Tony Gilroy has already spilled the beans on the most important detail of his new Bourne film-- Matt Damon won't be back and neither will the character, but the events of the first three films will serve as a jumping-off point for the plot of his new film. Now talking to Deadline Hollywood, Gilroy has dropped a few more details, not telling us much new but confirming a few things we may have just suspected thus far.

The focus of the story will be, once again, on Treadstone, the shadowy operation that spent the first three films trying to track Bourne down. The main character this time will be a spy with a similar background to Bourne or Clive Owen's character in the first film, an agent and probably a killer. Gilroy came up with the idea after what he calls a "courtesy meeting" with the Ludlum estate:

We made a deal that was basically, 'If you want to put me on for a couple of weeks to figure this out and go exploring in the hills, I can't tell you what I'll find but I'll tell you where I'll dig. And then I hit a vein, and ended up delivering way more than I thought. I came up with the whole thing and if it wasn't a swinging idea, I wouldn't have signed on to direct. It feels good, fresh, but quite honestly, a Bourne kind of movie. I brought in my brother Dan, we started off together as a team."

Gilroy is very, very careful to emphasize that Bourne will still be out there, somewhere, in the world of his next film, and that there's plenty of room for Damon to return in a fifth film if he so chooses. As much as a fourth Bourne without Bourne seems like a ridiculous idea, Gilroy seems to be going about it in precisely the right way, starting fresh without discounting everything that came before. Branding this new film as within the Bourne franchise is going to be awkward, of course, but if they don't try too hard to shoehorn in the old stories there seems to be some potential here. Losing Damon is hard, of course, but a fresh start seems to be exactly what this franchise needs post-Greengrass.