On the road with the nicest man in Hollywood: Matt Damon | 60 Minutes Australia

his publicists are really going to love this but matt damon really is a sort of bloke who gives hollywood a good name he was here this past week to promote his latest movie the bourne supremacy but in the event what he promoted most was his own reputation as an all-round good guy he's famous for movies like goodwill hunting and the talented mr ripley and i have to say for being nice and in an industry full of men and women behaving badly mr damon is sadly something of a rarity so perhaps it was not surprising he charmed the pants off the local media this crusty old reporter included [Music] by definition stars are out of reach twinkle remotely from another constellation they are mysterious and unknowable and in fact nothing like the nice obliging earth matt damon who redefines all our notions of fame you love the work do you do you love the fame no no no no no that's the kind of the drop the downside yeah i mean but as downsides go it's not that bad you know you get good seats in restaurants and uh you know people kind of kiss your ass so it's you know not that yeah that's all right um you know experience that the uh the loss of anonymity is what's uh always what's uh what's the pain you don't really realize how great anonymity is until you lose it he copes by being nice happy birthday to my friends rachel what are you doing so nice that he even took time on the red carpet this week to make a birthday call to the unknown friend of an unknown fan not only time for fans but time for early morning djs my heavens jason bourne's one serious little insect and i am still at it late at night today tomorrow i read i don't know your figures this time around but last time you were here you did 101 interviews in four and a half days exactly which is exactly uh a quarter of what i normally do i mean i've done as many as 94 interviews in a day in america my fear would be being interviewer number 102 well you'd want to be i if it were me i'd rather be number one or number 102 you know better than you know 56. [Music] when fame enters the room everything changes even at an exclusive cocktail party the temperature drops but matt works the room and everyone warms to his role as the ordinary bloke a party plays so well it might not even be enough it's good is everyone asking about the olympics no not not a lot actually i i don't even know what the hell is going on in the olympics so you try to draw the cloak of an ordinary life around you to maintain your yeah i mean you know yeah i think yeah it's it's more of kind of a hiding in plain sight um hiding in plain sight yeah you go out and you do the interviews and you it's a nice expression perfectly personable and polite but you don't really give up you know so as an actor i mean to learn your trade or the ongoing learning of your trade is to move among people and observe them but you can't do that can you because you change them by virtue of being that's exactly right yeah that's the big drawback that's why you see people's work kind of fall off the longer they're famous it's really hard to try to i mean you have to be vigilant in trying to find ways to keep observing people but because if you're walking into a room and everyone's behavior is changing you're never going to be able to to see people behaving as they do you know in the wild as it were matt damon is jason bourne we're here to promote a movie too aren't we no well i better ask you something about the movie the car chase i had the misfortune to sit too close to the screen that's a problem yeah it appeared to me to be in that car and of course working in television i was trying to work out how you did it they had a steering wheel and a seat put on the roof of the car that i was in with a professional driver on the who sat on the roof of the car and they had a stunt driver in the other car and they had my steering wheel disconnected and then the camera operator was sitting to my right and we just took off at 100k and and went through this uh you just long for this rough ride yeah and slammed into each other and uh yes trust those guys oh yeah implicitly they're great the movie is a spy thriller the born supremacy from the robert ludlum bestseller matt plays jason bourne had disaffected cia assassin with amnesia but forget the unlikely clock it's been a huge success overseas and is expecting a long run here and you sprint and you run along i swear i do a lot of running are you a great runner uh no i'm not a great runner i actually saw some of the playback and slightly altered the way that i ran oh really because i looked a little goofy when i ride the subway in new york if i hear the train coming i you know and i'm coming down the stairs you know i go you know what there's gonna be another one yeah i kind of walk down daisy theresa even if you saw the movie mystic pizza back in 1988 with julia roberts you might have missed matt damon a 17 year old high school student had just one line but a line he's never forgotten the line was mom do you want my green stuff because we were sitting around eating uh lobster in the scene and that was my my one line mom do you want my green stuff sometimes it's one line like tony curtis was a telegraph boy right one line and you discovered yeah that would definitely wasn't the case with me i mean i uh i i uh you know it was another 10 years before uh before my big break stop brushing me back stop crowding the plate the film was goodwill hunting in which he co-starred with his best mate ben affleck you're gonna get charged you know that you think i'm afraid of you wrote it together and won an oscar for best screenplay and the oscar goes to ben affleck [Applause] he was on a roll is that it's tom tom ripley next came the part of the bisexual murderous but charming con man in the talented mr ripley did we know each other hello uh well i knew you so i was a great film and a courageous role hinting perhaps behind the smile was a steely talented actor making brave choices coincidence so to play a character with uh you know whose sexuality was in question who was uh you know who was doing the things he was doing for the reasons he was doing them which you know weren't kind of cut and dried kind of hollywood you know uh easy to follow reasons it's a complicated story um i i just knew it was a it was a once in a lifetime it felt like a once in a lifetime kind of role whoa whoa check this out then from completely outside the square came the comedy stuck on you directed by the celebrated and very off-the-wall farrelly brothers who wrote him over a beer at matt's place hey taste ice cream you gotta dot your head you dumb hey we're sitting there and pete fairley says to mia hey can i use your bathroom and i said sure sure it's right you know that's right down the hall there so i'm sitting there talking to bobby and and a minute later he he comes out and he's soaking wet absolutely naked except for a towel around his waist with shampoo in his hair and he walks out and he goes you gotta you got any conditioner so that was cause i gotta make this yeah i said i gotta work with these guys stop bored she's smiling at you if she wanted to talk to somebody she wasn't brought up rapidly hi how are you my name's bob tenner um but i'm really more of a baritone in matters of real-life romance matt used to date famously the likes of minnie driver a one-time coaster afraid of me you're afraid that i won't love you back you know what i'm afraid too and later there was winona ryder can i talk about girls yeah sure um you don't have a high-profile girlfriend anymore right what did you learn from dating the famous from my own experience and from watching what happens to other people uh it just looks like the the fame component which is not the part that i like is magnified kind of exponentially if you have two people who are both celebrities for me now it would be very i i can't see a world in which i'd i'd date a celebrity again just because i i don't want to be uh it's just not worth it you know it's just not worth it i don't want that attention now there is the lovely but totally unknown florida bartender luciana barroso whose only celebrity comes from being at his side yeah and she stays well back from the same game yeah i mean i think anybody who who gets uh close enough to it you know to see it for what it really is you know any normal person goes oh my god and they stay away from it was scarcely a scandal in his life virtually the only pitfall was early in his career when the american media reported that he'd announced his breakup with mini driver on oprah before he told minnie about it the oprah story breaking up with minnie driver yeah total horse yeah before minnie knew about it yeah no complete which actually uh you know she acknowledged i think at some point in an interview like um you know that that that that that wasn't true i mean we'd broken up three weeks before that but it's a story that i mean six years and three relationships yeah is you know still there so it's official it didn't happen no it did not happen [Music] until now matt damon has skillfully avoided media controversy with the looming american election like his mate ben affleck he's weighing in on senator john kerry's side questioning why america went to war in iraq i mean america right now is like a 49 nation you know we're really really divided um you know and i don't know if that's the case with australia the australians i've met don't all seem to be you know leading the charge to kind of be over there i think they uh you know they feel like a lot of americans do like uh like we went in there on you know with with some bad information and someone should be accountable for that i don't understand why you know if this were a movie you know shoot someone would have lost their job by now i don't understand why you know why government officials are held to some different standard [Music] in his media blitz of australia this week matt damon left everyone smiling [Applause] and i wanted to come back and without going in too much into detail about my personal life um i brought a bunch of people with me this time because i wanted to show uh show them australia too no tantrums no paparazzi punchers here was an actor who wasn't carried away with himself a star yeah you can tell the difference between hollywood and reality just watching this boxing match and the way the guys were walking into the ring and i'm sorry you're a movie star you're also one of those movie stars who actually can act look at some of the roles that you play and they're pretty elliptical sometimes aren't they you played an angel of death the genius con man murderer the troubled mathematical whiz kid an assassin and a conjoined twin that's just a handful yeah well that's a that's an interesting spread isn't it where's it coming from uh hopefully uh not from a place that can be defined because if it can then yeah there's trouble yeah then there's trouble i i i want to hopefully just stay one step ahead of being pigeonholed so um you know and being forced to play the same guy over and over again so so so far i've been able to do that have you managed to get so old ahead on such young shoulders oh thanks uh you know you're only not even in mid-30s yeah um yeah i don't think i'm that i wouldn't call myself that wise i mean i'm still figuring it out hello i'm tara brown thanks for watching 60 minutes australia subscribe to our channel now for brand new stories and exclusive clips every week and don't miss out on our extra minutes segments and full episodes of 60 minutes on com dot a ninenow.com and the nine now app

Channel: 60 Minutes Australia

Views: 102,720

Keywords: 60 Minutes, 60 Minutes Australia, Liz Hayes, Tara Brown, Liam Bartlett, Tom Steinfort, Sarah Abo, karl stefanovic, 60Mins, #60Mins, matt damon, team america, ben affleck, the martian, jason bourne, actor, hollywood, talented mr ripley, good will hunting, supremacy, identity, red carpet, premiere, a list, saving private ryan

Id: XZnvSOVOXVo

Length: 13min 51sec (831 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 10 2022