Interview: Matt Damon

If you thought Rocky Balboa had longevity in the cinematic world, then brace yourself for Matt Damon’s character, Jason Bourne – coined by film critics as the 21st Century James Bond.

Bourne Ultimatum stars, Matt Damon rose to fame with best pal Ben Affleck in Good Will Hunting and as years have surpassed he has clearly built a niche of his own. Juggling fatherhood as well as the demands of Hollywood , MyVillage caught up with the action hero…

What does playing Jason Bourne mean to you?
Obviously, it enables me and Paul to be the guardians of this franchise that we really are fans of. But also it enables us to go and do other films. Because of the success of these films we are afforded the opportunity to go and make films like United 93 or Syriana and, to a certain extent, The Departed. Now it’s come out and it’s done very well at the box office but classically Scorsese’s films don’t make very much money at the box office so nobody went into it thinking they were going to make money, we all did it because we wanted to work with Marty. So it’s easy to make choices to do films that you don’t think will do particularly well at the box office when you know you have a Bourne movie in your back pocket.

You’ve hit the double whammy with these films – they have had box office and critical acclaim. But does that increase the pressure on you for the third?
There are certain expectations that people have because they’ve seen the first two. There are certain signposts we have to hit but at the same time you can’t be repetitive or people go ‘oh they are just selling me the same old pair of sneakers.’ And that’s hard too, because you have to find new ways of being entertaining within the style that you have entertained them before without being repetitive. But I think we’ve got a great story and some great twists and turns.
 
The first film, The Bourne Identity, reinvented you as a commercial star…
(Laughs) Basically what you are saying is that it saved my ass and that’s completely true. The weekend that it opened I was doing a play in the West End and I hadn’t had a film offer in six months because I’d had a couple of movies tank and the word was that the first Bourne movie was going to tank, because it had been delayed so long and it had so many rounds of re-shooting and it just had all the hallmarks of a turkey. So I went from the Friday night of my final weekend of doing this play to the Monday morning when I returned to New York and I had something like 20 or 30 movie offers, just based on the opening weekend of The Bourne  Identity. So it’s pretty easy to understand why these movies have been a great boon for me.

From speaking to the producers, they tell me that a Bourne script can, and often will, change as you go along. Do you embrace that?
Yes, definitely. These are long projects, longer than most just because of  the way we work. On the last one we were shooting up until two weeks  before it came out. It’s like a work in progress until it’s released and we keep tweaking it. And the studio is great and lets us do that, and normally you don’t get to do that with movies. You always want to but you don’t always get that luxury of going back and picking up things that you want. In both cases with the first two movies, they were testing well, certainly well enough to be released and for the studio to not put any more money in, but we went back to them and said ‘look we have these ideas for these little scenes, we really think it will make it substantially better, even though it might not seem like it, but these little changes will make a huge difference.’ And they just went with us on that on the first movie and it proved them right. And then the second time when we re-shot an ending a  week and a half before the movie opened so that made a big difference too. So they are very open to us working in that way.

That was the New York ending in The Bourne Supremacy?
Yeah, it worked really well.  And it was a vast improvement on what we had there. Actually, I always wanted to end it where Bourne walked out  after apologising to the Russian girl and he is just sat there on this park  bench, just bleeding in the snow and I loved that, it was like ‘what’s he going to do now? He’s tried to atone for what he is done and now he is  kind of sitting there bleeding out on this bench.’ But it was just so dark and  everyone, Paul and Frank (Marshall, producer) and the studio, I think I was on my own with that one. (Laughs).

Not all actors take to filming action sequences. Was it a learning curve for you?
Yeah. Each sequence is different. I think it’s hard to gauge a performance within those sequences because you can feel really kind of goofy. I mean,  my only experience doing them is with these Bourne movies and I think I’ve got a little better at them. But they always require slightly different  things. My approach was to figure out what the sequences require and  then train as much as I possibly could so that physically I could do them in a way that was believable. And at the end of the day the only job you have as an actor is to be believable and not take people out of the movie by  looking like you don’t know what you are doing, or that you couldn’t do what the movie is saying you can. I think it is a little more demanding to do  them the way we do them.

You set the tone with the first film, The Bourne Identity. Did you spend a  lot of time discussing your approach to the role with the director, Doug Liman?
Yes. He and I had lots of conversations about it. He had this idea of casting me and at the time nobody had put me in a movie anything like this, and my big fear and his big fear, was that people weren’t going to accept me as the character.  So we decided that the best way to  overcome that was if I just over trained like crazy for all of these things -  for the fighting and the firearms  - so that I could actually do them. Because audiences are smart enough to know when you are actually cutting away to a stunt man. We wanted to make sure I could do as much of them as possible, as much of them as was safe, and the audiences were hip enough to go ‘oh wait that actually is him doing that. ‘ And I think that went a long way in selling me as the character and I just kind of stuck  with that approach.

Do you enjoy the physical challenges of the role?
Yeah, it’s interesting. That’s the best part of this job for me, the time before we start working is when I get to quietly go and try these things out. And it’s particularly fun when the shots are challenging and everybody is working together and it’s because the camera operator does something and you do something and everybody is working in concert and you pull  off a shot that is really difficult and you do it all in camera. That’s a pretty exciting thing to happen.

Did you meet Special Forces people for your research?
Well, for the first one I met with different specialists: martial arts people, a boxer.

Why a boxer?
Because Doug had a theory that I thought was really interesting and turned out to be right. He wanted the character to walk like a boxer  because he felt like there was a real economy of movement in the way those guys carry themselves, an assuredness in their posture.  I had six months and I had never boxed before and I went and trained and really it changed my body and also it worked and it changed the way I walked a little bit. And for the firearms training I went to a former SWAT marksman and he just took me to the desert in LA and we would work six or eight hours at a time and he taught me everything. We had all summer to work  on it and he was great.

You’re a father now, with a step-daughter and a baby.  Do you try and take the family with you when you are away filming for Bourne?
Yes, I do. In fact, we started in Tangier and they didn’t come for those few weeks and that was really, really miserable so we decided en masse, as a group, that we are just going to make a go of it on the road. It’s a new experience but it seems, knock on wood, that’s it’s going to be a good one for everybody.

Are you enjoying being a father?
It’s great and just for peace of mind. It’s great that we are all together and having all these adventures together. I’ve been on my own for so long on  the road, you know, before these kids came along, and there was always that feeling of ‘I really want to show this to somebody.’ It grates on you  after a while. So to have them here with me and to know that they are out  having adventures when I’m at work is wonderful.

You’ve had a fantastic couple of years – working with Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro and now back on Bourne. Has it changed you as an actor?
I hope so. I feel like I got better. I learned so much working with Bob. I jumped into that role pretty quickly and he had been basically preparing it for eight or nine years and he said to me ‘look I’ve prepared this role, you don’t have to worry about anything I’m going to walk you through this moment by moment,’ and he really did. To be working that closely with him on a movie that mattered to him was so special. It was the best year of my career – you know, between Bob and Marty, it literally couldn’t be going any better. I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop for like ten years but things keep getting better. I just want it to keep going.