This is the fifth in a series of posts featuring the accounts of an innocent bystander at the filming of the movie The Bourne Legacy in the Philippines, and about how stalking is the new cardio. The two are not necessarily related.

Saturday, 18 February 2012

The cab driver drove me to the middle of a slum. “Uhm, is there another gate you could drop me off?” I asked the cabbie. I had asked him to take me to PUP, where The Bourne Legacy was filming that day. It was PUP, all right, and it looked ok, but the surrounding area was scary. “There’s another one at Pureza,” he said. “You could probably take one of the tricycles to get there.” As opposed to just taking me there himself? Clearly he also wanted to leave as quickly as possible. “Fine,” I muttered. I got off and stood near the tricycles and pedicabs. I called Annie to ask her where I could meet her. Bets had to leave town for the weekend, and Elisa had school that day: #teamRennerManila was down to two operatives that day, Annie and me.

“I’m outside the gate and it’s a slum area,” I explained to Annie over the phone. OMG, did I just say that out loud? I thought. I looked around to make sure no one was about to stab me for insulting their neighborhood, because I probably deserved it. Now that I think about it, the people there seemed nice and not-scary, the place was just really depressing and they probably deserved a lot better in life. Annie said she’d come pick me up.

I was sure this was the right campus, though. I passed by the usual vans and trucks with “Bourne Legacy” signs taped on them, on the street leading to the PUP gate. (The funniest one I’ve seen was a van with a paper sign that said, “Catering for Bourne Legacy. Do not delay.” That was last week at the Magsaysay Blvd. shoot.) I realized my problem was there was a huge sign on the gate of PUP that said “No ID, no Entry”. But I shouldn’t have worried. Apparently the one good thing about being too old to pass for college students was the guards think you’re teachers or parents — they just let us through without a word, while making the students present IDs and papers and stuff before they could go in.

According to A. the crew had been setting up since she got there. There were tents and around the outdoor basketball court, and green screens were being erected. We stood by and watched for maybe half an hour or so but there was no sign of Jeremy Renner. I tried to spot Tony Gilroy, but I couldn’t see anyone whose face I could match to the photo I pulled up of his from IMDB. So we went to get snacks and water in the cafeteria. Then we hung out in a covered bench area with the marchers of the production — the guys whose job it was to drive the cast to and from locations and the hotel. They were very nice, and they didn’t really have much to do during the filming itself. Occasionally, we’d go back and stand outside the filming area to see if Jeremy was there. Nothing. Then it rained, like, really hard, so we ran back to the covered benches. After the rain stopped, some of the crew got busy mopping up the rainwater in the spot where the green screens were being set up. We went back to our spot outside the filming area to watch. At that point we were just watching people mopping up water. But pretty soon, we saw what they would be filming — a jeepney and a motorbike, parked right beside each other. “Parked” may not be the accurate word, though, as they were sort of mounted on top of some mechanical thing. Some guy who was probably a stuntman or Jeremy’s body double sat on the bike while they were setting up the shot.

I spotted a man in a sleeveless grey shirt walking with what looked like Rachel Weisz’s body double (she was also wearing the same clothes Rachel had been wearing while shooting the Manila scenes) towards a couple of trucks to our left. I thought he was a body double because he looked like he was in his twenties.

And then I saw his tattoo.

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