My notes from that day remind me that he is slight of build, 'not so tall', and pale. He is wearing a backward baseball cap suppressing 'a shock of light brown hair', a dark T-shirt, heans and an oversized plaid wind-breaker. Listening to this tape is a bit surreal. There in crisp audio is me, a Joe-Schmo journalist, and Damon, an Oscar-winning superstar who poses for magazine covers in the bathtub, changes starlet girlfriends with the seasons and enjoys the adoration of thousands of shrine-building Internet crazies, adn we're having a char over coffee, like people. The theme seems to be how Damon outclasses other actors. Mp> "For the most part young actors in Hollywood are actors by default," he says. "They were a model last week adn they're an actor this week. Most of them are either strung out or they're like, 'Hey, man', or 'All right, dude'. They're morons. They're actors because their buddies are. And they get auditions, you know. They're good-looking so they get agents."
Back then, Damon was (and is still) two semesters away from earning his bachelor's degree from Harvard. This son of a "radical leftist" educator - "she's been to El Salvador" - tells me that he turned down Columbiz and Caregie-Melon to go to college in Cambridge, where he grew up. "The casting guy will look at my resume and say, 'you're at Harvard'." he says. "From that moment on it's like 'thank God'. It just means I'm not full of shit, basically. If nothing else, even if they don't like my work, I'll at least be interesting conversation."
I haven't heard the tape since just after I made it, at the Seinfeld diner in Manhattan. Back then I was a journalism grad student at Columbia and Damon was a struggling movie actor between jobs, the ideal subject for my assignment to profile an 'artist'. We were both 23. By chance at a bar near campus I had met him and his then girlfriend Skylar, a striking blonde Columbia med student on whom Minnie Driver's Hunting character was later based.
I knew Matt Damon by name because I had interviewed for my undergraduate newspaper the unsuccessful pre-school flick School Ties, in which he starred with Brendan Fraser and Chris O'Donnel a few years earlier. He was rarely recognized by strangers and, somewhat flattered, agreeed to an interview. Mp> This may be the only long, candid interview Damon gave before becoming a top-tier celebrity and having his press carefully orchestrated by access brokers. A couple months back, when I tried to arrange a follow-up interview, four years after the original, a letter and several phone calls from me to Damon's New York office went unanswered.
"So when will you graduate?" I ask. "I'm trying to ge enough momentum careerwise to go back," says Damon. "After School Ties everybody got so much smoke blown up their asses about how huge we were gonna be. I took that to mean that, at least, I'll definitely get a gig. So I went back and knocked off another year at Harvard. Suddenly the movie bombed and I was fucked. Brendan, who stayed out in LA, is getting like $1.7 million per picture. He's like a really big movie star. Chris got Scent of a Woman right after that. So the two people who went and worked immediately were the ones who made it."
Despite his chargrin at having put Harvard ahead of Hollwood, Damon still wasn't quite above turning down an offer in 1993 to star opposite Sharon Stone in the big-budget The Quick and the Dead. "it's a piece-of-shit spaghetti western," he tells me. "You would pick up this script and you would read it and you would justlaugh and go, 'fuck this, are you kidding me?' I put my high hat on and said no. I haven't worked since then." The part eventually went to Leonardo Di Caprio; the movie was indeed a flop.
A few months ago Damon competed wit hLeo for another cowboy role. Reportedly, when the Titanic star hesitated to take the lead in the upcoming All the Pretty Horses, the filmmakers offered it to Damon. He accepted and will make $5 million for his trouble. (Last year, well before the Horses offer, Damon suggested to another interviewer that $5 million was exorbitant wges for acting. "I can't spend that much money.")
Before Horses begin shooting, Damon will have wrapped sever other major films, two of which - Saving Private Ryan and Rounders - hit theaters in the summer.
The tape plays on. Damon explains that his pallid condition is the result of a crash diet. At the time he was a finalist for the lead in Gus Vant Sant's To Die For. The role required him to look like a scrawny teenager. "I get so excited about meeting with Gus Vant Sant." he says. "This is someone who's not gonna sit there and fucking listen to the studo, you know, listen to these people who are just trying to make money, like they're dealing in widgets. It's good to get on board with someone like that." (Damon lost that role to Joaquin Phoenix but, of course, eventually did get on board wit hvan Sant, the maverick auteur directed Hunting, the breakthrough film for which Damon and pal Ben Affleck won screenwriting Oscars.)
The conversation turns to Damon's craft. He describes himself as something of an apprentice to whom working closely with Robert Duvall and Jason Patric in 1993's failied Geronimo, an American Legend was akin to years of acting lessons. "I'm an affable person, so I get into these situations where these people will just tell me how they work. That's wht you get in acting school, except you get some jaded person who did a Milkbone dog biscuit commercial telling you that." Patric, he says, made the biggest impact. "Jason will sit down and talk to you for an hour about picking up this spoon. And why. Why would you pcik up this spoon and why I wouldn't pick up this spoon. he can talk for ever (sic) about it. With an actor like Tom Cruise, it's like 'hey, pick up this spoon'. 'OK'." (Back then, you'll notice, dissing fellow actors was something of an obsession for young Damon).
He mentions that he finds no educational value in the experiences O'Donnell with who he seems especially competitive, had on the The Three Musketeers set the same year. "Those guys were out getting bombed every night. That's not gonna help me as an actor, seeing how drunk I can get with fucking Charlie Sheen. Who gives a shit?"
As the recording stretches to a second hour, we discuss a scatter of random topics, including an extended nude wrestling-in- the shower scene he had with O'Donnell and Fraser in Ties. "It was high pressure," he says. "the set was closed to women, but of course they gathered around the monitors outside - a big fucking joke. A lot of the interesting, homoerotic stuff got cut."
We touch on racism: "People are fucked up, and they can't communicate at all," and on the Academy Awards, the winning of which last spring reduced Damon and Affleck to wind-punching boneheads: "Political bullshit." Then on the future: "Hopefully I'll be working, doing good stuff, just staying on the path I'm on right now. I hope to find my longtime companion, settle down and have kids, be able to put them through college."
Since our meeting, Damon has exceeded his own career expectations, and many of his films stick closely to his "hifalutin" ( his word) standards of independence and artistry. But his personal life has skewed from his workaday predictions. Damon, who had been with his Harvard sweetheart Skylar for two years when we met, has been linked with three different A-list actresses in teh past year. He callously dumped Hunting co-star Driver to squire Winona Ryder, according to the gossip columns.
Despte these indications that he has gone Hollywood, and despite having my interview request snubbed by his people, it's hard to hear the last moments of our chat and not conclude that Damon is at heart a decent fellow. At the least, he was once willing to spend several hours helping a stranger with his homework. He even put me in touch with Skylar ("It wasn't love at first sight," she says) and his "Old man," Kent, a Boston financier ("Movie stardom is a longshot. I'm glad he's had a college experience; he still has options."). Regrettably, I didn't take Damon up on one suggestion: "You shoudl call my roommate, my longtime pal and partner in crime Ben Affleck."
The tape is ending. We're well into post-interview pleasantris.
"Thanks," I say. "You've been generous."
"Call if you need anything else," he replies. "Anytime." I don't know if
your agent passed on the message, Matt, but I did.
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