I feel for Matt & Ben, they must have been at their wits end with how their friendship has been the selling point of the promotion of The Rip. Whoring themselves out, again, cheapening their relationship, again, when questions could have been more focused on their vision of the craft of filmmaking, and so on. Like, at the end of the day, their relationship is a private matter? I don't think this way of promoting movies, and I blame Netflix here, is a good way to get them to make more movies together. And as you said, it was less intense during Air, but there was the Bennifer thing at the same time... Anyway, it is frustrating to watch from the outside, so I can't imagine what it's like for them.
Hi anon, yes, exactly! Like, this whole being celebrity friends thing is such a tough balancing act. On the one hand, they are one of the most important people in each other's lives. And not only would it feel awful to have to hide or downplay that to avoid the attention, but there is also a joy to be found in openly celebrating this other person and how much they mean to you. But it must feel equally awful to see this most precious thing in your life treated like a commodity being fed to the masses for profit. It's like Matt said:
I don’t want to be his friend in public [...] It’s way too important a friendship for that, and it goes so beyond this career or anything. You know, it’s a significant part of my life and not for public consumption in that way.”
— Matt Damon’s interview for GQ (September 2021).
They have dealt with this conundrum since they exploded onto the scene. And their previous response was to avoid the circus altogether and just maintain their friendship privately. But in their bid to protect their personal relationship, they sacrificed their creative partnership. And for two guys whose shared passion for acting is at the bedrock of their entire lives together and apart, being cut off from experiencing the joy of creating together must have felt heartbreaking.
That's why the Get Back story never fails to move me (and why seeing it get brought up ad nauseam during this press tour, being slowly chipped away until it becomes just another trifle anecdote, made me incredibly sad). Another example is the way people react to the shared bank account thing, treating it like a novelty and making them feel self-conscious about it. It's so tricky because it does feel like something special. Two people trusting and loving each other enough to tie their fates and resources together is something special. It shouldn't be, it should feel normal, but it is. People care and are fascinated by their relationship because there's something at the core of it that feels profoundly precious and beautiful. The kind of unconditional love they have for each other is something we all crave in our own lives.
So I'm looking at them too. I'm consuming them too. In an ideal world, this consumption does not have to be a bad thing; it could remain mutuallistic. Their relationship is inarguably one of the biggest selling points of the movie. They knew this going in; they actively played with people's preconceptions during the film; and now they (and hopefully the rest of the crew) will profit from it. If all of this is kept sane and consensual, it's great for everyone involved. We're entertained, and they get to make a living doing what they love with the people they love. But there is a point after which things can tip from joint sharing to invasive exploitation. Hence the balancing act.
I believe they've never been better equipped to deal with these pressures than they are now. That they're too mature and cognizant of the preciousness of what they have together to ever let anything else come between them. I can only hope that this experience will not put them off collaborating in the near future. Not just because of my selfish interest in it, but because I genuinely feel like the joy they derive from creating together is too meaningful to be wasted.
Matt Damon's interview w/ The Advocate (18 January 2000)
[During promotion for The Talented Mr. Ripley, Matt Damon gives an interview to LGBT magazine The Advocate. He discusses his approach to playing Tom Ripley, same-sex relationships, and the scrutiny around his friendship with Ben Affleck. I first came across excerpts from this fascinating interview when browsing the Damon Affleck Slash Archive using the Internet Archive's WayBack Machine, but my gratitude goes to @kampedupkinks-blog for pointing me toward the full issue. Full transcription under the cut.]
Going to the Matt
Gay people, characters, and subjects are nothing new to Oscar winner Matt Damon. Here's his whole unexpected attitude on it all.
By Brendan Lemon
As the title character in the luxurious, homoerotic new movie The Talented Mr. Ripley, Matt Damon is obsessed with trying on a rich friend's clothing, looking for the right well-tailored suit to reflect his evolving view of himself. Ever since the Boston buddy picture Good Will Hunting won him a screen-writing Oscar and established him as a movie star two years ago, the actor has been redefining his own identity too.
Measuring this metamorphosis is a challenge, partly because the 29-year-old actor is still pondering just how to use the public voice that his fame has provided and partly because his celebrity's outward clues can be a little misleading. For example, he may have just bought a gargantuan—7,000 square feet—apartment in downtown Manhattan, but you sense he wants to make it a home rather than a showplace. And he may go out with another movie star (Winona Ryder), but, refreshingly, the two so rarely make the scene that they seem the furthest thing from a young Hollywood power couple.
The performer talked about both his life and gay-related issues raised by his new movie during a conversation one recent afternoon not far from his New York City home, a discussion in which he displayed his Harvard-caliber intelligence (he dropped out of that university to act, not because his grades weren't good), an attractive blend of sensitivity and seriousness, and the kind of genuine politeness that makes you want to meet, and thank, his mother.
While Damon upbringing has made him highly skeptical of celebrity, he is not about to turn the spotlight away from himself. "Matt is not the sort of actor who refuses to talk about his movies because he doesn't want to talk about his life," said Anthony Minghella, the director and screenwriter of The Talented Mr. Ripley. "In fact, one of the things that distinguishes him as both an actor and a person is that he doesn't duck the moment." Case in point: In the new movie's hottest scene, Damon's Tom Ripley looks lustfully at his friend Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law) as he emerges from the bath. "Matt didn't ever try to wink at the audience while we were filming that, to distinguish himself from the character," Minghella said. To which Damon replies: "That would have been ridiculous. Ripley at that point was so bubbling over with desire."
Damon sees the homoeroticism of his latest character as an acting assignment, but his matter-of-fact approach to it has roots in his own life. "I grew up in a community house in Cambridge, Mass.," Damon said, "and a number of people who lived there were gay." Respect for difference wasn't the house's only core value; so was hard work a quality for which Damon is still known. "Matt won't always admit the rigor with which he approaches his roles," Minghella said, mentioning that for Ripley the actor learned to play the piano. "I sort of learned," Damon clarified, "just like I sort of learned to sing." The modesty is misplaced: In the movie the actor's wonderful rendition of "My Funny Valentine," aimed at an oblivious, sax-playing Greenleaf, stands as a clear, lonely lament recognizable to anyone—straight or gay—who's known the pain of unrequited love.
Don't expect Damon, however, to star any time soon in a revival of Babes in Arms, and certainly not with lifelong buddy Ben Affleck. The two remain call-each-other-at-all-hours close and make periodic noises about finishing that next screenplay, but any discussion about their friendship strikes Affleck, according to Damon, as "weak." Their bond, of course, still causes some people to regard them as more than pals. In this interview Damon addresses the subject head-on, while admitting that "the speculation isn't quite as much fun as it used to be."
But Damon, whose habit of answering virtually any question directly is reminiscent of Tom Hanks, with whom he had a memorable battle-jitters scene in Saving Private Ryan, mostly wanted to talk about sexuality because of his participation in The Talented Mr. Ripley. The movie which Minghella adapted from a 1955 novel by Patricia Highsmith (the first in a series), tells the story of the aforementioned Ripley and Greenleaf, two young Americans at play in late-1950s Italy. The secretive, hollowed-out Ripley is a consummate social strive. Unlike the wealthy, golden-haired Greenleaf, Ripley is to the manner—but not to the manor—born. In his quest for class he aspires to absorb everything about his friend: not just his clothing and his possessions but his pampered way of life.
But Greenleaf, involved with another young American, Marge Sherwood, treats Ripley disposably. Amused by Ripley's conversational talents and touched by his love of music, Greenleaf takes him along on high-spirited jaunts up and down the Italian peninsula, a series of sunlit, mostly seaside locations that the film caught sumptuously on location. But when Greenleaf tires of his visitor and attempts to toss him off, Ripley reacts tragically. "Maybe no one who sees the movie will agree with me," Damon said, "but as the one who played the character, I thought, This is so unfair. This person deserved better. He was so close to knowing happiness with another man."
In the hands of Highsmith, a lesbian expatriate who like many American writers—Vidal, Baldwin, Williams—came to Europe partly to escape the stifling sexual orthodoxy of postwar America, Ripley is a figure of great fascination but little empathy. Following him as he assumes Greenleaf's personality and attempts to elude his pursuers after the murder is a riveting yet slightly chilly exercise. "We wanted to make Ripley more human than Highsmith did," Damon said. To that end, Minghella pointed out, the character does not, as in the novel, plan to kill Greenleaf but, rather, lashes out at him when he confesses his love and is rejected. In another adjustment, Minghella transformed Peter Smith-Kingsley, one of the book's minor figures, into a gay man offering Ripley love and acceptance.
By fleshing out the book's homoerotic subtext, Minghella has made the story more resonant for a contemporary audience. He has also opened himself to the charge that he has made a movie about a "gay serial killer." "I think that that is a very reductive characterization," Damon said, "but I would urge people to see the movie and make up their own minds about its sex and psychology." To which one might add: Whether you like the film or not and whether or not you find it upsetting, Ripley stands as a sophisticated essay about an identity in formation—economically, psychologically, sexually.
For the movie's Forsterian world of prim Anglo-Saxons smitten with Italian sensuality, Damon's Ripley and Law's Greenleaf were joined by Gwyneth Paltrow as Sherwood and Cate Blanchett as a new character named Meredith Logue. All of them except Damon play roles in keeping with their images. After all, Damon has built his career playing mostly recognizably good guys. "Is my list of credits that heroic?" the actor asks a little disingenuously. To which one answers: Look at your resumé, Matt. Damon's gallery of Hollywood classic male archetypes includes the soldier (Courage Under Fire, Saving Private Ryan), the cowboy (Geronimo, the upcoming All the Pretty Horses), the athlete (School Ties, the upcoming golf fable The Legend of Bagger Vance), and the lawyer on the side of Southern right (The Rainmaker).
As part of his search for new suits, however, Damon has been willing to try some unexpected material. He is the frisky fallen angel Loki in the controversial movie Dogma, and he and Affleck are producing a TV version of The People's History of the United States, an iconoclast work by the scholar Howard Zinn. But it is as Ripley that Damon has most fully revealed in the unexpected.
Some people think it was brave of you, after just having won an Oscar for Good Will Hunting and becoming Hollywood's newly minted leading man, to play a role as upsetting and vulnerable as Tom Ripley.
I don't think playing Ripley was brave of me. I'm an actor who read a great script and who was extremely lucky to have been asked to do the part.
Ripley, however, is a very sad soul, and you appear to be anything but. What personal experiences did you draw on to convey that part of him?
Like everybody, I'm lonely to some extent. Like everybody, I live in fear of not being loved and not having love returned. And I think everybody has a Dickie Greenleaf in his life: someone who is extraordinarily charismatic but who can go away.
Ripley covets everything about Dickie's identity—his way of life, the issue of class, in both the sense of one's social stratum and of one's taste, is, along with sexuality, perhaps the driving issue of the movie. Did you relate to Ripley's cravings for class?
Only to a certain extent. When I was growing up in Cambridge, Mass., people took a certain amount of pride in not being Harvard people. We always thought we were cooler than they were. In terms of relating to Ripley's outsider quality, I have the standard stories that you probably have—of not being invited to the dance and picked for the team. The challenge of Ripley was making the longing to be chosen consistent in my character, despite the horrible things he's doing. Because if you don't stay in sympathy with Ripley—if you go into the theater thinking he's a "gay serial killer" and not a tormented, sensitive human being—then you may as well stay home. You're only going to have your preconceptions confirmed.
What were the key scenes for you to convey Ripley's sexuality?
The chess scene, where Dickie is naked and in the bathtub and Ripley is clothed and out of it. Also the scene where Ripley says he'd take a bullet for Dickie and the scene in the jazz club where, under the cover of music, I shout to him, "It's one big love affair." That's sort of my coming-out in the movie.
The bathtub scene is homoerotic yet slightly enigmatic. Ripley wants to get in the bath, but when he asks and Dickie says no, Ripley has to damp down his desires. Even though, moments later, when Dickie is toweling off, Ripley looks at his ass with a longing that suggests he's just seen the face of God.
When Ripley first got to Italy, if Dickie had taken off his clothes and said, "OK, strip down," Ripley would have just recoiled. Our idea was that he was a virgin. I say that because he's probably never been naked in front of somebody. Remember the first time you were naked in front of somebody? It's terrifying, but you get over it because, hopefully, you have somebody who says, "You're beautiful." But Ripley's never had that. He hasn't crossed the hurdle of deep self-loathing.
But when, at the movie's end, Peter Smith-Kingsley, a sweet, sensitive musician whom Ripley meets...
The ultimate man!
...asks Ripley to take his clothes off and become intimate, he's still struggling with his physical self-image. He is still deeply ashamed of himself, both because of his demonstrated capacity for violence and because of his inability to be intimate—with anyone, male or female. It is this abiding moral sense that makes him human rather than, to be reductive about it, a serial killer. He takes no pleasure in his transgressions.
Right, which is why the ending is so devastating. Ripley still believes that if he showed his authentic nature, he'd be cast aside.
Which is a version of what everyone fears and what some gay people, sadly, fear their whole lives: that as soon as people see our true, hidden natures they will reject us.
So rather than expose himself further to the man who truly loves him, Ripley "rejects" Peter in the most extreme way possible.
Ripley's relationship with Peter is potentially an adult, homosexual one, whereas the one with Dickie is more adolescent and amicable. The movie reminds us that there is a vulnerability involved in same-sex friendships that is just as acute as those in full-fledged gay love affairs.
Same-sex relationships with anyone when you are young entail extreme vulnerability. The first experience most of us have of devastating personal rejection is not with someone we want to date but with someone we want to befriend.
When you were that tender age, was your desire to be an actor looked down upon by your buddies?
No.
You were extremely lucky in that, you know.
I know. A number of people have come up to me and said that because of their interest in theater they were referred to as "drama fags." That wasn't the case in our school. I was supported by my parents and friends in the desire to be creative.
Who were some of the early gay influences on you?
I grew up in a community house, inhabited by my mother and brother and many other adults and children, and a number of people who lived there were gay. My theater teacher was not gay, but I probably had more gay than straight teachers in high school. So being gay, luckily, was not something that I was "introduced" to at some age. It was more that I was introduced to the prejudice against it. I had the reverse of a typical growing-up in that regard.
Your lifelong friendship with Ben Affleck had been endlessly scrutinized since your success with Good Will Hunting. Given how you grew up, was it odd to be tagged as lovers and have that speculation be viewed by some people as a negative thing?
The gay assumption seemed silly to me, a real waste of attention. But I understand that the idea of something hidden fascinates people.
At first, your friendship with Ben was a good marketing ploy. But now that your careers are established, has that strategy gotten tired?
Absolutely. You reach a point where it's your friendship and no one else's.
But you're smart enough to know that the media isn't likely to leave your relationships alone—whether it's you and Ben or you and Winona Ryder, your current girlfriend. You're also smart enough to know that the public has been burned enough times by the media dissembling about homosexuality to be more skeptical than they used to be about the subject. And thus a few people are going to read this interview and still want—still need—to believe that the couple is not you and Winona but you and Ben.
But that's because sex sells magazines and because people are now conditioned to believe that anyone they see on the cover is having sex with everyone in their lives. Given the shallow nature of the packaging and the salesmanship in our culture, it's no surprise that people are lulled into these assumptions.
The unvaryingly sexy packaging is a distraction from ever having to think about the real issues.
Of course.
To go back to you and Ben, would it be so terrible if you were a couple?
The question of whether Ben and I are gay is so awkward in a lot of ways. There is no real right way to answer it without offending somebody. It's offensive to just deny it fiercely, as if there would be anything wrong with it if we were a couple. That would be offensive to the people I grew up with. I don't want to be that person. At the same time, I can't say it's true because it's not. Ben once made light of this type of tabloid speculation by telling an interviewer something like, "I'm sure there are gay people who are in the closet in Hollywood, but also I'm sure that they didn't sleep with Henry's friend." [Laughs]
Yeah, it's interesting how the source for so many tabloid outings always seem to be some Henry guy's pal or some friend of somebody's hairdresser.
That's so true.
One of the strangest things about the media's attempt to disparage your relationship with Ben is that male friendship used to be considered a noble thing. It was not powerful men but powerful women who were divided through the use of the gay rumor. Now same-sex closeness of both genders is targeted.
I guess it's not enough for me to say that I love Ben so much that I'd take a bullet for him.
You also have to say—pardon my bluntness—that you'd take his dick up your ass.
Yeah. It's completely bizarre.
If you were, in fact, in a relationship with another man, would you be in the same position career-wise?
I would like to say that if I were gay, I'd be out. But I think that's not fair because I'm not gay, and I don't know personally what pressure is brought to bear on you if you are. My short answer, without a lot of reflection, is that if you were out, your career would suffer. Would Rock Hudson have had the career he had if he'd been out? No way.
But, of course, we'll never know until someone with your level of leading-man visibility comes out and until Hollywood allows the box office rather than its own internalized prejudices to decide if the public is ready for such a move. With a few test cases, maybe we could move away from this type of discussion. Saying that may be naive, though, given our culture's obsession with celebrities.
And with celebrity bedrooms.
It feels weird to think of the Ripley movie in light of this prurient culture of ours. Because it takes place at a time, the late 50's, when it was taboo for an American guy to confess any kind of affection. That type of unstated longing, of course, is what gives the film so much of its power.
If this were a contemporary movie, the relationships would probably be handled differently. All the people I talked to who are of Ripley's generation—who were young in the '50s—said that you didn't talk that much about your sexuality in any regard. Today, on the other hand, you meet someone, and 15 minutes later he's saying, "You know, my boyfriend and I have this problem with trust." If this were a movie set in 1999, for a tasteful young man like Ripley to admit to a wordly Princeton graduate like Dickie that he has a homosexual side would seem really tame. Especially in our age, when you go home and there, on Jerry Springer, is some guy with two penises.
But in some ways the culture remains alarmingly the same. Highsmith's novel, for example, is infused with homosexual panic. This is part of Ripley's fear of being found out in all aspects of his life—that he's a fake somebody instead of a real nobody. And the fear of thought gay remains a huge fear for some guys still today.
Sure. This makes me think of American Beauty with its theme of the fear of the person next door. Middle America knows that its next-door neighbors could, in fact, be gay. They can't pretend any longer that it's not possible. And that, unfortunately, is very upsetting to some of them. People should recognize that homosexuality just is. Personally, I think it's genetic. That's always been my theory because I have friends who are gay and who really don't want to be and who say they don't have lives that are conducive to it.
What do you mean, "not conducive to it"?
Because being gay makes their lives more difficult professionally.
I'm not going to take the time here to comment on that kind of self-concealment, even though I know from experience how necessary it can seem at a certain time in your life. Are some of these friends actors?
Not just actors. Though it's true that show business is a lot more closed-minded than it may appear. Which is ironic, considering that there are more gay people in the movie industry and in arts in general than in other walks of life.
I think that's a fair and accurate statement. Or at least one that won't frighten the horses.
[Laughs] Right.
Since, in a sense, we've been talking about maintaining appearances, let me raise the matter of appearances regarding the Ripley movie. Specifically clothing. Tom enjoys wearing Dickie's clothes, even though Dickie doesn't always enjoy the fact that Tom is borrowing them. This reflects, of course, how Tom is struggling to assume Dickie's identity in all forms, not just the sexual or psychological ones. The clothing interchange reminded me of one of the real pleasures of being a gay couple: wearing your partner's wardrobe.
But that's not necessarily a gay thing. My group of closest friends and I lived, until recently, in these loose communal situations—in New York, L.A., Boston. And there was a constant raid on somebody's closet. You'd see one of your roommates in a restaurant, and he'd say, "Hey, that's my shirt. You asshole! I just washed that shirt!"
What did the question of clothes mean to you in the making of Ripley?
It relates to body image. Ann Roth, the movie's costume designer, said to Jude Law, "These clothes hang better if you don't wear underwear." So Jude said, "Right, I won't wear underwear." And she looks at me, and I said, "Of course, Tom wears underwear. It would be too exposing of himself not to."
How were clothes key to the formation of your own personal identity?
I remember for my graduation from high school my older brother gave me his leather jacket, which was my favorite thing in the world. He gave it to me in June. I went into my room, put it on, and basically waited for fall. My brother was so cool, and because I was wearing his jacket, I was cool too.
That was a moment not so much of vanity as of validation.
Absolutely.
It's interesting how validation becomes vanity as you grow older. Speaking of which, at what point growing up did you start receiving validation for your looks?
When I got to Harvard. When I got there I thought I was James Dean, wearing my leather jacket. A friend of mine from England, who lived on my dorm floor, and I thought we were very cool. And we weren't afraid to say it to each other.
Some actors consider it a little unmanly to have to obsess so much about their appearance. Do you?
I worry about appearance less than I used to. I look at Brad Pitt. I will never, and could never, look like that. He is just incredible to look at. Period. If I were gay, he would be one of the posters on my wall. Ben and I both have more realistic ideas about what we look like. Not that we're insecure about it. But I know what drop-dead gorgeous looks like, and I know that I'm not it. I also know that I don't want to think, ever, about how I look when I'm in front of the camera. Because then I'm thinking about the wrong thing.
You know, however, that a certain amount of your stock as a movie actor has to do with your appearance.
But if they want handsome, they're not coming after me; they're going to Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise—one of those guys.
I wonder. I can think of a few producers who might think that you would fill the handsome slot just fine.
Well, thank you. Now I feel validated. [Laughs]
You've said that Ripley is a once-in-a-lifetime situation for you. Is that because you wouldn't play a character with Ripley's attributes—repressed rage, class envy, murderousness, homoeroticism, extraordinary sensitivity, aching beauty—ever again?
Anything as original as Ripley I'd love to do again. Unfortunately, people aren't willing to put up the money to make movies like this very often. They were with Anthony Manghella, in part, because he'd just won an Oscar for The English Patient.
Even though you signed on for the movie before Good Will Hunting made you a star, I don't think you should forget the role you and Gwyneth Paltrow played in getting the movie made.
I'm not sure about that. I just hope the movie gets received the way it should. Because, realistically, its box-office chances aren't clear-cut. It needs a strong critical reception to be successful. It's still amazing to me that the studio was so supportive of Anthony's vision. In the wake of The English Patient, he could have directed a lot of movies, but he chose to make this one. He's the one who's brave, not me.
In which the author faces a dread beast of epic proportions (his own alter ego), perils that would destroy a lesser man (e.g., worldwide fame), and uncouth fans, all whilst shamelessly promoting his new movie
By Ben Affleck | Photography by Sam Jones
Oscar Winner Affleck talks to himself about the hazards of fame, the art of publicity, and why you should see his new movie.
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I'm promoting my movie. in doing so, it is incumbent on me to do an interview for a movie magazine. I've asked the good people at PREMIERE to let me contribute an article rather than be interviewed, in an effort at a little break from the norm. I've run the first draft past the studio whose movie I'm hawking, and they were kind enough to give me some feedback. In general, I believe they found my pithy little attempt at a first-person description of what it's like to actually do publicity and my own idiosyncratic deconstruction of said process mildly amusing. But they had some notes. With those in mind, let me say this: Every man, woman, and child on this earth must drop everything and run to their local multiplex to see Reindeer Games. Well, there might be a title change in the works, so maybe it won't be called Reindeer Games, but pay that no heed! Whatever the marketing folks decide to call the movie, it is absolutely imperative that you see it immediately, two or three times if need be. Watching this movie will make you smarter, more successful, and a (much) better lover. I implore you, for your own sake, pay to see this movie. It is, quite simply, the single greatest dramatic narrative of the modern era.
Now, on to the irrelevant part.
I. A DRIVE-BY
"Affleck, you suck!" was all I made out as a full can of beer sailed by, inches from my head. I believe that was the precise moment I knew things had changed.
It was a drive-by beer-canning—a little-publicized-but-all-too-real hazard for the working actor in L.A. It was June of 1997, somewhere around midnight. I was coming out of a record store on Sunset Strip, and in retrospect, I guess I should have seen it coming.
I hadn't been subject to public stoning by Budweiser since my high school days, in Boston. I remember thinking that in this new context, it was a fairly artless, albeit effective, form of what in acting class we used to call "a critique of the work." That was the first day it occurred to me that there is a side of fame that might be unpleasant. It was a peculiar induction—one Jason Patric has aptly characterized as "baptism by flashbulb"—to a strange club whose membership requirements are simple: People you've never met, seen, or spoken to develop opinions (occasionally quite negative and almost always judgmental) about you, your work, and whether or not you "suck." Though my holy water was alcoholic and carbonated and gunned at me by strangers, I suddenly had an affinity for how Mr. Patric must have felt.
Before Good Will Hunting and Armageddon, I did quite a few movies, but nobody saw them. In fact, the entertainment press corps in general seemed aggressively disinterested. When I went to Atlanta to promote Chasing Amy, I clearly remember that the few journalists who showed up to interview me seemed bored (with me), dejected (at having such a low-rent assignment), and desperate (during the actual interview) for a reason—any reason—to write anything. Later, the movie became a minor cult hit, and occasionally I would be confronted by a stranger or two (oddly, these interactions also tended to happen in record stores). But instead of berating me, these guys usually wanted to know, "Did you really nail that girl?" "Was she really a dyke?" and "Do you have her number?" While deeply flattering, these rare interactions didn't prepare me in the least for what I was to face down the road.
That night, I wondered if perhaps this was something that even the great ones have had to endure, but I could never quite convince myself that there was some rangy teenager standing outside Brando's house, hectoring the deaf masonry with the likes of "Why'd you pimp Kabuki-style gear in Moreau?!" Surely there is a point at which one is accorded some space, respect, and privacy. I just wasn't there yet.
The gangly kid's harangue at a thespian about his play is a fair confusion of character and actor. But the words and pictures that provoked the beer-flinger were not of a character in a film; they were representations of me in the press-specifically the tabloid press, coverage in which I had taken no part. So I decided to become the captain of my own destiny, or at least of my own image. I decided to stop avoiding or passively enduring press coverage; instead, I would start a conversation with the public by engaging the press, thus having control over the words and images representing me.
This was, to put it mildly, a blunder. I had underrated the forces at play in the creation of celebrity media and overrated my own ability to withstand and control them. As if that weren't bad enough, I also discovered that I was my own worst enemy.
It wasn't until my third or fourth interview was published that I began to suspect something. I would run into people who know me fairly well (like my mom) and they'd fix me with an uncertain and dubious stare. I began to anticipate the inevitable: "I read your thing in [insert name of rag here] . . ." Then their voices would trail off. I knew the sentiment. I'd experienced it before. Earlier in my career I'd get that. People would say, "Hey, I saw Phantoms. . . ." Though I understood the comment in the context of a movie where I played a sheriff in Colorado battling an ill-defined but vaguely menacing sewer monster, I didn't see the connection with the interviews. But when I asked my girlfriend what she thought about the mixed reviews I seemed to be getting, she let me have it. "I don't even recognize that person." "Who?" I lamely asked. "The guy in that interview, in any of your interviews . . . Interview Guy."
Sonofabitch. Interview Guy.
What I found when I read back over my own inanities was as phony a frat-boy-chucklehead as you're ever likely to encounter—and someone who, I hope, bears little resemblance to the guy typing out these words. Somehow I'd inadvertently given birth to a monster. Interview Guy liked to come off as a cross between a pseudo-intellectual college sophomore who'd just read his first chapter of Proust, a drunken motorcycle fanatic, and an all-around, aw-shucks-can-you-believe-I'm-just-a-regular-Joe ham bone.
The idea here is to set this gruesome record straight. I'll bring Interview Guy face-to-face with myself. The transparent difference will dissolve Interview Guy; the remaining image will be me. Either that or it'll be another in a long series of publicity disasters. At this point, I don't have much to lose.
II. INTERVIEW GUY
INT. MY HOUSE-DAY: INTERVIEW GUY, 27, bearing a striking resemblance to Ben Affleck, but wearing Prada stretch plastic trousers, comes running into the room with a beer. He does a handstand, slams his beer, and slouches into the sofa. Ben Affleck, a.k.a. ACTUAL BEN, sits across from him. Actual Ben is not nearly as good-looking as Interview Guy and seems a little taken aback.
INTERVIEW GUY: I take Viagra and I think the kids should try it at home, the little ones! [Interview Guy runs around the room twice, then heads outside. After a beat, he comes crashing back through the door on a motorcycle. He wipes out.]
INTERVIEW GUY: (Cont'd) [Re: motorcycle] I'll get another one. [Re: nothing in particular] Acting is a journey, right bro?
ACTUAL BEN: Not really. Most of the time it seems like a gigantic press junket, where I talk about my "arc" and decry the invasive nature of the press in my life—then go and have my woes translated into Korean and beamed via satellite to Asia. [A beat]
[There is another awkward beat.]
ACTUAL BEN: (Cont'd) Are you unable to smile or behave normally when having your picture taken? I mean, do you have a particular aversion to looking normal, or are you satisfying some innate urge to look like an idiot?
INTERVIEW GUY: Hey, man, I'm just a regl'r guy who likes to have fun-
ACTUAL BEN: Also, in your photographs you seem to clench your jaw, squint your eyes, and suck in your cheeks. Is something wrong with you physically? Do you have TMJ?
INTERVIEW GUY: [Flushing red] I . . . That's my strong, leading-man jawline and laser intensity coming through. . . . I can't help that! That's not on purpose. . . .
ACTUAL BEN: This isn't going anywhere; let's go to the questions. . . .
[Ed Note: During this segment of the interview, both Interview Guy and Actual Ben have agreed to answer a list of prepared questions. A tape recorder was placed in the room, and the following is a verbatim transcript of their answers.]
QUESTION: What is your favorite magazine?
INTERVIEW GUY: Maxim . . . no PREMIERE! This is for PREMIERE, right?
ACTUAL BEN: I don't have a favorite.
QUESTION: Who is your favorite actor?
INTERVIEW GUY: Arnold, Sly, your mom . . . just playin', guy. . . .
ACTUAL BEN: Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Benicio Del Toro, Sean Penn, Meryl Streep, Cole Hauser, Casey Affleck, Jay Lacopo, Vince Vaughn, Joaquin Phoenix, Don Cheadle, the brothers Wilson, Ed Norton, Nicolas Cage, Robert De Niro, Marlon Brando, Zeljko Ivanek, Dennis Franz, Julianne Moore, Steve Buscemi, Frances McDormand—there are really a ton of actors I think are great and whom I admire. And I honestly believe after seeing The Talented Mr. Ripley and All the Pretty Horses that Matt Damon is one of, if not the, finest young actor around.
INTERVIEW GUY: That Ripley thing, that's a gay picture, right?
ACTUAL BEN: Well, no, it's not. . . .
QUESTION: In the wake of the massacre at Columbine High School, there has been greater scrutiny on the level of senseless and gratuitous violence in movies. What role do you think movie violence plays in influencing real people, and what is the responsibility of filmmakers and actors?
INTERVIEW GUY: I'm so sick of that question. Some idiot kid who played too much Mortal Kombat and can't get a girlfriend decides to shoot up his school . . . that's not Sylvester Stallone's fault for making Cobra. The guy was trying to make a kickass Marion Cobretti biker picture. Forget about teaching masturbation in schools; they ought to hand out twenty bucks and a map to Korea town. You get yourself a little massage-parloring down there, you feel a lot less inclined to blow up your lunchroom!
ACTUAL BEN: I disagree.
INTERVIEW GUY: 'Course you disagree; you smoke cock.
ACTUAL BEN: No, I don't "smoke cock," I just think there is some responsibility to be had by those of us who have some impact over the content of movies and how violence is presented. Doubtless, there is blame aplenty to go around. But the exploitation of mindless violence for the sake of titillation, without any attention paid to the genuine trauma that real violence does cause, is irresponsible.
QUESTION: What qualities and/or attributes do you find attractive in a woman? What would your "ideal woman" be like?
ACTUAL BEN: I can't say I have any one "type." I have dated and been attracted to all kinds of women. I tend to be able to look past first impressions and am usually attracted to a woman whom I like and want to be around. No matter how "hot" some woman is, I'd find her very unattractive if I couldn't stand to have a conversation with her.
INTERVIEW GUY: You done, Jake-O? Okay. That's bullshit. Everybody goes by appearances. I got nothing against the homely broad, I just don't care to give her a jump, you follow me? As far as what type of chick I most like, I'd say I'm your basic, red-blooded, Claudia Schiffer-Pam Anderson type of guy. And, you know, her beaver doesn't have to be shaved but . . . I don't mind it!
[Ed. Note: There is a five-minute segment of the tape where Interview Guy runs around the room, high-fiving no one in particular and repeating porn dialogue to the tune of the theme song from Martin. Finally, he cracks open a beer and sits back down.]
QUESTION: Are movies important?
INTERVIEW GUY: I think they can be. You go see Anaconda and you know you can't take a river trip with Owen Wilson, a rapper, and the guy from Deliverance, 'cause it's gonna end badly. So that's a public-health message, in a way. Fuck, come to think of it, that was the second bad rafting experience for Jon Voight. There's a fucker you really don't want on your Outward Bound crew. . . .
ACTUAL BEN: No.
QUESTION: Can you define your relationship with Gwyneth Paltrow?
INTERVIEW GUY: Well, she's my friend. She's very smart, very sweet, really just a good, decent person, and someone I both respect and admire. She's also a dynamite actress. As it happens, we just did a movie together called Bounce, which will be out in summer 2000 at a theater near you.
[Ed. Note: At this point there is a second lengthy pause on the tape and sounds of a struggle. Then nothing. It's the Blair Witch of Books on Tape. . . .]
III. BEING SEAN PENN
There's a reason that the National Enquirer has the highest circulation of any paper in the country. People like it. And people like it because, despite what most actors tend to imagine the general public is fascinated by (i.e., every subtlety and nuance of their latest performance), it concerns that very thing that drives most people to the movies in the first place: sex. And not just sex but gossip-who is having it with whom, who's been jilted, who gets the kids, who's getting above their station, who threw a fit on their show and fired a bunch of people. All of it. The movie business has become a kind of ongoing soap opera. The same characters move from one story to another, augmented by bits of background titillation from newspapers and magazines, and people go to see how the latest installment in the Schwarzenegger serial will turn out. Therefore, it should be no surprise to actors that their private lives seem inexorably entwined with whatever perception people have of their performances, and vice versa. In fact, that gossip, that tabloid fodder, is an organic part of the perceptions people have when they go to the movies.
The majority of famous actors are not famous because of roles they've played. The random passerby, when asked, will tell you they've heard of a particular actor but will have difficulty naming more than one or two movies he's been in. What people do see, far more than the movies, are the television shows and magazines in which actors promote their films. This creates a strange dynamic, where celebrity becomes the goal, publicity the means, and the actual work takes a distant backseat.
If one takes for granted that the goal of an actor is to assume the identity of another person, then doing publicity as oneself seems absolutely the wrong thing to do. The less people know about you, the less apt they are to project some preconception onto your performance. There are actors who seem to understand this conundrum and have managed to deal with it in a sensible way.
There are powerful forces at work that compel an actor, after appearing in a movie or two, to whore out every last detail of their gonorrhea treatments, incestuous experiments with grandma, shock therapy, and the time they had one too many and got a five-dollar hand job in T.J. And later the same bunch that threw you to the press will tell you not to give so much away. You can't win.
So what, then, is the lesson? I really don't know. You can lie to the press (my brother, Casey, once told Interview magazine that he had a Ph.D. in eugenics from Columbia), you can bullshit a little (whereupon your friends from home tell you you've changed and you're full of shit, and you're mom is ashamed of you), you can go ahead and talk about the "touching game" you played with Uncle Ted (and then your mom really is ashamed of you). Or you can go the route of the dignified and be Sean Penn. Just watch out for the backlash—it gets ugly.
Whenever I've run this theory past the cocktail-party crowd, the response is always a Pollyannaish "What's wrong with the truth?" Or "Just be yourself!" Now, while that may be sound and novel advice, in this case it misses the mark, for two reasons. First, after you've had to distort and misrepresent yourself for every producer in town (e.g., like the time you had to pluck every emotional chord you've got to muster up some semblance of passion for your Beverly Hills 90210 crying-scene audition), you hardly know who or what the real you is anymore. Second, no one really wants to "be themselves" in public. We are reluctant to expose ourselves even to friends, much less to a jaded public with an eye for scandal and an unquenchable thirst for hubris and its attendant fall. So I, like every other sensible person thrust into (or thrusting themselves toward) the glare of the public eye, tried to project an improved version of myself. Big mistake.
Before anyone imagines that this is some kind of lamentation of a great evil in the world, let me say this: Any actor who has had any success whatsoever ought to count his lucky stars that he turns over enough bread for the Enquirer to even consider including him on the "worst dressed" list. Clearly, successful actors (and particularly those who, even for a fleeting moment, are anointed "movie stars") enjoy wealth, power, and privilege wildly beyond their station. We should take what we get and like it—I don't contest that. I do, however, find the situation of "promoting" myself and my movies curious and contradictory.
But in the end, it is probably not worth deconstructing. It's a pretty straightforward thing: Talk to somebody, brag on your movie some, and hope that a few more people go to see it because they're intrigued with what they've read. And, hey, maybe they've gotten to know the actor a little better. In that spirit, let me end where I began: Who I am, and why you should see my movie.
I'm somebody who probably has too many mirrors in his house, but doesn't much like what he sees when he looks into them. I try to be generous, try to be kind, and try to remember how lucky I've been, but I've been known to fall short in all three regards. As far as fame and fortune go, I generally believe one should understand that none of it is deserved, but try to take as much advantage of it as one can in good conscience. I like quiet and the idea of rest, but can't seem to stop moving. I like people (as someone once said), but I hate gatherings. I try to expose myself to diversity, change, and new experiences, but when alone in my car, I end up listening to the same song over and over on the CD player. I know that fame and fortune are fleeting (as Matt recently said in GQ, "the phone stopped ringing for better actors than me"), but I can't help hoping that I can do this forever. I believe in the friends and family I've known since childhood, but I've already lost touch with too many. I love company and the security of love, but most days I feel alone. If I had to choose between being held in high regard by those in the movie business or esteemed by those around me whom I admire, respect, and have known through thick and thin, I'll opt for the latter: a life where people still talk to you even if the phone rings only occasionally, and where your friends don't mind if you haven't made it onto the cover of a flashy movie magazine in quite some time. Oh: And go see the movie I made with John Frankenheimer. It's pretty good.
Ben Affleck, actor and Oscar-winning writer (Good Will Hunting), blew his deadline but only misspelled two words in this piece.
"It was such a good publicity thing for marketing people," says Damon later at Affleck's house. "We ended up just talking about our friendship, which is really kind of a weird thing to do.... Hey, Ben," he asks, "what do you think about whoring out our friendship for personal gain?"
"At a certain point, some things in your life shouldn't be used to sell movies," Affleck replies. "Hey, I have two sphincters! See my movie!"
— From Ben Affleck's interview for Vanity Fair (October 1999).
-
Well, the trick now is that we’re writing two movies at once. So whichever one turns out better will be the one we turn in first. We also happen to have been paid by two separate movie studios to write something. Not much money, by modern screenplay standards. But we’ve cashed the checks anyway, so we owe scripts. We’ve put off doing them because both of us, I think, wanted some time between Good Will and our next movie. We were sick of hearing about ourselves. And I assume everyone else was sick of hearing about us.
— From Ben Affleck's interview with Playboy magazine (December 1999).
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Q: At first, your friendship with Ben was a good marketing ploy. But now that your careers are established, has that strategy gotten tired?
DAMON: Absolutely. You reach a point where it’s your friendship and no one else’s.
— From Matt Damon’s interview for The Advocate (18 January 2000).
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DAMON: Both of us were pulling for our own and the other’s movie, and the stakes had gotten so high. During press interviews, people would ask, “Whose movie is going to do better?” and I was like, “I don’t fucking care, as long as we’re both okay.” I honestly don’t care much anymore about the media stuff. Each of us got really leery talking about the other or about our friendship, because it felt cheapened when we saw it in print. At this point I just acknowledge to myself that I love him and he’s going to be in my life forever.
— From Matt Damon’s interview with Playboy magazine (August 2004).
-
Over the years, the two teenage friends have remained close, in a way that—as they separately acknowledge—far transcends the cartoon best-Hollywood-buddy way it can often be depicted.
“Like, I don’t want to be his friend in public, you know what I mean?” Damon says. “It’s way too important a friendship for that, and it goes so beyond this career or anything. You know, it’s a significant part of my life and not for public consumption in that way.”
— Matt Damon's interview for GQ (September 2021).
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AFFLECK: I don't know that that would've been possible for me alone, doing this job in this world without somebody I grew up with who I loved, who I knew loved me and had my back, who believed in me, and whom the popularity of my movies or what people said about me wasn't going to change what they thought about me. This friendship has been essential and defining and so important to me in my life. There were a few critical times, which are private and I don't want to share, but where your support was so profoundly meaningful to me that I don't think I would've been able to be successful without it. So let me take this opportunity to thank you.
— From Ben Affleck's interview with Matt Damon for Entertainment Weekly (January 2022).
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Q: What's the maddest you guys have ever been at each other?
[5 seconds of utter silence]
Q: Have you ever been— has there ever been like a real, "I can't, I'm so mad at Ben right now, blah, blah, blah," or anything like that? Or have you always been aligned?
AFFLECK: Ugh, nothing— nothing that is appropriate for a podcast.
DAMON: Yeah.
AFFLECK: Because it wouldn't be, you know, "Oh, I'm so mad," you know—
DAMON: "Ugh, I'm mad because you did not take out the trash," you know. It's like— But, ugh—
AFFLECK: Although, that Matt— I do remember a time that me and Casey, in Summerville, just being, "Let's see how long he can go."
— Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's interview for The Bill Simmons Podcast (March 2023). Transcription starts at 1:19:45.
Ben Affleck has seen fame from both sides now — and he's ready to talk (with Matt Damon, and EW) about it.
Ben Affleck, at the top of his game
Entertainment Weekly (11 January 2022)
The actor-director has seen fame from both sides now — and he's ready to talk (with Matt Damon, and us) about it.
By Leah Greenblatt
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It's one of those endless blue-haze days in Los Angeles, and Ben Affleck is leaning back on the diving board of a borrowed Bel Air estate to catch the sun, his long torso arced like a bell curve. For a moment it seems like he might actually fall in, bringing a precariously perched photographer and several yards of creamy, expensive-looking knitwear with him. But his balance is better than it looks: Affleck, 49, has walked the plank many times before, and tumbled from greater heights than this. He's also climbed back up again, a story of outsize stardom and second chances played out in the public eye for nearly three decades now.
After a mid-career swerve toward directing films like Gone Baby Gone, The Town, and Argo (for which he won Best Picture), the actor has returned to his first love, turning in fresh, revelatory performances in Ridley Scott's medieval epic The Last Duel and George Clooney's warmhearted drama The Tender Bar. To mark the occasion, Affleck's erstwhile creative partner and oldest friend in the business, Matt Damon (it's been 24 years since they took home their Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Good Will Hunting, how do you like them apples?), sat down to discuss life, love, and all the roles — School Ties, Armageddon, and yes, even Gigli — that made the man. —Leah Greenblatt
MATT DAMON: Ben Affleck, it's great to see you here today.
BEN AFFLECK: Hey there, man! Welcome to the red carpet. Before we get into your project, who are you sleeping with?
[Laughs] Well we're here to talk about The Tender Bar, a movie directed by George Clooney which you star in. I guess I first became aware of it when you called me very excited that you read a great script that Bill Monahan wrote and George offered you a job. I promptly called George and he said that it was because you were cheaper than me. But as the month went on, I started to wonder if he was telling me the entire truth.
He told me that you argued too much. "I got tired of dealing with Damon's bull----. You're gonna do what I tell you, right?"
How was I going to just take his notes and not say anything? But you said you received some of the best direction of your career from Georgie, so I was wondering if you could help people understand what that means.
Well, first of all, because you'd worked with George, I had worked with George, I knew him well and liked him quite a bit. You've always been very smart about picking great directors, and lucky that good directors have picked you. I feel like you really understood that very early on and how well it served you, and I remember George being somebody about whom you just raved.
So aside from being deeply jealous and developing a sense of inadequacy and self-loathing, I did think, "Oh, that would be nice one day, if that happened to me." So when he just called me out of the blue — you know how rare it is that a finished, wonderful script shows up with a really great director, and all you have to do is to just basically be conscious and sentient and say yes.
I mean, especially today, right?
Yeah, I knew that this was kind of mine to screw up. I couldn't imagine there wasn't a long line of people that wanted to take this part, so I really respected his confidence and faith in me, and I wanted to do well for him. I wanted to do it for myself. There's an emotional scene in the end where I give the kid [Tye Sheridan] a car, and every time I read the script, I cried. So I showed up and I really got ready and did my thing. We did the first take and I thought, God, this is it. This is all working. George came over and he said, "Yeah... Giving a car to someone is supposed to be fun."
That's what he said?
I was like, "Right, yes, of course. I've been playing it completely wrong." Other directors can talk to you for an hour and a half and it doesn't seem clear what they're driving at, whereas George has this gift of succinctness and insight. But also just being directed by somebody who's done this job that I've been trying to do for, I don't know, 30 years, is such a comfort and a relief.... My dad worked in a bar, as you know. All that stuff was very familiar to me. So my only concern was, "Should I be working harder than this? It shouldn't feel this smooth."
I've always said, as an actor, your only excuse for not being good is "I didn't know what movie I was in."
It's interesting, because that was the very first thing George did. I mean, a director's job in large measure is tone. Is it more comic? More serious? For me, every time I work with a director that I really admire, and even some I don't — I can learn from negative examples, too — but I just feel like I become a much better director.
I remember Francis [Ford Coppola] sold these little cigars at his winery that are called Carmine Thrifties, they're named after his father. And on the side of the box, it says, "Steal from the best." Which brings me to my next question: Is there anything you're going to carry forward into your own directing coming out of this experience?
I think it's hard to overestimate the degree to which a director's attitude, openness, comfort, generosity pervades the set and sets a tone. George does that better than I do. And he was enormously respectful of the degree to which I take very seriously my need to be there with my children for my half of the custody. I mean, he bent over backwards. You didn't have to be there until midnight every night [or] obliterate the rest of your life in order to do this. Because he's got this spectacular wife, he's got his children, he's got a very rich, full life. He's got to sell coffee—
He sells tequila, too.
Tequila and coffee. That's no joke.
He's got you in the morning and the night.
I'll tell you what I want to be. I want to be George Clooney selling coffee and tequila. Because that really frees you up to do the movies you want to do.
So speaking of awesome actors, I've been tasked with going all the way back to the beginning of your career.
Don't be afraid to relieve yourself of some of that burden, if it feels unduly burdensome.
I take my job very seriously here at Entertainment Weekly.
That's what I'm afraid of.
But before we go back to where it started, let's talk for a second about where you are. Do you attribute it to just, "You play in traffic long enough, you're bound to get hit by some cars?" Is that why your performances are so good of late? Like what you did in The Way Back and The Last Duel. It's full, it's rich, it's invested. It's right. And you're not reaching.
Thank you. That means a lot. Sometimes people will go, "You know, you've really gotten better as you were older," which sometimes feels like "You're not that bad-looking in person! You're not as stupid as I thought you were!" I have some performances as a younger person that I really liked. I knew [Good Will Hunting's] Chuckie Sullivan. I felt an affinity for Ned Alleyn in Shakespeare in Love, and really connected with the character in Chasing Amy.
Changing Lanes! You were great in that one.
That's where I met Bradley [Cooper], actually. Starting off, you have these ideas about success. You know, my mother made $28,000 a year. So I would be like, "How could I justifiably say no to this?" Just not understanding the value of turning things down. People talk about your choices and I want to say, "Well, it's not like I was passing on Scorsese movies." Like, "No, Marty, I'm good. I'm going to do Surviving Christmas." Part of our fates are controlled by the opportunities we have in terms of material and directors.
Absolutely.
That's a big one. And then also, I've always felt more comfortable playing characters that weren't the traditional kind of protagonist. You do this much better than I do, and it's not a backhanded compliment because you find a way to make characters interesting and flawed and real. Because you can't, as a storyteller, alienate the audience from your protagonist. Then you're just watching a movie about somebody you're either judging or don't like or don't believe. And that just blows the whole thing up.
It's deceptively difficult to play the leading-man role. It's like Denzel [Washington], you just can't help but like him and want to be him and admire him. That's a level of being interesting so that you draw people in. One of the nice things about getting older, if you're lucky, is you stop bulls---ting yourself and you start going, You know, I actually know where my feelings are. And the more I figured it out, the more accessible that was. I know what painful is and I know what disillusioned is and I know what ambivalent is, I know what nostalgia is.
Right.
I had a really nadir experience around Justice League for a lot of different reasons. Not blaming anybody, there's a lot of things that happened. But really what it was is that I wasn't happy. I didn't like being there. I didn't think it was interesting. And then some really s---ty things, awful things happened. But, that's when I was like, I'm not going to do that anymore.
In fact, I talked to you about it and you were a principal influence on that decision. I want to do the things that would bring me joy. Then we went and did Last Duel and I had fun every day on this movie. I wasn't the star, I wasn't likable. I was a villain. I wasn't all the things I thought I was supposed to be when I started out and yet it was a wonderful experience. And it was all just stuff that came along that I wasn't chasing.
My only thing is that now I live in fear every time I do another movie, I'm like, Do I still feel that, am I still good? I'm afraid it's going to go away, you know? 'Cause it's elusive. But I'm happy now. I'm feeling it now. And I do think I've gotten better. I think people generally get better with the age and experience—
Some might not. They might get in really bad, corrosive habits.
If you're smart, you learn from people who are really good. And I think our friendship helped kind of inculcate that knowledge in me. We were very generous and open with stuff. Being around other people that you liked and respected and were smart just made you better.
You said to me and I've always repeated it — I mean this is when we started writing together, you were 20 and I was 22 — really starkly, you were like, "Judge me for how good my good ideas are and not how bad my bad ideas are."
Everyone's got bad ideas. Like David Fincher, who is brilliant, every now and again, you go, "Hmm, I don't know." But then you find out he has the humility to go, "Oh, huh."
I remember that with the Coen brothers, more than once. One of them would come up and give me a note after a take and then the other one would be off talking to another actor and would come up and give me the exact opposite note. And without fail, I would always say, "Joel, Ethan just told me the opposite thing," or "Ethan, Joel just told me to do the opposite thing." And no matter who it was, the second guy would say, "Oh yeah, do what he said." [Laughs]
Let me ask you a question about the business before I start running these old movies by you. Given The Last Duel, which I'm drinking my tea and shamelessly promoting with a Last Duel mug that I made...
Did you hand-paint it? Matt Damon, hold the mug!
Obviously it was a box office failure. But interestingly enough, it's number one on iTunes. So it means that there is an audience, just one that was unwilling to go in the middle of a pandemic to the theater. How does that make you feel, coming out with another drama — did COVID just accelerate something that was going to take 10 or 15 years, or is it coming back?
You know, I won't hedge, because that's always boring. I will say, when The Way Back came out, it was released the week they closed the theaters [for the pandemic]. But even before then I knew this movie about grief and a child dying and alcoholism and recovery is just not going to get adults in the seats. We were just talking about Narcos: Mexico, Succession, Mare of Easttown. There's these amazing things being done on streamers. Roma! It's not just some formulaic TV procedural like when we were kids. And you could only watch it like my dad, on an 11-inch black-and-white TV.
If I had to bet, a drama like Argo would not be made theatrically now. That wasn't that long ago. It would be a limited series. I think movies in theaters are going to become more expensive, event-ized. They're mostly going to be for younger people, and mostly about "Hey, I'm so into the Marvel Universe, I can't wait to see what happens next." And there'll be 40 movies a year theatrically, probably, all IP, sequel, animated.
The Last Duel really clinched it for me. I've had bad movies that didn't work and I didn't blink. I know why people didn't go — because they weren't good. But I liked what we did. I like what we had to say. I'm really proud of it. So I was really confused. And then to see that it did well on streaming, I thought, "Well, there you go. That's where the audience is."
Heading back into a time machine now—
If I thought I was going to be held accountable for these movies 20 years later...
Thirty years, dude. Thirty. Let's start with School Ties because that was the first time we did a feature film together. What do you remember?
I knew my nine lines back to front. I loved every day I was on a call sheet, every day I got to come to work. You were there, in Boston. It was one of the best experiences of my life.
Even by the dump in Lowell. Remember?
We literally were next to a dump and thought we were kings. I knew I was playing the one s---ty anti-Semitic bully character, so I figured it was probably not going to be great for me career-wise, but I loved it.
I wasn't in this, but Dazed and Confused, that was your first time working with and meeting Rick Linklater and all those guys.
He was a model to us as we looked around and thought for the first time, "Maybe we can make our own movie," you know? You can do Reservoir Dogs or Slacker or Clerks or Do the Right Thing. People were kind of working outside of the system, and that was inspiring.
Look, it's a bunch of 19-year-old kids shooting nights in a party scene in Texas. So it was barely distinguishable, the time at the hotel and the time on the set. I got to know Matthew [McConaughey] when he was first starting out. Rory [Cochrane], I stayed friends with him, he was in Argo. Anthony Rapp and Joey Lauren Adams and Renée Zellweger, it was just an abundance of riches.
And then it bombed. Bombed! Nobody saw the movie, but it got great reviews. I remember there was a [former EW film critic] Owen Gleiberman review saying "Once every decade..." and I thought this was hyperbole. But it ended up being true, it's a real cult movie that people still talk about and I'm glad to be a part of it. And again, I was the single unappealing character in a movie of enormously appealing people. So not a great career strength. [Laughs]
Well now, speaking of DIY filmmaking: Mall Rats. You obviously have got to talk about Kevin [Smith], but maybe fold them all in because you've got Chasing Amy, too.
I was, once again, playing the bully, running around, throwing people into their lockers. But I liked Kevin. He's funny and smart and charming. We got along.
Kevin also saved Good Will Hunting. This is not a small side note. He is the reason Good Will Hunting got made. We were dead in the water, all the offers had evaporated.
I promised him I would thank him if we ever got an Oscar and promptly forgot. And then I told him, "If I ever win again I swear to God I'm going to thank you." Forgot again.
Kevin and Gus [Van Sant, Good Will's director] and Robin [Williams] were equally important. And I think Francis [Ford Coppola] vouched for me with Robin.
God, he was a wonderful guy. And funny! It was the first time I ever got to hang out with somebody that talented and that famous. I remember walking down the street in Boston with him, he had done Good Morning, Vietnam and Awakenings and Fisher King and all that. And all everybody in Boston would say was "Nanu, nanu."
Yeah.
Mork from Ork.
Mork! But he did do that — he would just do take after take after take because that beautiful brain of his would always come up with something different to do.... So from there, I remember when you got Armageddon. We got split where people went, "Oh, well, Ben's the big movie guy. And Matt's the serious guy," because I did Saving Private Ryan. But the fact was that we were desperate to get another job, and I would've happily taken Armageddon. You would've happily taken Saving Private Ryan. I remember I was shooting [The Talented Mr.] Ripley in Italy when that thing opened, and it was a massive hit. That was a terrific cast.
Yeah, Bruce Willis, Owen Wilson, Billy Bob [Thornton], Mike Duncan. This was real Hollywood, which I felt like I had never seen. They dug out two stages of Disney for huge asteroid craters, and I didn't even think about the fact that the basic premise of the movie was totally absurd.
Why are they training oil drillers to be astronauts rather than astronauts to be oil drillers? You would think the learning curve would be somewhat more steep on the oil-drillers-to-astronauts route. But it was fun and the right time. It's funny, Bruce dropped out of a movie, and as the deal for dropping out of this movie that wasn't working is that we get to put you in two movies, and they put him in Armageddon and The Sixth Sense.
Oh my God, really?
Yes! And I was a little naive about the opinions people would form about me. Or Michael [Bay] and Jerry [Bruckheimer]'s focus on aesthetics, like, "You guys gotta go to the tanning bed!" They made me fix my teeth and work out and be sexy. Be sexy, how do I do that? "Go to the gym!" Running in the gym and putting oil on my body and stuff, and it just turned out to be a long-form version of one of those male topless calendars, in a garage, carrying a tire, kind of greased up. Michael had a vision of a glistening male torso in the oil, and he was like, "That's going to go in the trailer and sell tickets!" And you know, what can you say? We could have made, I think, 400 Chasing Amys for what we made Armageddon for.
It's funny because that's the one movie of mine that my kids have watched and they'll kind of all admit to liking, even though they relentlessly mock it and me. "What are you, driving a tank on the moon?" But they had fun, you know what I mean? They won't even watch The Town. So there you have it.
My kids won't watch my stuff, either. All right, wow, they have a lot of movies they want me to ask you about.
Skip to the ones that are interesting.
Let's touch on Gigli because it's directed by one of our favorite directors, Marty Brest. Where does it sit with you now?
You know, it's an interesting thing because it was a really easy choice. I loved Midnight Run. I loved Beverly Hills Cop. I loved Scent of a Woman. Marty's obviously enormously gifted. There's no question in my mind that this was a guy I wanted to work with. There was wonderful stuff in there. There are things where my daughter will be like, "This is ableist and disgusting," and okay. The way we see stuff has changed a little bit, or a lot in some cases. And there are things that seemed they could work at the time and don't in retrospect.
But really, the truth about that movie and what it taught me was how much everything around a movie sort of dictates the way people see it. But for being a movie that's such a famous bomb and a disaster, very few people actually saw the movie. It doesn't work, by the way. It's a sort of horse's head in a cow's body. And the studio at the time, because I had begun having this relationship with Jennifer Lopez, which was selling a lot of magazines and appeared to generate a lot of enthusiasm, they just predictably latched onto, "They want a romantic comedy. They want the two of them together. More of that!" And it was just like that SNL sketch: "Bad Idea."
But even movies like The Sum of All Fears that worked commercially but didn't have any depth to them, I didn't do anything particularly interesting in them. [Gigli] didn't work and we did five weeks of reshoots, which we knew were not gonna work. It was a movie that didn't work.... Interestingly, I learned more about directing on that movie than anything else because Marty is a brilliant director, really gifted. It's not like it's worse than all... there's a bunch of horrible movies and in terms of losing money, I've had five movies — at least! — that have lost more money than Gigli has.
It's just that it became a story in and of itself. The funny name, the Jennifer Lopez romance and overexposure of that, it was kind of a perfect storm. And I remember talking to Marty the Friday it came out and I was like it's just spectacular, it's a tsunami, it couldn't be worse. This is as bad as it gets.
I thought my job was to be a cipher. I can see now how people looked at me and thought of this person as some callow frat guy who's cavalier, or has too much. It engendered a lot of negative feelings in people about me. There's that aspect of people that I got to see that was sad and hard, it was depressing and really made me question things and feel disappointed and have a lot of self-doubt. But if the reaction to Gigli hadn't happened, I probably wouldn't have ultimately decided, "I don't really have any other avenue but to direct movies," which has turned out to be the real love of my professional life. So in those ways, it's a gift. And I did get to meet Jennifer, the relationship with whom has been really meaningful to me in my life.
I remember you saying to me at that time — probably around the opening weekend, and I never forgot it — you said, "I'm in the worst possible place you can be. I can sell magazines, but not movie tickets."
Yeah. I remember feeling like it was the worst of both worlds. I always viewed it that the tax you paid to get the chance to do this work was to sacrifice your private life, and people were going to have license to make sport of you to some degree. And I didn't go into it blindly. I knew that Sean Penn and Madonna were a tabloid story when I was young. I knew that could happen. Jennifer and I happened to be together at a time where the whole industry of celebrity journalism, if you want to call it that, sort of exploded. But I thought, "S---, this is really not how I had hoped to go, where I'm going to be, what? Famous for being an a--hole or a failure and not able to work?"
I can't think of a worse outcome. Because I've never found any virtue in fame at all. I've probably gotten out of a couple of [traffic] tickets. I've gotten reservations at restaurants. But the whole point was to be able to do this job. That was it. Otherwise, what is it worth? It's corrosive. It changes the relationships you have with other people. But one of the things that time showed me is that it is those moments of crisis or pain or perspective that are strong enough to make you go, "F--- it. Well, this doesn't work. I've got to do something different." I've definitely learned more from failure than I have from success.
Yeah. Well, we're not ending on the note of failure because the postscript to the story is, after 2006, you became a world-renowned director. You won an Academy Award for Best Picture, which is really the highest mountaintop in our business. I'm wrapping this up because I'm late for dinner. My kids are staring at me through the window.
I know how it goes.
But you've had a remarkable last decade and a half that is culminating with some of your best acting work that you've ever done and The Tender Bar is another example of that. And I dare say your writing is pretty damn good. I was really proud of the work you did on The Last Duel.
I love you, man. I want you to do all my interviews. Are you cheap? [Laughs]
I'm free, actually. I'm free.
To be honest... Thank you. It's true, it ends on a much happier note. Not easy and not always smooth, but good. I don't know that that would've been possible for me alone, doing this job in this world without somebody I grew up with who I loved, who I knew loved me and had my back, who believed in me, and whom the popularity of my movies or what people said about me wasn't going to change what they thought about me.
This friendship has been essential and defining and so important to me in my life. There were a few critical times, which are private and I don't want to share, but where your support was so profoundly meaningful to me that I don't think I would've been able to be successful without it. So let me take this opportunity to thank you—
—in a Zoom interview. [Laughs] Congratulations on another great piece of work, and I hope people go see The Tender Bar. We've just got to get people to see the movies.
Well, that may go away, but we'll always be good. And we'll finally have figured it out when we hit the dinner-theater circuit.
We're each a fan club of one for the other. All right, man. I love you.
PLAYBOY: [...] Affleck also had a big spy flick, The Sum of All Fears, around the same time, but yours [The Bourne Identity] did better.
DAMON: Both of us were pulling for our own and the other’s movie, and the stakes had gotten so high. During press interviews, people would ask, “Whose movie is going to do better?” and I was like, “I don’t fucking care, as long as we’re both okay.” I honestly don’t care much anymore about the media stuff. Each of us got really leery talking about the other or about our friendship, because it felt cheapened when we saw it in print. At this point I just acknowledge to myself that I love him and he’s going to be in my life forever.
— From Matt Damon's interview with Playboy magazine (August 2004).
PAJAMA GAME
Affleck with Matt Damon the morning after Damon slept over at Affleck's loft. Their friendship was "a good publicity thing for marketing people," Damon says.
[Photograph included in Ben Affleck’s interview for Vanity Fair (October 1999)]
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The case of the groggy-eyed Damon
By Jeannette Walls for MSNBC (7 June 2000)
Is Matt Damon appearing in Talk magazine because he's mad at rival Vanity Fair? The star of Good Will Hunting and The Talented Mr. Ripley got furious with Vanity Fair after the magazine ran a photo of him that he was promised wouldn't be used, sources say.
MATT DAMON was visiting his friend Ben Affleck late last year, according to one source, when he walked into a room where photographer Annie Leibowitz was taking pictures for a Vanity Fair cover story on Affleck. "He was all groggy and didn't want Annie to take his picture, but she insisted it would never appear in print and that it was just for her personal collection," says the insider. "So he relented. He was absolutely furious when Vanity Fair ran the picture. He was very, very upset about being lied to." Miramax, the studio most closely linked with both Damon and Affleck, was also furious, says the source.
Every magazine in the business was eager to get Damon for its cover for his All the Pretty Horses, which Miramax and Columbia are releasing this fall. Some media insiders are saying that after the alleged betrayal, Damon decided to appear on the cover of Vanity Fair's less successful arch rival Talk magazine in retaliation. Talk is partially owned by Miramax and is edited by former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown.
Another source says animosity between Vanity Fair and Miramax is one reason the magazine is running embarrassing details about Miramax head Harvey Weinstein. In its July issue, Vanity Fair is running an article that describes the abusive behavior of some Hollywood bosses, and describes Weinstein's dirty laundry (literally) and says that Weinstein had one assistant repeat "Mantra-like", "I'm a dildo Harvey. I'm a dildo Harvey. I'M A DILDO HARVEY."
Neither Leibowitz nor Damon's spokesman had a comment. A Vanity Fair spokeswoman insists there's no feud, pointing out that Weinstein is only a small part of a larger story and that he "is legendary for being a tough boss." She adds, "If Matt Damon was upset, he wasn't upset for long. He was partying long and hard at a Vanity Fair party."
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[Retrived from the Matt Damon Column. My gratitude to mattfleck.memes on TikTok for bringing this to my attention!]
