THE new “Jason Bourne” film might feature a plot involving a global social network, but don’t expect to find its director Paul Greengrass tweeting about it any time soon.

    “It’s not my thing,” admits the 60-year-old British film-maker. “I don’t know how to do it. I don’t have any interest in it. I’m not of the generation that does it. I was one of the last people I knew to get a phone.”

    The film, simply titled “Jason Bourne,” reunites Greengrass with lead actor Matt Damon after their two previous franchise outings, 2004’s “Bourne Supremacy” and 2007’s “Bourne Ultimatum.”

    Twelve years on from the events of Ultimatum, Damon’s former CIA assassin is living “off the grid” when his old colleague Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) catches up with him, having hacked into the CIA computer.

    Greengrass admits he didn’t think he’d be back to make another “Bourne” film. “You don’t want to come back and make one that’s not very good — that’s the terror of it. You’ve got to be sure you’re doing it for the right reason.”

    When he started working on the script in 2014, the starting point was how much the world had changed since Bourne’s last outing. Back then George Bush was U.S. president and the Iraq war was in progress.

    Since then, Greengrass notes, there has been a global financial crisis and the rise of smartphones, social media, electronic surveillance and cyber-intelligence. “We had to try and craft a story with Bourne in that landscape,” he says.

    A key theme in the film is the relationship between personal privacy and state security — there’s a direct reference in the screenplay to U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden, and the plot involves a social network, Deep Dream, that pledges never to share its users’ data. A bold claim, perhaps, in this digital age.

    (SD-Agencies)