of Ansel Bourne inspired the story of Jason Bourne in the hit movie The Bourne Identity. The Bourne Identity has a ton of plot twists and turns and enough excitement to make any James Bond movie look like an episode of Sesame Street. The Bourne Identity was released in 2002 and did very well at the box office as it became a huge financial success. The critics were mixed on The Bourne Identity and even though it did not get any Oscar nominations it did manage to win the award as ASCAP’s top box office film for 2002. It’s success went on to have sequels and it just seems like the basic principle behind The Bourne Identity can be repeated several time and there is just something about The Bourne Identity that people are drawn too.

The Bourne Identity opens with fishermen dragging a body out of the water and trying to help him survive. Upon examining the body they find two bullets in his back and a series of tattoos on him that look like maps and other information. Their curiosity is at an all time high but when the man regains consciousness he has no idea who he is or how he got into the ocean. The stranger eventually turns out to be Jason Bourne, played by Matt Damon, and the time he spends on the fishing boat is time for him to heal and try to remember who he is. But try as he might the stranger cannot remember that he is Jason Bourne and even though the fishermen saved his life, he is still in very grave danger. The fishing boat drops the stranger off on land and wishes him luck in his search for his identity. He winds up in Paris and finds that he has access to many levels of special government clearance and some very strange items, including a handgun, in a safe deposit box. He discovers he has great fighting skills that include many levels and disciplines of the martial arts and he is a weapons expert as well. The Bourne Identity really picks up speed at that point and everyone wonders if Jason Bourne will figure out who he really is in time.

Robert Ludlum wrote the novel that the movie is based on but director Doug Liman did not want an exact adaptation of the novel for the movie. Instead Liman gave screenwriter Tony Gilroy an outline of the plot he had in mind and told Gilroy to work from that. For all of the accolades the novel had received, and the fact that the studios felt that the novel was good enough to turn into a movie, the screenplay writer Gilroy had never read Ludlum’s novel prior to writing the screenplay for the movie The Bourne Identity.