Universal Pictures has released a new photo for The Bourne Legacy, which hits theaters nationwide August 3. This shot offers our first look at Edward Norton along with Jeremy Renner. Read on past the photo to see what writer-director Tony Gilroy had to say about crafting this new entry in the Bourne franchise.

The Bourne Legacy MTV Photo

Tony Gilroy, who wrote the first three Jason Bourne movies, writes and directs this spin-off, which follows Jeremy Renner's character, Aaron Cross, a new agent who has come out of the Treadstone program. Here's what the filmmaker had to say about his early talks with the studio about taking on this project.

"I guess when they finished three, a lot of people spent a lot of time thinking about how and where to continue. I wasn't a part of any of those conversations. When that ran out of road, everybody had sort of moved on. After that, I was approached because they were searching for some way of continuing something. I took a very casual meeting, long after everything had stopped and Matt (Damon) and Paul (Greengrass) had gone. There were a bunch of wacky ideas that they were trying, none of which were really appealing. I said, "I don't know how I can help you, but it seems like you need a really big idea. You're really going to need to swing away if you're going to do something else, and I'm not sure if anybody's going to want to do that." I went off and did think about it a little bit and came back at them with something very ambitious and unusual. That caught some traction, and we started having conversations about it. We picked it up from there."

The filmmaker also addressed how this movie follows The Bourne Ultimatum, the last movie in Matt Damon's Jason Bourne series.

"Everything that happened before was not a dream. Everything that happened was completely real, but you thought you knew what was going on. You thought you were seeing the world, and this movie is telling you that there's a much larger world, a much larger conspiracy beyond this. The events of the other three films are incredibly present, but they're not really in this very much. What happens in Ultimatum is really the spark that's blowing open the door to this movie because the Jason Bourne story is exploding out into the public. Being impossible to conceal any further is causing problems for this much larger conspiracy. Ultimatum plays in the background of the very beginning of this film."

CLICK HERE to read the full interview with Tony Gilroy.