33 Feature

BUILDING CHARACTER

From Hollywood blockbusters to independent films, Matt Damon is driven by his love of acting.

IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE for the 2021 Cannes International Film Festival, Matt Damon sat down to talk about his latest movie and some of his most memorable roles to date.

Here, he reveals that his pal and collaborator Ben Affleck was sleeping on his couch in a cramped apartment when the pair found out they had sold their Oscar-winning screenplay for Good Will Hunting.

He also tells how he turned down ten per cent of Avatar and gives an insight into the media circus that surrounds his pal Brad Pitt.

You looked really moved to be here in Cannes at the premiere of your new film Stillwater.

I think I’ve done this festival four or five times but it felt like the first festival I’d ever done in my life.

All of us have had this really difficult year in this time with Covid.

It was such a relief to be in a room with a 1,000 people and 1,000 strangers who are part of the same community, because we all love the same thing.

And I’d never felt that so strongly having been denied that for a year, 18 months or whatever it’s been.

You’ve always had such a passion for film – how do you keep that alive over such a long career?

I just love it and I always have.

My application for college, in the essay, the first line said, ‘For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to be an actor’ and it just never changed.

If I lost that enthusiasm I would stop, I’d go do something else.

It’s a very tough business and can be pretty brutal but it can also be fantastic.

‘Good Will Hunting’ started it as an assignment for a college paper and then a few years later you got an Oscar with Ben Affleck? Did you realise at the time that it was going to be a turning point in your life?

I think by the time we got that award, yeah.

But, just getting it made, the only rule Ben and I had was that we had to like it so every decision we made, we made for the absolute right creative reason.

And there was never any strategy like, ‘What if we do this so that could happen?’.

I watch actors or writers do that sometimes … they try to fulfil a formula and make what people want to see, rather than making what they want to see and trusting that other people would want to see that too.

So yeah, we sold that screenplay in November of 1994, and our lives were never the same.

It was more money than we’d ever had and we each instantly went out and bought matching Jeep Cherokees.

We were so broke at the time but we wanted to move out of our apartment.

It was me and another guy that we went to high school with and Ben wasn’t living with us but he was staying on the couch in this tiny place.

Ben is six foot four and his legs dangled off the end.

Every morning I’d walk in and be like, ‘God, this is just ridiculous’.

It was in that situation which we sold the screenplay and so in order to move out and get a better place we went and started to look at somewhere with three bedrooms in a nicer neighbourhood.

We had no credit score, we had no nothing, so people were like, ‘We can’t rent to you’.

But what we had was the article in Daily Variety.

We were on the cover, it said, you know, ‘These two idiots sell a screenplay’.

So we carried Variety around with us and we were like, ‘We’re these guys. We have money now, you can rent to us, we’re going to pay you’.

And somebody did rent us their place. >>

At the beginning of your career, you were branded with a nice guy image? Were you worried that might stick?

I don’t know.

If it got attached to me, certainly there were a lot of directors who wanted to subvert it, right?

It’s fine with me. I can play into it or play against it, either way I’m doing something fun and it’s just kind of up to the director to use me however they want.

Talking of directors, you’ve worked with the biggest directors in Hollywood – Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola, the Coen brothers. Is the expectation of an actor different when the director is that big?

Yeah and they all do it differently.

On ‘Saving Private Ryan’, Steven was shooting with like ten cameras at once and the choreography of the action and of the camera moves was at such an insanely high level.

I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know enough yet to appreciate what I’m watching, I know it’s very special but I’m just going to ask him as many questions as I can. And even if I don’t totally understand the answer, I’m going to remember and catalogue exactly what he said, because it will make sense to me later’ because he’s just at this incredible level.

But he was also demanding in the sense that he’s a professional director and he expects professional actors.

You’ve got to bring it on take one because he sure is and the cameras are going to work and he doesn’t want to wait around because he wants to get to the next great shot.

So I felt pressure in the sense that I really wanted to do a great job because it felt like the highest level that you could kind of work at in film.

“For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to be an actor’ and it just never changed.”

– Matt Damon

Which director’s style of working do you prefer?

For me, I take every job based on the director and if they’re a master director I don’t care what their style is, I’m in and I’ll adjust to it.

But it’s a good lesson to be technically prepared because you don’t know exactly what you’re going to get from a director or what demands they’re going to ask of you.

And it’s a director’s medium, so they are the boss and you have to conform to what they want.

I mean Clint [Eastwood] will give you one take and no more.

The very first day I worked with him [on ‘Invictus’], I’d been working on this South African accent for six months, eight hours a day and it is a very, very hard accent to do in the English language.

I did the first take and he said [does Clint Eastwood voice] ‘Cut, print and move on’.

And I said, ‘Sorry boss, can I do one more?’

Then he says, ‘Why? You wanna waste everybody’s time?’ and I was like, ‘Nope, guess we’re moving on, OK’.

I mean, de Niro, it’s been reported a lot, he’s got this style of repetition and it was fascinating to watch up close.

He wanted to do a pick-up shot of a closeup of his.

Back in those days when we shot film, the magazines were eleven minutes and I sat there and watched him go through four magazines.

So for 44 minutes he said the same seven lines, over and over and over.

And I was sitting there, I wasn’t saying anything, I was just there for his eyeline.

That’s a very different style and sometimes you get directors who really will indulge a process like that.

And all of those things work right? All of those people have made great movies. Just stylistically they can be totally different. >>

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Can you talk about the choices you’ve made in your career? Maybe a choice that was very important or something that you might have got wrong?

Well, I can think right off the bat what that would be.

I got offered ‘Planet of the Apes’ that Tim Burton was directing.

I had already verbally committed to ‘The Bourne Identity’ with Doug Liman and then Steven Spielberg offered me a small part in ‘Minority Report’, which is another great script and great movie.

Then Soderbergh offered me ‘Ocean’s Eleven’.

For moral reasons I said to Doug Liman, ‘No I’ve already committed to you’ and in my mind I thought, ‘Well, ‘Planet of the Apes’ is going to be a big hit but what are you going to do?’

And so, I did ‘The Bourne Identity’ and ‘Ocean’s Eleven’ – and that changed my career, definitely.

Another time I made a moral decision was when I was offered a little movie called ‘Avatar’ [laughs].

Jim Cameron called me, and he was really lovely and said, ‘You know, this movie doesn’t need you, it doesn’t need a movie star at all, the movie is the star, the idea is the star and it’s going to work, so if you don’t do it, I’m going to discover some new guy and put him in – but if you do, I’ll give you ten per cent of the movie’.

But I was in the middle of shooting ‘Bourne Ultimatum’ and he wanted to shoot during our post production and I needed to be available.

And for moral reasons again, I told him I couldn’t walk away from this thing that I’d spent all these years doing and he was really great about it.

But ultimately, it didn’t matter, I missed out.

Mostly it’s going to sound like because it was so much money, but I missed out on the chance to work with him and I hope that comes around because I would do that for free.

What is more fulfilling for you – the big blockbusters or the smaller movies?

They’re both really fulfilling, to tell you the truth.

You love each project, it’s like you put so much time and blood and sweat and tears in with your teammates making this thing.

But I would say the most deeply enriching would be the ones that we’d written.

They’d start out as just an idea in your head and you go through every stage with it.

That’s kind of a deeper level of involvement, you know, because sometimes as an actor you’re hired labour, you’re not running the show, you’re there to do a specific thing.

You can go from production to production and I did for many, many years.

I just had a duffle bag, I didn’t live anywhere, I just went from job to job because I loved doing it.

But you definitely feel less of a connection because you’re kind of just there for production, you’re not there for pre-production or post production.

So definitely you’re involved a lot longer and maybe in a little deeper way when you’re writing.

How do you balance your professional life and your personal life, especially when there is so much focus with social media etc.?

I think the media kind of gave up on me because I was so boring [laughs].

Usually what sells those magazines are like sex and scandal and everybody knows kind of, ‘Well, he’s married and a dad’ and I’ve been relatively free of scandal too so it’s not really worth their money to sit outside my house.

They also know I’ll wait them out … I’ll sit in the house forever.

But a lot of my friends can’t get out of the way of it.

I remember thinking that about Brad [Pitt] and watching the insanity around him, not because of him though, he’s like a dude from Missouri, he couldn’t be more normal but he lives in a world where everyone goes crazy.

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For ‘Ocean’s Twelve’ we had to do this thing at the Formula One in Monaco.

We had to show up – George and Brad and me – and walk to one of the garages and take photographs.

And for that they were going to put ‘Ocean’s Twelve’ on the side of the cars, which was like a billboard, a good ad space for us, I guess.

So we got off this boat and we had to walk about a half a mile to this garage where we were going to take this picture and I literally have never seen anything like it.

It was absolute madness, all these people and everyone with cameras and everybody going crazy and in a circle around Brad, to the point where I got arm-barred four times by security and I’m like, ‘No, no, I’m with Brad’.

But my wife and I were holding on to each other for dear life and it’s still one of the most messed up things I’ve ever seen.

And I looked at Brad at one point and he was walking like his pulse didn’t go above 50.

He was just holding his camera up and taking pictures calmly of all the lunatics around him.

I just remember thinking, ‘Man, I could not, I couldn’t do it. I’m just not built to do it.’

But he doesn’t bring it on himself, you know, he doesn’t court that.

He wants to be as private as he can be but they just don’t allow him to do it.

So I feel very lucky because I feel like I got the best part of it where I get to do the work, which is all I really want, and I can leave that other stuff out.

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