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[THE COURTSHIP, LOS ANGELES]
"Something" turns into drinks and dinner at the Chateau Marmont. But before that, I've scheduled an interview with Liman, at a mutual friend's house in the Hollywood Hills. Liman, 35, is best known for directing the widely admired indie movies Swingers and Go. The Bourne Identity put him in another league. "I found myself facing a lot of people who worked for me but whose job, it seemed, was telling me what we couldn't do," he says.
The essential problem was the script. Liman's intention was to create a spy story with an actual human character at the core of it - this is what sold Damon on the movie - but when the final revision came in on the eve of production, it had morphed into a typical genre piece, with cheesy dialogue and elaborate car chases. Damon was mortified; Liman says he was, too. At a big party that was supposed to welcome Matt to Paris, the director and his star huddled conspiratorially in the corner and didn't talk to anyone else for the entire evening. They agreed on what the script needed, but there was no time. The $60 million budget was set, a crew of hundreds had assembled, locations had been worked out, things had to roll. And so they did, with rewritten scenes faxed in every day from New York, and Liman warring with his producers. "Fortunately, Matt was behind me all the way," says Liman, "and if he hadn't been, I would've been completely screwed."
Liman and Damon did a little warring of their own, about one pivotal scene: Matt's character is loading his handgun, about to shoot it out with the bad guys, and Liman wanted him to imbue a particular line with a little Bruce Willis action-hero mojo. Matt refused.
"What was funny was, he actually did it once, off camera, just to show me that he could," says Liman. "And he f..king nailed it, and I was like, 'Yeah, exactly!' And he said, 'I'm not doing that. Those are the parts I turn down.'"
When we finish our conversation, Liman drives me over to the Chateau Marmont, where Matt is sitting on the patio smoking a cigarette and drinking an Amstel. He has accessorized the Damon Uniform with a canvas work jacket that has someone else's name stitched on the front. It's a pleasantly star-studded evening at the Marmont. Sandra Bullock is running around. Famke Janssen, fetchingly attired in heels and low-slung jeans, saunters around with her rat-on-a-string dog. She and Matt, who were in Rounders together, reflect each other's glow for a few seconds, and then Matt turns to me. I ask him how he spent his Saturday. "Golf," he says.
"Why didn't you invite me? It's not hang gliding, but it's more than you and me and the tape recorder."
"You think I want a writer to see me play golf? I'm terrible."
We discuss his mini-clash with Liman. I'm curious to know when he became such a serious thesp that he wouldn't indulge a beleaguered director with one Bruce Willis knockoff. After all, Matt is a regular guy who dropped out of college at 22 to move to Hollywood with his buddy Ben. Ben would've done Bruce. Ben has done Bruce. "I should've done it," says Matt. "But you have to draw the line somewhere. I could be saying lines like that all the time, and doing plenty well with it. I picked this movie because I didn't want that."
There is still more shooting to be done on The Bourne Identity, but Matt's been in LA, finishing up Ocean's Eleven. He stays at Ben's house, and when his mom came to visit the week before, she stayed there too. "I took her to my friend's hockey game. He plays for the Colorado Avalanche. He's the only guy in the NHL who can't skate backward." Matt loves the idea of a hockey player who can't skate backward, because it means relying on tenacity rather than skill, and this is how Matt sees himself as an actor. It's why he lost 40 pounds, coming dangerously close to shrinking his heart, for one of his first big Hollywood parts, in 1996's Courage Under Fire. It's why he spent months learning how to play a single piece on the piano for one brief scene in The Talented Mr Ripley. "I do all this because if I didn't do it, and I sucked, I'd wonder if there wasn't something I could've done that would have made a difference."
After about three Amstels, Matt is all talked out, and we sit down at a table on the patio for dinner with Liman and some of his friends. Damon orders spaghetti and meatballs, solid regular-guy fare. As our plates are being cleared away, Matt gets an e-mail on his BlackBerry from Casey Affleck, who is at a wedding and is sitting next to an empty chair intended for Matt. "I'd better get over there," Matt says, rising to leave. "Come to Paris and see us finish the movie. It'll be fun."
[THE ROMANTIC GETAWAY, PARIS]
I am supposed to have Saturday afternoon with Matt, but Liman needs him on the set. So we reschedule for the evening, and I go shopping in the Marais district with Matt's assistant, a pretty, six-one giantess named Trinette, and his co-star, the German actress Franka Potente, who is known to American audiences, to the extent she is known at all, as the fleet-footed redhead from Run Lola Run. I have told them we have serious business; they must help me come up with an idea for what to do with Matt on Saturday night in Paris. Trinette says we ought to go to Mark Wahlberg's 30th-birthday party, which just happens to be in Paris.
"He is not going to go," says Franka. "He's going to be tired after work, and maybe he'll get a beer with you somewhere." I explain that I've already had the beers-with-Matt encounter. "Look, she says, "for weeks we were supposed to have a date of some kind, just to get to know each other. Finally, I got him to ride on that big Ferris wheel right by the Tuilieries and that was that. I never had such problems with a boy."
After shopping, Trinette and I head out to the set, which is in a remote industrial quarter, the New Jersey of Paris. Unable to bear the torpor of watching the same 30-second scene get shot twenty times, we escape to the cafeteria, where we eat what has to be the worst food ever served in France. Matt joins us at last. I tell him about Marky Mark's party. He frowns: "I don't know, man, I'm beat, and I've got to get up to rehearse tomorrow morning. How about we just grab a beer somewhere?"
For our big night in Paris, we empty the mini-bar back at his suite at the Ritz. I tell him that maybe he can help me out by relating some great tale of Parisien debauchery. "It hasn't really been like that," he replies. "I haven't even seen all that much of the city. When my brother and dad were here, we went out for a run and passed Notre Dama, and we ducked in for a second, and it was like, 'Great, at least I got that one off the list.'"
So Mr. I Don't Do Bruce Willis is not exactly Mr High Culture either. And speaking of culture, what happened to his writing career? It's been five years since he and Ben won the best original screenplay Oscar for Good Will Hunting. "I wish I were the kind of guy who could sit down and pound something out," he says. "But Good Will Hunting took forever, and we don't have that kind of time anymore." At this point, Matt is into his third or fourth Amstel, and though the interview is going fine, it is just another interview. So I spring an idea on him: "What do you say we go try and find Anna Kournikova?"
"What?" he says.
"Anna Kournikova. The French Open is happening right now, and where else would she be staying but the Ritz? Let's see if we can find her".
"And what would we do if we did find her? She's probably got like 50 huge Russian guys following her everywhere she goes."
"I'm sure she does. But that would only make it more interesting in terms of my story. I mean, you'd have to figure out a way to get past them."
"Pretty f..ked-up idea, but nice try," Matt says, walking over to the mini-bar. "I'm having another beer. You want one?"
[VALENTINE'S DAY, NEW YORK CITY]
Matt Damon is my Valentine, the reward for almost a full year of hounding him. On February 14, we meet for dinner at Keens Steakhouse, in Manhattan's garment district.
"So my girlfriend's in LA," he says, as we take seats at the bar. "What's your excuse?" (Though he scrupulously avoids mentioning her name, it becomes clear that he is referring to Odessa Whitmire - Ben's assistant.)
The last year has not gone exactly as Matt had planned. His intention was to live in his apartment in the Village for a solid stretch of time and start work on a screenplay with Ben and Casey. But he ended up spending just four weeks total in New York, and the screenplay is nowhere. Random stuff intervened. For starters, there was Project Greenlight on HBO, in which Matt, not an empire builder by nature, was clearly content to let his partners Ben and Chris Moore do all the dick-swinging. He also appeared in an episode of Will & Grace, playing a straight guy who pretends he's gay so he can join a gay men's choir. Plus, he had to go back to Europe for more shoots on The Bourne Identity.
"More reshoots, oh my God, is this going to be worse than Bagger Vance?"
"You know, I think it's going to be good."
"But you have to say that."
"Doug is one of those guys who has the ability to sit in a room and work it and work it and work it until he gets what he wants. And after September 11, the studio got more interested in it and gave us the money for reshoots."
"The whole experience must make you wish you'd done something simpler. I mean, why not Planet of the Apes next time?"
"If you decide to do any movie, it becomes your life for four or five or six months. So it's important to me to make decisions that I can live with. Actors feel compelled to work - if you keep turning things down, maybe they'll stop asking you. Maybe they'll think there's a million other guys who'd kill to do this. And they'd be right. There's nobody more replacable than an actor. So I might be crazy, but I'm content not to work these days."
Then he describes what is likely to be his next movie. Steven Soderbergh has just acquired the rights to 'The Informant', a nonfiction book about corporate swindling at Archer Daniels Midland, and he wants Matt to star. "This is why you don't want to have committed to something just because you were worried about working," he says. "I would hate it if Steven came to me and I had to say, 'Sorry, I'd love to, but I'm getting $25 million to play Gilligan.'"
Sitting at the bar, we are constantly interrupted by admirers. Some want autographs, others send over drinks, one guy spends several minutes telling him about his brother who was killed in the World Trade Center. Matt politely, and without condescension, obliges them all. He even agrees to go say hello to a whole table, and then gets ambushed. "Matt F..king Damon," yells a drunk woman. "Like, who the f..k cares about your skinny ass?" Matt is more amused than offended. Usually, no one says anything to him: "I can live a surprisingly normal life. As long as I stay out of malls and SoHo on the weekends. And, I guess, steak houses on Valentine's Day."
My last date with Matt ends much like the others: me, him, and a bunch of Amstel Light empties. As we head out to get cabs, he asks me whether I've got enough to make a decent story. "I hope so," I say. "It would've helped if you'd at least gone searching for Anna Kournikova."
"Yeah, sorry about that. But don't worry. You've got my permission to make the whole thing up."
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From This Is London:
Hollywood actor Matt Damon was dealt an embarrassing blow at the weekend when he was turned away from one of the capital's most celebrated restaurants.
The Ivy, which reportedly banned Liza Minnelli recently for ranting at staff, took a call from Damon on Friday wanting to treat a party of eight of his theatre co-stars to a meal on Saturday night.
He was told that he could only get a table for himself and three friends. But banking on talking round staff with his celebrity status he turned up with eight friends anyway.
To the Talented Mr Ripley star's shame, he was turned away at the door with the suggestion that he might like to try another restaurant a short walk away. With that, Damon, 31, and friends Summer Phoenix, 23, the sister of the Gladiator star Joaquin and the late River, and Casey Affleck, 26, the brother of Ben Affleck and five others, walked to Sheekey's fish restaurant in Covent Garden.
The blow was doubly hard for Damon as he had planned the meal to celebrate their first day off rehearsals. Damon, Affleck and Phoenix have been told by the producers of This Is Our Youth at the Garrick Theatre on Charing Cross Road that they must refrain from late-night drinking if they are to make the West End show work when it debuts in less than two weeks. Their decision to dine at The Ivy was to be the one extravagance of their stay.
[Insert The Ivy spokesperson quote here about Matt trying to "sweet-talk" his way in]
The trio, who have been in London a week, had been working 12-hour days and turning-in early every night at their suites at the Covent Garden Hotel in Monmouth Street. On their 18-day stay, they are paying a special luxury room rate of �220-a-night - or �11,880 for their entire stay. After that, the theatre is putting them up in chic London apartments. (My note: Possibly the only time I've ever wanted to live in London)
They have been told that there is no time for partying in the capital. A source on the show said: "They are being told in no uncertain terms to get some sleep rather than go out when they finish rehearsals each day.
"Matt, Summer and Casey take over from Hayden (Christensen), Anna (Paquin) and Jake (Gyllenhaal) in two weeks and there's still a lot of ground to cover. There's no suggestion that they won't be up to scratch by the time the curtain raises, but we are all aware there is a lot to do."
Ironically, their regime couldn't be further from the plot of the play they are rehearsing which culminates in a hedonistic drug and drink-fuelled spending spree.
4/10/02
Felicity wrote:
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FM: What plan did you have going in? How much did you make up on the spot?
VS: The original idea was something that I wanted to do with [J.T. Leroy's
novel] Sarah - to just go and start shooting the novel. You have a guide
that you're working from, but you're not writing it down. So when we made
Gerry first, I was still interested in not going through that screenplay
stage. [Casey, Matt and I] had meetings - "scriptwriting" sessions - for a
number of months using outlines. Those were pretty undisciplined. We were
just writing ideas down. Then out of those ideas, we made an outline. A
week before we shot, Casey and Matt did more traditional dialogue writing.
[When we started shooting, we] knew the progression to the end, but it
changed as we reacted to things as we went. We threw away ideas, which you
wouldn't ordinarily do if you were shooting a script... we didn't get locked
in. We just had a selection of locations, and we chose at that moment, or
maybe the day before, where to shoot.
{On the characters having no cathartic revelations or soul-searching
moments}
VS: Before we made the movie I thought we were definitely going to hve a lot
of long bits of soul-searching dialogue. But it wasn't Casey's reaction to
the direction we were going. And I think it was maybe a big fear on our
part to have a bad version of that [soul-searching dialogue]. We wanted to
have a good version of that [kind of interaction]. So maybe we just wound
up with our version - because we have something.
FM: Were you ever worried that the whole thing just wouldn't work?
VS: ...After the first week, I showed [the early footage] to Harris
[Savides, the d.p.] and to Matt and Casey, and I said, "This is what the
idea is." I didn't know whether or not it was going to come together or
not, whether it was actually going to fit. There was a very good chance
that these long, contemplative shots were going to be overly contemplative
and just fall apart after the first 30 seconds. I was just going on my own
instincts and having developed my own set of rules about what was good or
bad [about this way of shooting] based on watching Chantal's and Bela's
films. But it wasn't until we actually put it together, after the first
week, that I knew we weren't wasting our money. One of the things that
really glued everything together was Casey and Matt themselves. Even as
people on screen doing nothing, for some reason they have this chemistry
together. They're really good friends, but I'm sure [their on-screen
chemistry] isn't based on their friendship. I don't think a real friendship
necessarily can be filmed. Most of the time, the two people on screen are
enemies who never talk to each other between takes, and somehow there's
still a chemistry between them. The chemistry [between Matt and Casey] was
another thing I think I saw after the first week of shooting. I was really
fortunate we got that, because it would have been difficult to transcend
some of those long passages without it.
FM: What role do you think Matt Damon's status as this young American movie
star played within the film? Could you have made it with two unknown guys,
and would it have worked?
VS: I don't know. What do you think?
FM: You're definitely playing with the audience's expectations about how
Matt Damon will act on screen, even if it's just the simple fact that it's
kind of a non-heroic role. But I also think there's something more dramatic
about Matt and Casey being subsumed by this big desert than if it was just
two guys you found in Argentina.
VS: If it were just two guys, it would be totally different. As I
originally thought of it, they were going to be funny characters lost in the
desert. [The roles] were elevated by Matt and Casey to be less caricatures
and more regular guys - maybe partly themselves. I think the initial idea
that it was two guys who were completely unprepared to spend more than even
10 minutes in the desert because of where they were from. They were
supposed to be suburan kids who, once they got out of the car, were doomed.
It worked its way from that to being something really different, because we
realised after talking about it that it wasn't really about the naivete of
the kids. Any human who gets out of the car is doomed if they don't have a
way to get back. Matt's standing as an international-superstar actor was
something that was never really part of the equation. But there was this
whole question of, since there were two guys, which one is going to be the
"alpha male"? We just arrived at that realistically, as opposed to through
the way we constructed the characters. That was kind of an interesting
thing to watch.
FM: Did you know who would be the active one during the film's climactic
scene?
VS: It was a big question. We didn't know when we started out. When we
were shooting we didn't know. I assumed, and I think Matt assumed too, but
Casey didn't assume. I think Casey assumed that we were all assuming one
thing, and I think Casey thought, "Well, why are we assuming that?"
{On the potential pressures of the film not succeeding}
FM: It certainly doesn't seem like the movie is informed by that pressure.
VS: No, because the film's not trying to make money out of the money [I
spent on it]. It's just trying to be free. The reason I risked the money
was not to impose [restrictions] on myself. It's sort of a self-designed
cage built around freedom. There are certain things we couldn't have done
on this movie if there were executives around. They'd talk you out of doing
them. Since we didn't have them I only had myself as the stand-in.
**
Gus certainly has very strong and well-developed ideas far from the
mainstream.
He makes some very clouded statements, and you're really not sure of their
meaning (actors hating each other, Casey's assumptions etc).
We were correct in Val's assumption from May last year that the possible
murder of a Boston student in New Mexico was the source of inspiration for
the film.
There are three colour pictures with the story.
(If Casey responds to these questions, it will be posted here.)
OK, March 7:
The Coolest Film of the Year: Ocean's Eleven
Rob three casinos in one night? That calls for Hollywood's A-List
(excerpt)
Matt Damon impresses again in his limited screen time in O11. Perhaps not yet quite in the same league of megastardom as his co-stars Brad and George, surely it won't be too long before Damon establishes himself on the top table of Hollywood's leading men. In O11, however, he was happy to take a back seat. "I remember walking behind these guys and everyone was taking pictures and screaming "Brad" and "George"," he laughs.
Empire, April 2002: The letters page has a letter about the in-jokes of O11, for example, it seems to be connected to Friends in more ways than one (Roberts and Clooney have both guest-starred, Ryder was in one episode and used to date Matt, etc). Also next issue is the "big blockbuster issue", which I take to mean will be dedicated to them - I take it Bourne will be in there somewhere too.
There is also an article in the current issue of Now magazine dedicated to him, but I can't seem to find my copy. It's basically about two things, one of which may be his career or love life, and the other is his support for Ben through rehab. Most of it is general stuff about not wanting to talk about his love life, moving into his apartment in NY, but the Ben stuff I haven't really seen before in a UK mag. A couple of nice pictures accompany it as well. :)
| E-mail: | matt_rap@hotmail.com |
| URL: | http://mattdamon.cjb.net |
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