Inside Adam Savage's Cave: The Bourne Identity Burn Bag

hey guys it's norm and Adam and we are back in the cave the cave the cave is undergoing some reconstruction you might have seen on episodes of still entitled that you'd shelves put in yeah while recording a podcast and they're almost set up but they are almost set up it's a long an ongoing process I have filled the shop with 13 Billy bookcases from Ikea the Billy is the the inexpensive way into a glass front cabinet yeah the case is like 120 bucks and then the doors are a little bit extra buy them one at a time and I have added a modification of actually adding LED lighting strip lighting don't buy these at a store at a store they're about $10 a foot on Amazon it's $1 a foot Wow so you'll save much cheaper 90% of the expense by going on Amazon it's tough to compete yeah and free shipping of course yes exactly but we're here to talk about what's in the shelves and behind us on this particular shelf is a collection of props that you can replicate that you've made so yes I replicas and actual props so yeah I never know what kind of movie is I'm going to latch on to I never know what sort of prop is gonna jump out at me and something I I really really want you don't know is I'm like when you're watching a movie you don't know if that's gonna resonate like five years later and and there might be movies with tons of cool props in them like Chronicles of Riddick that I don't care at all about you don't want those glasses you know does I have no interest whatsoever but when the Bourne Identity came out which i think is 2004 2003 early 2000 yeah I got really into Jason Bourne I love the idea of the Go Bag now this actually has a predecessor which is the movie Spartan it's a lesser-known David Mamet film starring Val Kilmer and it's phenomenal I can't recommend Spartan and not in Spartan if you watch the DVD extra materials Val Kilmer's kind of like a stand-up comedian when he does the the commentary but he talks about how he had they had a couple of Special Forces consultants on the film he plays a special forces commander on a mission in Spartan and he has a little bag and he calls it his go bag and he said he had all the things in there that a Special Forces guy would need and I love the I mean obviously I'm a toolkit fanatic I love the idea of you have everything you need in one place most of us have our emergency rations stuff you know the water and some band-aids these guys have captain guns well and so actually I met on Mythbusters weed we did a sniper special with an incredible marksman Dave Lee manag who did some tours and actually had to go back he wasn't able to tell me some of the things that were in it because it's not for a civilian knowledge he did say it was whatever you needed to get from wherever you were to ND any single point on the planet within 36 hours and be able to survive there so it's now simply an over-the-shoulder thing you might need all sorts of different gear weather and stuff and I've always found that process that that concept really really exciting and so in the Bourne Identity at the beginning of the movie he wakes up started getting an energy tag he has that shit he has a chip in his hip and he goes he figures out that it's a bank in Zurich and he goes to the bank then he opens up this bank box it deposit box the safe deposit box and in it is all of this stuff all of these passports and money and stuff that obviously from his former identity he's still trying to piece it together but I love the idea that this is like a secret stash that allows you to be anyone and do anything it's enough money and identities to escape to anywhere so he dumps it all into a burn bag which is I guess four documents in a bank anything you don't want anything you want to get rid of you put in a burn bag and they take and they incinerate it so the records totally gone so I actually looked into making a burn bag from The Bourne Identity and I never got around to it because they didn't have enough reference sometimes if I can't get enough precise reference I'm not even interested in starting and then I came across a guy who had one of the actual burn bags I think they made three for the film so this this bag right here along with the trash man what's in it this is the trash bin from the bank in Zurich and this is the burn bag from the bank sequence so when when Bourne gets accosted by one of the security guys red bag red bag on the ground this is that bag holy crap so this is actual movie prop this is an actual movie prop and you built then the replicas to fill the bag well and so I I didn't so much billed as a SEM simple but we could take a tour through the replicas this is one of my favorite props I just I really love I really enjoy that I've got one of these and I will tell you that there there is a thing in the prop collecting community that some people and I don't understand them they like buying a movie prop of which there's only one and then they like hiding it away from the world so that no one can see it they actually kind of get off on having the only one of something that doesn't make any sense to me I have something like this I want to share it so actually a fellow prop fabricator I known in indie Magnolia out of Australia I actually gave him all the reference material fabric samples sizes grommets measurements and he's actually producing some some bags like this I'll always have the original but if other people want one I want them to have one awesome so let's take a look what's goes alright all right Adam you have all these probable cos on the table yeah this one's actual prop the actual bag and let's start with just the money because okay lot of money here okay so I frequent form as we've talked about before the replica prop form and I had some screenshots there's a lot of very close-up camera shots of the bag and its contents in the film when he's in the bank he takes off the cover of the of the safety deposit box and the camera sort of Langer asleep hands over all the contents so I've started putting up screenshots of those contents on the RPF and then we started working through what was there so for instance the RPF is an international forum there are people in every country in the world and this is actually just before this film takes place just before the euro yeah came into being so it's money a lot of money is obsolete ton most of this money is obsolete but we were able to with the help of a lot of international members identify oh those are reals those are saturday arabian money these are kronor these are you know deutsche marks etc and so i was able to find references in fact actually now that this most of this money's discontinued it's very easy to find high quality scans of it because it's not not usable as much anymore i also solved one legal problem by not printing anything on the back i don't I don't want any trouble from any organizations about counterfeiting I just want it to look great and so it's pretty you know downloaded high-res copies downloaded hi guys cannot we put them out and create the band exactly and each one of these bands I don't think there's standard I think they were all made by the art department of the film so I had to kind of color match each one I did have an advantage having worked in the film industry I did have a bunch of fake hundred dollar bills these are movie hundred dollar bills real funny money real funny money these is in the movies when you see people handle hundred dollar bills these are them and it says for motion picture use only knots right there are legal tender etc and I had a bunch of those I also had and I always I reach out to prop makers for stuff like this I had a guy who makes money for the movies make me these British pounds custom make them for you well he's got nahi this is a design he made for film and so I bought a bunch of stacks of them and his technique is actually great he takes what looks like a real British pound so this is it this is a copy of a real British pound and he and I didn't print the back and he comes up with a design that looks enough like it for a film yeah there's the right elements you get the Queen on the right side there's no way that it could be confused with the real things good enough for American audiences we exact all difference exactly so in that I figured out each of the types of money that were in the bag and the amounts of each kind of stats a lot of counting I made tons and tons of lists I keep really this is I just find this very entertaining to do on a plane today you know each of the shots I figure out how many of each one and then I assembled it so the money was one of the first challenges the second challenge was the passports and in fact I reached out to each of these passports is a Jason Bourne actual passport under the different names that he has in the film real pest poised are not real passports at all these are actually filmed passports again it says clearly these are you know these are fake passports these are for film use only their exact replicas of Jason Bourne hands down passports they all have stamps in fact actually yes the guy who made these for me went so far as deposit where Bourne might have gone and places in the course of the film I'm not kidding this is how crazy this gets visas for different countries that he's talking about Hong in 97 and oh yeah Wow absolutely so I've got yeah five of the passports here then there is the I mean every one of these has a story about how hard it was to find I bought a pretty nice replica of a tag tag viewer power your power power tag Hauer link that is the type of watch that Bourne uses in the film and it's you know tag and and and Omega they all do many different designs of every watch so it's very hard to find a replica of exactly the dial arrangement I had to like look through hundreds to find the one that I wanted I wasn't going to spend the money tags on this bag Manafort watch that's fine then there are things like this like this is that this is actually a keychain but at first when I saw it I thought it was one of those Kord holders oh yeah right my camping equipment so I went looking for that I couldn't find it that someone on the RPF so they recognized it because they had gotten it as a gift at an office and it turns out to be a keychain made by a company to give out as gifts in an office why was that in the Go Bag you know just the art directors looking for things that look technical that look kind of cool a Mac hash but dongle out in in the film actually on the blu-ray you're able to zoom in and see it actually read Mac hasp on the back so that's the right model the exact right model and color translucent blue as I go deeper you're going to think I'm crazier and crazier but this is deeply satisfying this is a really weird cheapo multi-tool that looks kind of cool with rulers on it turned out to be one of the easiest things to find someone came up with it in about a day or two and it was like 14 bucks creddies these contact lens cases about three of these this uniball of which you can see three in the bag I ended up with four or looks at something you know you buy a target a standard uniball except that this happens to be a discontinued uniball even at hands even tens turned out to be difficult to find and in this one member of the RPF wife was a teacher and you look when people come upon the uniball that they like they buy a lot of young he had a bunch and he traded this to me for a couple of other items and then there is that this is quite visible the film it turns out to be a French phone car and card yeah I replicated this and actually I'll show you my replica of it I replicated it by we actually were able to locate the original photo of Notre Dom and usually the stock of a fake card yes the stock photo and then someone found the real one and that is pretty good so that's your replica my replica before I ever saw this in person and this is the real thing I did pretty darn well I will say that it turns out people collect phone cards of landmarks of everything so you can find these on eBay from time to time and over the years I've managed to find two I also have a again made by someone who makes us for the movies and on the back it says you know not for real use not a real credit card but I have these Jason Bourne credit cards and I say Jason Bourne right yep now I have somewhere a black card an American Express black card which isn't in the movie but but I figured born would a horse have a black card and then there's this which is it to be very hard to find this Air France mm this is like an elite flying membership club card it's very very difficult to find this so this is my recreation of it that's basically graphics that I printed then I laminated then I cut out in the shape of the credit card it's not perfect I'd like a better one someone out there has one I'll trade you for it hmm and then here this is something that you couldn't find a perfect replica yeah so they're content obviously you know he had these contact lens cases and the implication is that he could change the color of his eyes for different passports I couldn't find the elegance soft colored contacts in the original packaging it's very difficult to change this every year so this is my Photoshop reconstruction on a different brand of contact lens it's done and there there's but on yeah and then lastly a second to last there's a medical French medical card which you can see in there I don't know what's in one of these so I don't have anything in it but that's my Photoshop file of the front and back of this and I found you know when you're trying to find reference for stuff like this you know I see the name of it on on the screenshot so I start doing certain exercises in Google yeah well then I start doing searches for it on Flickr which is an indexed on Google and that's where I hit paydirt a lot of the time then there's one final piece of identification that you can see in the film which is this which is a French driver's license now in all of my google foo I have not been able to figure out what the hell sighs a French driver's license there's no photo of someone holding in their hand in the wallet I found people holding in their hand but honestly this this is about the variants you could figure out from this so I painstakingly replicated the French driver's license down to the ID picture which is laminated the stamps of the vehicles he'd be allowed to drive the anti-counterfeiting lines on this as all my design to kind of match what it might look like and then I picked it up in these two different sizes because just in case again if someone out there knows exactly how big a French driver's license is please send it to us at testing comm so I can know then I'll print it out for real and of course though and of course this is the ugh oh sorry there's several other things give this thing this is actually a real stunt sig from the movie this is a got a certificate of authenticity it's from the Bourne Identity so whenever you see someone running with a gun in it whenever you see someone doing anything with a gun in a movie that they're not actually shooting right it's a rubber working guns are heavy they weigh like three or four pounds you can get hurt and they're expensive you don't want to drop them when it people are throwing guns to each other all the time in the movies no one ever really does that so these are rubber guns you can see this one this one actually yeah it bends and it's it's like Weeki so this is one of one of the stunt pistols made for the movie the other thing you see in the movie a bunch are faxes from Interpol so this is an internal fact of looking for Jason and his girlfriend played by franka potente potente potent ax that's my Photoshop reconstruction of it even down to the fax idea across the top and then there are two very detailed faxes that you can see in several points in the movie I did them in both color and black and white because you can see both versions in the film depending on on which portion of the film that's happening in through your obsession with the film went beyond the go-bag well once there are more details to pick out it's not an obsession with the film per se is more of just a it's again the figuring out of each of these details is like a bit of meditation for me just sitting there and like zoning in going to find something it's it's a treasure hunt and it's it's about the hunt not about the object itself but it is very satisfying for me to have pretty much I'm missing one pen from the bag and there's a pocket knife in the Bourne Identity that it looks like a green Swiss Army knife it's not quite that doesn't have the logo it doesn't have the Victor Knox logo or a winger and it's a slightly different color green but I've never been able to figure out what it is so this is as close as I can get I'm two objects away from perfection so technically still work in progress I guess so and of course some gold bullion well these dis gold bullion is actually these are replicas obviously purchased on eBay of one kilo of 999.9 gold these are not visible in the movie they're probably not in his bag but I thought it'd be able you really had to get everywhere you'd have to be able to use this and maybe the black-market we carve off a little bit dr. scale okay it's real gold it's gonna be mighty soft you can probably bend this with your fingers yeah so this is my assumption of something that would be in there and it goes out of canon as it were but I thought it should be that's a little bit of Liberty I also have a really nice replica of the shot of Jason and his girlfriend and this I purchased a vintage Air France ticket thing at some point in my research I came across a ticket jacket like this so I purchased this to go in the case as well sometimes I drift out of Canon just because I think that it deserves to have this and that's me thinking like an art director very cool so that's Jason Bourne's go bag absolutely what would you put in your go bag um well I don't think I'd have anything that hurt people in it uh you know I'd have a Leatherman I don't go anywhere without a flashlight you know I I this is it like 20 times a day wrong laser drawn late yeah you know what we have we'll have to do a segment about what I'm always carrying on my person because it is a very specific set of objects that I use for survival very cool thank you a table solutely and we'll have more from the shelves in the cave and future edition of inside man cave absolutely red bag on the ground you

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 2,172,184

Rating: 4.8716211 out of 5

Keywords: Inside Adam Savages Cave, Burn bag, adam savage, The Bourne Identity, adam savage man cave, jason bourne, bourne identity, tested adam savage, adam savage tested, adam savage cave, inside adam savage's cave, bourne burn bag, the bourne identity 1988, adam savage props, adam savage movie props, adam savage movie replicas, adam savage burn bag, adam savage workshop, inside adams cave

Id: bQbbtnTz1KE

Length: 18min 48sec (1128 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 06 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/smokey_sunrise]

You guys should check out Adam's thread over on therpf.com a move prop forum, Adam documents putting this prop together.

http://www.therpf.com/f9/bourne-identity-red-bag-contents-79041/

[u/FerretPantaloons]

Here's the clip where Bourne opens the case: http://youtu.be/txHNcE_d7ro

Clarification edit: Bourne opens a safety deposit box, goes through the contents, and near the end of the clip (@2:30) he dumps it into the red bag.

Part 2 where the security guard spots him with the red bag.

[u/BrodyApproves]

News headline tomorrow: 'Mythbusters' star Adam Savage Arrested for International Counterfeiting Ring

[u/cityofweasels]

I feel like Adam packs so much more into a 24 hour day than I manage to do. :(

[u/blueatlanta]

it was pretty funny how adam seemed like he didnt want the other guy touching his stuff. he kept snatching things out of his hands

[u/KRA2008]

TIL Flickr isn't indexed on Google.

[u/[deleted]]

I also want to recommend Spartan, really sweet under-known movie.

[u/GS_Dan]

Tested is great. Has become even better since the Mythbusters guys joined. Still have a premium account grandfathered in from the Whiskey Media days.

[u/Sgtpierceface]

There should be a Mythbusters episode for all the crazy shit Bourne does in the movies.