Amid the clamour of London's Waterloo Station on a Wednesday morning, Matt Damon is being pursued by armed assassins.
He weaves and darts through the throng, fleeing from a couple of terrifyingly hard-looking thugs who urgently scan the crowds for him.
Occasionally they reach inside their jackets for guns, or touch their ears to listen to invisible transmitters.
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As the cameras roll, the tannoy booms out continuously, announcing departures for Windsor and Guildford.
All around the station there are signs ? in effect a legal waiver ? warning the commuters they could end up in a shot.
But only a handful appear to know they are making their Hollywood debuts ? they're too busy travelling and nosing around Boots and Tie Rack to notice that the Bourne crew and one of Hollywood's biggest stars are among them.
But it is exactly this level of verité that has helped the Bourne spy-thriller trilogy gross more than £250 million so far; the films' bone-crunching realism, taken directly from Robert Ludlum's brilliantly spare Bourne books, was credited with inspiring the monochrome "reboot" of the James Bond films.
In this final part, we shall see Damon's character, Jason Bourne, finally piecing together the details of his lost past.
Two films ago, he woke from unconsciousness to find, alarmingly, two bullets in his torso and no idea how he got them ? or, indeed, what his name or job were, although his own curious abilities gave him a clue.
He didn't know, for example, how he knew how to blow up a house and four assassins using a gas pipe and a toaster.
Only in The Bourne Ultimatum does he complete the picture of his past ? that, much to his chagrin, he had once been an emotionless CIA killing-machine.
At Waterloo, Bourne meets a British journalist who has vital information about Bourne's past but is being targeted by killers.
After each take, Damon returns to British director Paul Greengrass and they swap notes on the approach for the next one.
Damon is thoroughly focused. He practises a body swerve, over and over, which will take him past one group of extras and a little further from the enemy pursuing him.
When he finally finishes, he joins me on the balcony. For the first time on a Bourne film, Damon has allowed almost total access to a journalist and will spend several days telling me his 'war' stories ? not just about the movie, which required him to spend six months being hit and learning to fire an arsenal of real guns, but about a delinquent childhood, a brush with death by starvation, and persecution as a "traitor" by sections of the American media. He's articulate, open and as ferociously intelligent as you would expect for a Harvard man (although he dropped out after two years to pursue acting).
He wears black jeans and a black shirt over his lean but muscular frame.
With his straw-coloured hair cut short, he has the air of a young senator: all angular features, New England accent, disarming smile and realistic views about the fragility of his celebrity.
"Oh yes, Jason Bourne saved my life," he smiles.
"The weekend The Bourne Identity opened in 2001 I was doing a play in London's West End and I hadn't had a film offer in six months because I'd had a couple of movies tank.
The word was that the first Bourne movie was also going badly, because it had been delayed so long and had so many rounds of reshooting. It had all the hallmarks of a turkey.
"So I went from my final night of doing This Is Our Youth on the Friday, to the Sunday when I had 20 to 30 movie offers, just based on the opening weekend of The Bourne Identity.
"It reinvented my career. It's when you see how the business really works that the rose-tinted glasses come off.
"None of it's personal. None of it has to do with how professional you are, or how you conduct yourself, which explains why some people consistently work despite their horrible reputations.
"The only thing that matters is if you are making money and your films are making money, because then Hollywood lets you keep working ? really, that's it.
"It was a good lesson for me. It allowed me to be a much bigger p**** at work. Only joking."
Now, thanks to Bourne, he's joined the Hollywood elite, working with Robert De Niro (The Good Shepherd), Martin Scorsese (The Departed) and the star-laden Ocean's 13 team with pals George Clooney and Brad Pitt, all in 18 months.
He's earning more than £5 million a film and has overcome insecurities that nearly drove him to a breakdown (of which more later) to become one of Hollywood's most recognisable names.
Does he take it as a compliment that Bourne influenced Bond?
"Yes ? I mean, you can ape a style. But that character is fundamentally different from Bourne.
"I've met Daniel Craig and he's terrific. But Bond is an Establishment guy.
"He is a misogynist, an imperialist, he's all the things that Bourne isn't. He kills people then drinks a Martini.
"Doug Liman [the original director] said to me before we started the first one, ?James Bond does not speak to me at any level and I think it would be cool to have a James Bond that people our age can relate to.?
"Bond is a character left over from the Sixties. It's what makes Austin Powers so funny ? he brings those values into today and they clash so much with what we've evolved into that he makes a fool out of himself constantly."
To create the role of Jason Bourne, Damon employed classic method-acting techniques.
He is a perfectionist, and his guy-next-door exterior clearly masks an obsessive streak.
For instance, Liman mentioned casually that Bourne should walk like a fighter.
Damon took that to heart and it led to six months of punishing daily workouts in the ring.
"At the time, nobody had put me in a movie anything like this," he says.
"My big fear, and his big fear, was that people weren't going to accept me as the character.
"So we decided I should just train like crazy for everything ? the fighting, the firearms ? so I could actually do them.
"Audiences are smart and I was paranoid, but I think that went a long way to selling me as Jason.
"I'd never boxed before but I had six months to prepare, so I took boxing lessons.
"I got hit a lot but I got into great shape and that helped.
"I went to a former Swat [Special Weapons and Tactics] shotgunner and he took me out into the desert outside Los Angeles and we would work seven or eight hours at a time, firing handguns, rifles ? you name it, we used it.
"We just broke them down, rebuilt them and fired them repeatedly until I felt I could do it automatically.
"It must have cost a fortune, but the studio paid for all the rounds?
"I wanted it to be that when Bourne handles a weapon on screen he looks like he knows exactly what he is doing, and you only get that kind of authenticity from familiarity."
Not that they wanted him to go too far; everyone remembered how in 1996, for Gulf War drama Courage Under Fire, playing a heroin-addicted GI, Damon turned up on set having lost 3st 9lb because he wanted his body to look suitably ravaged by the drug.
He did. He had been on a "starvation" diet of fluids and been running 13 miles a day.
"I went too far," he admits, sheepishly. "I got sick and I wouldn't do that again because it was just too much.
"At the same time it helped the performance. I didn't have to act at all ? I was a wreck."
Afterwards, Damon suffered anxiety attacks and feared that he had a life-threatening illness.
"I was getting dizzy spells and hot flushes. I didn't say anything to anyone for a while because I was afraid I might be really ill.
"It was my first real brush with a medical problem and I was very scared.
"Eventually I told my father and he took me right away to the doctor. He explained to me that my body essentially thought it was being chased by a bear for four months.
"He said, ?Why else would you be starving and running unless something is chasing you??
"My body was hitting me with adrenaline, and once I stopped the regime the adrenaline was still coming and it was manifesting itself in hot flushes and dizziness."
Only once it had been identified did the vicious cycle stop and Damon could get back to work ? and as if on cue a runner from the Bourne unit arrives at our cafe to request Damon's company; happily, he suggests we talk again in a couple of days' time.
When we do, he's at his rented house near Pinewood studios in Buckinghamshire, cradling his youngest daughter.
At 36, he's been happily married to Argentine-born former barmaid Luciana Barroso for two-and-a-half years, and they have two daughters, Isabella, just turned one, and Alexia, eight, his wife's child from a previous relationship.
"Look, I'm sorry about this," he says, "but my wife's gone out and I've got the kids and their friends.
"Just a second."
He breaks off and explains to the youngsters that if they go and play for a while, he'll take them to the park. Isabella continues to gurgle on his hip while we talk.
The youngest of two brothers (Kyle, 40, is a sculptor), Damon grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his mother, a renowned child-development professor, separated from his father when he was two.
At one point, mother and boys moved into an experimental commune in Boston, sharing a near-derelict house with five other families.
"It was governed by a shared philosophy that housing is a basic human right. Every week there was a three-hour community meeting, and Sundays were work days.
"My mother put little masks on me and my brother, gave us goggles and crowbars, and we'd demolish the walls."
There's an irony that, since Damon later made his name playing a ruthless killer, his mother banned him as a child from playing with toy guns.
But, he says, "I do think about what roles I take and, for instance, the way that I handle guns in a film.
"It's about the desensitising of violence, which happens particularly in American culture.
"Often the violence that people see on TV and in films and video games is where people are killed and there are absolutely no consequences for the person doing the killing.
"When I choose a role I certainly look at that.
"I don't want to do a film that has a body count for the sake of just entertaining people.
"It's not that I don't think violence doesn't have its place in cinema.
"Violence is part of the human condition and it needs to be explored because it's part of the world we live in.
"But it's a question of how it's handled. In the case of Bourne, I think it's a fairly subversive thing to have this iconic American character who by the end of the second movie is apologising for killing people.
"I've never seen that in a big Hollywood movie before. The film ends with him trying to atone for killing a girl's parents in cold blood."
His political views have clearly been shaped, at least in part, by his unconventional upbringing.
He's been a vocal opponent of the war in Iraq and has taken a lot of flak for speaking out publicly against it.
And although he praises President Bush's £15 billion African aid package to combat HIV ? a cause close to his heart as a spokesman for Debt, Aids, Trade, Africa (Data), part of the Make Poverty History campaign ? he voted Democrat in the last American election and will do so again at the next.
"I didn't vote up to and including 2000. It's terrible to say this but I didn't feel like my vote was going to make a difference because I already knew what the outcome was going to be. But 2000 cured me of that.
"I bought a big house in Florida with all the money that George Bush gave back to me with his tax cuts.
"But I voted for John Kerry in Florida in 2004 and I'll be voting in Florida at the next election.
"When the Iraq war started, I put my name to a newspaper ad with people who were opposed to it.
"We were called traitors and some people said we weren't supporting our troops. "That's what they said about anyone who was against it, which is why so many politicians were scared into supporting the war or were too weak to stand up and say what they believed.
"It's difficult for me, because when I'm talking about Bush I'm aware of Pepfar [President's Emergency Plan For Aids Relief], and what a good job he has done because it's a matter of life and death.
"I went to Zambia last year and met thousands of people in these clinics who are alive because of that money.
"But I'm incredibly curious to know what Tony Blair thinks about Iraq now. Because he strikes me as a man of real integrity.
"I like Tony Blair but I could never understand it. What must he think now? I mean, it's a disaster."
If Damon sounds intense, he's not ? none of us are used to Harvard-educated A-listers with a clear moral compass and precise opinions ? and he suggests that next time we meet up we have a beer.
Will his friends George Clooney and Brad Pitt be there, I wonder?
"Now those guys are kindred spirits," he says.
"Having a beer with those two is exactly like having a drink with guys I grew up with. It's just like any other group ? cards, pool, a few beers.
"Behind closed doors you would have no idea of all that stuff. If an alien came down and saw George and Brad in a room with ten other guys, they would not be able to point out the movie stars based on how they were behaving." The same is true of Matt Damon, of course, and maybe that's the big difference between Bourne and Bond.
Every actor who's ever played 007 has been associated with the character for ever more, but Bourne's identity lives only on the cinema screen. Outside, Matt Damon is free to be himself. Like Bourne never existed. 'The Bourne Ultimatum' is out on August 16th
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