Matt Damon Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters | GQ

i literally just played you know the movie interstellar hadn't come out and i go it's not a big part but i am a guy alone on a planet you know and i don't know if i should follow it up with the guy who's alone on a planet nobody [Music] goodwill hunting that movie is so much of my 20s and ben affleck's 20s like we wrote that together and just the whole story of getting it made was one whole thing but then once we got it made to have robin sign up to do it was really that's really what got us a green light and and i just have so many memories of that guy he changed our lives and he and he couldn't have been more gracious more hard working as writers like he was a guy who could come in and just throw lines out for instance the last line of that movie he reads a letter from me and he says son of a he stole my line that wasn't scripted robin just did that we had scripted that he just kind of sits there and takes it in and realizes that my character is gone and he didn't say anything he just kind of took that moment and the one that's in the movie he just said son of a he stole my line and i was with gus van sant the director we were both next to the camera and i remember grabbing him like this like shaking him like because we knew that was it the second he said it and then we probably did 10 more takes after that because robin would just go until he literally had mined everything in that beautiful brain of his yeah he just was a really special guy sean if the professor calls about that job just tell him sorry i had to go see about a girl well some stole my life [Music] we wrote that movie specifically ben and i wrote it because we wanted the parts as actors and at the time there was a really popular movie that we all loved called reservoir dogs quentin tarantino's first movie and the story we had heard was that because harvey keitel signed up for the movie quentin got i think it was half a million dollars that was his budget and he could make the movie and so we wrote that part that robin eventually took we called it the harvey keitel part looking for an actor who could get us money because ben and i wanted to star in the movie and we knew we were worth nothing so we needed to get somebody and we wrote it really open-ended you know we wrote it okay they're from the same neighborhood so they kind of understand each other but we also knew we could adjust it if morgan freeman or somebody like denzel washington wanted to come in and play it we could make that character from roxbury and like kind of explore the kind of historic racial tension in boston if meryl streep took the part we could instead of a father-son relationship it would be a mother-son relationship so we really left it open because we wanted to cast as wide a net as possible because we just we're trying to get the movie made we went from literally the year before billy crystal was hosting the oscars and we were shooting goodwill hunting in toronto and we were watching it on tv at our little condo so the whole cast was betting on who they thought would win and gus van sant the director was with us and we just kind of you know on our couch watching the oscars and from that we went to the very next year sitting in the front row and billy crystal in the in the medley that he would the musical number that he would open the show with actually started to sing about ben and me and it was just completely surreal it took years to kind of process what happened that night it was utterly surreal [Music] saving private ryan spielberg put everyone in boot camp but he made you feel like separate right it was one better than that he didn't make me go to boot camp separately he made me not go to boot camp so that the other guys would resent me so they all went through this kind of experience and they all bonded but because i was the character they were looking for and they resented this guy that they were risking their lives to go find steven purposely kept me away from them and let them know that i hadn't been made to go to boot camp they're a very tight kind of cohesive unit i'm an outsider who they they resent it doesn't make any sense it doesn't make any sense sir why why why do i deserve to go why not any of these guys they all fought just as hard as me is that what they're supposed to tell your mother when they send her another folded american flag tell her that when you found me i was here and i was with the only brothers that i have left and there's no way i was gonna desert them i got that part going back to robin williams when we were in boston we were rehearsing for good will hunting and spielberg came in because he was shooting amistad and he was shooting a scene with anthony hopkins at the capitol and it was you know across boston commons from where we were rehearsing and robin took ben and me to meet steven because he knew it was never a bad thing to meet like you know the greatest filmmaker of all time and and how much we'd appreciate that and i had put myself on tape and i had read for private ryan and i hadn't been cast he met me in person and he said i think i know you from somewhere and i said well i did this movie called courage under fire and he goes that's the one he goes you know that's funny i said to my wife that's the exact type of person i'd want to play private ryan but he's too he's too thin because i'd lost 40 pounds to because i was playing a heroin addict and courage under fire and so it was only because robin introduced me to him that he went oh okay no you're you're you're you're you're the kind of guy i'm looking for for that job so robin not only got our dream and good will hunting made he actually got me the role in saving private ryan as well in a way the talented mr ripley patricia highsmith wrote a character that's very different than the one that in anthony's version of the talented mr ripley her take on it was when you read those books you're enjoying the fact that he's killing these people and these people are very kind of two-dimensional and anthony thought it was a lot more interesting if you made it about these people who were three-dimensional rather than kind of hating them and and being a total sociopath was somebody who just wanted to belong and had his nose pressed up against the glass and it was a completely different take than i expected even going into it anthony just had a great love for all of his characters and i think that comes across in the movie i haven't seen that movie in a long time but it seems to be the one of the ones that lasted dickie greenleaf who's that it's tom tom ripley tom ripley we were at princeton together okay did we know each other hello uh well i knew you so i suppose you must have known me and we shot that movie for 37 million dollars which was not a lot of money for that movie john seal was the cinematographer it required every department just really really pushing to kind of the limit of what could be done for it to look that good and for us to shoot it that fast and we it was six day weeks every week i remember sundays was just we'd all just sleep so we'd just be ready for monday morning because it was a marathon i was tasked with like trying to look like jude law which meant that every day i came home from work and i got on a treadmill when i ran six miles they rented me this beautiful palazzo i needed a treadmill and the only treadmill at the time in in rome was at the at the hilton and so i moved kind of out of town up on the hill to the hilton cavalieri which was kind of lonely which was good for the part but you know you're in rome who wants to who wants to live at the hilton right who are you to say anything to me so who are you to tell me anything actually i really really do not want to be on this boat with you i can't move without you moving gives me the creeps you give me the creeps you can't shut it out that's a prosthetic gag because what anthony wanted was was the hit in a quick exchange of dialogue and then for the blood to start and so i remember jude getting up at like two or three in the morning to go before everybody with the makeup team and they built this thing on his face that was very fragile so i'm sure we would have shot probably the bulk of the scene the day before you know because it's a pretty intense scene on the boat between the two of us when you do something like that you're walking around with wires attached to you and like it's like nobody touch him you know and it's like everything is get you down to the boat get him where he needs to be you know and then everybody get ready be in position and you know three two one boom and then the thing opens and then you have to take it all off and then you just put blood on him and then we carry on with the scene and so we would have shot that over a couple days the ocean's trilogy yeah the trick to those movies is it's supposed to look kind of tossed off and nonchalant and all of that but it's very highly choreographed the cast because we were all used to kind of headlining movies and carrying them and all that responsibility and pressure and you work you're in every shot every day and suddenly you know you're working two or three or four days a week which is unheard of stephen had the real heavy lifting stephen's job was to do you know try to keep 11 story lines going try to keep the you know the the right rhythm and pace to it you know they have to be fun you know but the heist has to like that gag has that all has to kind of work and so i remember riding up in the elevator with him one night we were in las vegas and i said are you gonna play any any blackjack while you're here he goes i have one big bet it's like a hundred million dollar bet and and i don't have time for anything else like this the only thing i'm i'm focused on oh let the sun beat down upon my face stars to fill my dreams i am a traveler in both time and space to be where i have been i don't even understand what happened in there what did i say you called his niece a very cheap one what she's seven you're currently confined to bed with a wicked case i'm sorry okay so what does this mean it means you stay here well we rarely kept a straight face i mean what's in the movie are the takes where we didn't kind of fall out laughing because we were pretty unprofessional steven used to complain he was like the teacher trying to keep everybody in line but but we just had so much fun together and it was such a good group there was no ego on those sets if you were the last person to get to set you know because you get you all get called at the same time and the last person invariably got a round of applause like standing ovation from everyone else even if you're like two minutes early to set like if you're the last one so kind of the opposite of what you might expect in a situation where ego could get involved it just never happened [Music] the bourne franchise when i signed up for the first one i signed up for one it's like well if the first one works you have to do two more i don't think anybody thought it would work so they were like no one's fine we went over schedule on that movie and that's always a bad kind of indicator usually it means the film's in trouble you know 9 11 happened like while we were in post-production and so the movie ended up coming out i think a year after it was supposed to come out none of us were anticipating it being a in fact it opened against two big movies scooby-doo which sounds you know silly in retrospect but those movies are you know they they find a very big audience and wind talkers there was a nick cage movie that was coming out that was a big budget movie bigger much bigger than us and all three of those movies were opening on the same friday we were just hoping that you know we could kind of make a little dent i still remember because the scooby-doo made 54 million dollars that weekend and we made 27 which was a lot more so we made exactly half it completely outperformed what we thought and then the reason that we ended up making a sequel was because it was one of those movies that because it hadn't been driven down anybody's throat because no one really thought it would be a hit audiences kind of found it on their own so every week it over performed what they projected and that was only because moviegoers were going hey you should go check this one out it's good and and that was that was kind of how that kind of became our thing it was like the the moviegoers made that franchise i really went as deep as i could on the choreography for the fighting was because i'd never done an action movie because people didn't think of me as an action person and i didn't either and i really wanted to do everything that i could to be as believable as possible in terms of the stunts i always defer to the stunt team because they're great and they if if it's safe enough for you to do they're they'll train you up so that you can do it those guys just take over and and they're amazing and you can't tell when it's me and when it's not because because they're they're that good but i always try to do as much as i can just because you can hold a shot longer i mean nowadays with face replacement you could probably do anything but back then you could hold a fight scene longer and if you got all of the moves right you can do 15 20 moves and you're like holy that's that's the actor like the actor's really doing that i did boxing training and martial arts training and all this stuff in the run-up to that movie because i wanted to try to help the movie as much as i could and and extend some of those shots the departed it was in boston so i was really uh kind of relaxed and and you know i mean i just knew that world mark obviously too no really knows that world and i remember we were shooting ocean's 12 and brad came up and said hey you want to be in a martin scorsese movie because brad i don't know if you know produced that and brad was going to play either leo or my role i can't remember which one i guess they had spoken to marty and marty was like no i'd like to have matt and i thought brad was joking i'm like what actor do you ask that question of who you know you're like shut up man he's like no i'm actually serious and then he handed me the script and it was fantastic i just felt like that was one of those things that fell from the sky it's like marty was like working with stephen you know with spielberg it's like or coppola like wow i got to do that i'll always be you know grateful that i had that that that chance and every day like it was just you know that scene in the elevator you know what i mean it's just like you just feel it's just electric when you're doing it because um because you're doing it you know in front of martin scorsese i can't wait to see you explain this to a suffolk county jury you this is gonna be fun just kill me i am killing you you know it was the the gag there is that it's a total surprise and i know i'm screwed and i'm begging for you know i think i'm saying just kill me and then the door opens and and his head gets blown off and i i remember sitting we were sitting there marty had a shot of the elevator door closing uh uh you know and opening because leo leo was laying across the thing closing and opening and like we were sitting there and leo and i were looking at it and it was like no one's ever gonna believe like that's leonardo dicaprio just got his head blown off like we knew that that surprise was gonna was gonna work [Music] invictus well it's an incredible book and it was a great script alan horn who ran warner brothers at the time called me and told me that he wanted me for this part and so i immediately called clint and i remember i got his office they said uh oh he's not he's not here right now and i go okay great just he can just call me back whenever and they go oh that's a thing we don't we don't know when he's gonna call because he's on vacation and nobody knows how to reach him and when it whenever he calls it could be a couple days but i'll give him your message and i remember hanging up the phone and saying to my wife wow that's pretty cool like when you're at the place where you're like i'll call you in three days because i'm with my family and i can't be bothered i'm like wow that's that was that was kind of neat but i just remember loving working with him he does one take i heard that so i worked on that south african accent like an office job tim monic this great dialect coach would come and we would from monday to friday from from nine in the morning till five like like it was an office job we worked for about six months on that thing because i knew i was only going to get one take and on the first day i i did my first take and i knew that i got i got it right but i was like you know hey boss can i have another one and he just turned to me and goes why you want to waste everybody's time and i was like all right i guess we're moving on you know so that was that was day one with clint heads up looking mad do you hear listen to your country seven minutes seven minutes defense defense defense this is it this is our destiny [Applause] he looks like an nfl linebacker he's six foot five the first time i met him i went to his house for dinner right when i got to south africa and i really admired like what that team did and what he did and everything and so i was excited to meet him and and i rang the doorbell on the door open and this guy who like took up the whole doorway you know opened the door big smile and and i just looked up at him and i said i look much bigger on film [Music] contagion scott burns our writer just did a mountain of research and and talked to all the experts they explained exactly what would happen and the movie's really accurate it was eerie you know for all of us to look at it once the world started to kind of imitate the movie you know luckily covid wasn't as deadly as the virus in uh in our movie you know and for anybody who said we couldn't have predicted this and how could we have known it's like well a movie came out about it 10 years before that i kind of told you everything not because we and if people in hollywood have some kind of any kind of secret answers or we guessed but because we actually just took the time to talk to experts and let them lead our story been working here just get this here jory don't touch anything help me [Music] well ian lipkin who was our technical advisor who's who you know he does for a living he identifies viruses and he explained that he identifies a new one every week they're able to kind of figure out what it is like this is kind of bird that you know and they can figure it out and stop it but there are these kind of outbreaks that happen all over the world all the time and you talk to that guy and like you definitely you know you definitely feel like this could happen [Music] the martian that was the first thing i said to ridley scott i was like i don't know if i can do this and he was like why and i said well because i literally just played you know the move the interstellar hadn't come out and i go it's not a big part but i am a guy alone on a planet you know and i don't know if i should follow it up with the guy who's alone on a planet nobody yeah i'm so glad he said that to me because i took the leap and i'm really glad i did obviously i'm entering this log for the record uh in case i don't make it uh it is oh 6 53 on seoul 19 and i'm alive obviously but i'm guessing that's going to come as a surprise to my crewmates and to nasa and to the entire world really so surprised there was a scripted moment when the character was supposed to break down and when we got to it we felt forced and ridley and i kind of looked at each other and we're like this doesn't feel right does it and we both kind of felt that same you know we were in the same movie together and we think yeah no and we were getting towards the end of the schedule and i thought we were gonna kind of find a new little scene to do where i'm about to like get reunited with my team we'd shot stuff with the other actors months earlier but they'd all gone home and ridley and i had made all those scenes but just together where it was just me on camera and so suddenly i heard in my helmet as the you know as the gimbal starts to shutter as if this thing is going to take off and the light effects start to happen and like and you really feel like you know you're about to kind of take off and suddenly i heard the voices of all of these actors who were my buddies you know and and it's and it dawned on me you know thinking through the kind of the filter of this character like he hadn't heard a voice in a year and that these people had made this sacrifice to come back for him about two minutes what day how are you doing down there i'm good i'm anxious to get up to you [Music] thanks for coming back for me well we're on it remember we'll be pulling some serious g so it's okay to pass out you're in martinez's hands now well tell that about no barrel rules copy that mav capcom go remote command go recovery go secondary recovery go pilot go they came all the way back you know they slingshot around earth and come back you know what i mean it's like it was so humbling it just totally happened and it wasn't planned that's just great directing that's ridley just just kind of put a move on me i didn't see it coming you know that one of those things it's over in five minutes that's just down to great directing [Music] true grit well that was just the chance to work with the cone brothers really and on the technical side it was like trying to figure out the tongue thing when he gets his tongue yeah injured and that we figured out i was sitting in a makeup trailer one day on another movie and picked up a hair tie and just put it around my twist started twisting it around my tongue and just tried to speak normally and that was how we kind of came up with that little gag but those guys are unbelievably prepared like they storyboard everything and now they're at the stage where despite having everything meticulously storyboarded they don't really adhere to the storyboards anymore because they're so experienced they can kind of you know if a better idea comes to them on the spot they just kind of drive in that direction and they just it was really they're really efficient and just amazing in conference you cannot side our agreement you're the one who shot me mr the beef has a point marshall it is an unfair leg up in any competition to shoot your opposite number goddamn it i do not accept it as a given that i did shoot le beave there are plenty of guns going off i heard the rifle and i felt the ball you missed your shot cockburn here's my shot you were more handicapped without the eye than i without the arm that was great i mean and also doing a western with them and with jeff you know and haley was like 13 and she was so sweet that was another situation where jeff and i kind of as parents were like very everyone was i mean to be fair i mean you know everyone there was wanted to make sure that she had a good time and i think she really did and she's amazing in the movie too she was another one of those it's like obscenely gifted you know child actors ford versus ferrari it was so much fun working with him i had a blast he's i mean he's unbelievably professional he comes at it out of a place of joy and i'm the same way we both love what we do i think he's aware of his reputation as being so you know serious the very first day the director jim mangold who's great we got our first shot off and jim comes running in he's a big personality and he just launches into okay well you do that on that line look at him and he starts giving us these notes but but it's big like it's you know it's almost like a performance huh how long has that been oh it's got to be three or four years at least let me show it yeah scca divisional championship you broke my finger was that such a nippy nippy bloody thing did you want to hear all that thing i call that the llama bite he's just this bigger than life guy he goes all right let's go take two and he goes running back to behind the camera and christian just turned to me and goes who was that guy and i think it was his way of going like this is going to be fun we don't have to out serious one another because if you come at it from a place of joy and relaxation and your work's always going to be better you ready the name on the middle of that steering wheel should tell you that i was born ready shelby hit it attaboy the cars we drove would be the shell of a car with like a miata engine so i think the real cars are all in museums we did work one day with the shell of a car and just the shell of an original cobra it just had police tape around it it was worth over a million dollars it was just the most beautiful thing but yeah no those real cars are something still water that was one of the things i loved it was like because that's a very very specific thing a rough neck from oklahoma that can even do that job most people can't do it i couldn't do it for sure and so to play someone like that transplanted to marseille which is a really specific city in france it's not paris it's marseille and i just thought that it was you know beautifully written and the dynamics between you know me and my daughter played by abby breslin and then this other kind of new family that he finds a woman he falls in love with and her daughter her eight-year-old daughter he suddenly has the relationship with her that he couldn't have with his own kid and all of the pain and the regret and the shame that he carries and we talk about it as kind of like a dramatic thriller it's got kind of the bones of the you know the guy goes to exonerate his daughter and it and it looks like it might be that movie and it's not it's something very different the father of the girl he the american student yes ma'am allison came here for college and that's where she met this girl lina one night she found lena dead and called the police all they cared about was alison sleeping with some arab girl she'd never acted before and she's just one of those kids who's a natural and you never know what you're gonna get with a kid and after the first day tom and i sat down and just said okay well we gotta make sure this doesn't get messed up we have to keep this as as fun and playful and joyful for her french laws helped us there a bit because they're really strict about how many hours a kid can work she never got exhausted she never got burned out by the process which which can happen to adults you know and so when she was on set everybody was kind of uh all hands on deck ready to go she was you know somehow naturally just did things differently every take like she just couldn't do it the same way twice which is you know technique that takes decades for most people to learn thanks a lot for watching if you made it this far if i missed anything then just write in the chats or whatever however you kids do it and we'll talk about it next time

Channel: GQ

Views: 1,947,994

Rating: 4.9545631 out of 5

Keywords: celebrity, damon, good will hunting, gq, gq iconic, gq iconic characters, gq magazine, gq matt damon, iconic, iconic characters, matt damon, matt damon 2021, matt damon bourne, matt damon good will hunting, matt damon gq, matt damon iconic, matt damon iconic characters, matt damon interview, matt damon movie, matt damon movies, matt damon ocean's, matt damon saving private ryan, matt damon stillwater, matt damon the departed, matt damon the martian

Id: otYXs5gRHqg

Length: 27min 41sec (1661 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 08 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/nyrothia]

by the looks of it, if adrenochrome is real, he's not in on it.

[u/TheDiceMan]

Gosh, some of the cuts in this were nauseating!

[u/Dinosaur__Sheriff]

Does he break down his team America role?

[u/thedarkknight16_]

Wow no Interstellar break down?