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This will be his first “Official” appearance on the show. As you probably remember, Matt usually just gets bumped off the show. Will he finally be actually interviewed?

From EW.com:

Set your DVRs: Matt Damon will finally submit to an interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live on Thursday, Jan. 24. And “may God help Damon if he dares show his stupid face,” Kimmel said in a statement.

For nearly as long as he’s hosted Jimmy Kimmel Live, the comedian has had the same show-ending tradition: Apologizing and saying that he’s been forced to bump his last guest of the night, Matt Damon. In 2006, Kimmel finally welcomed Damon onto the show for the first time — only to inform his guest as soon as he sat down that their time was up.

Damon got his revenge in 2008 by co-starring with Kimmel’s then-girlfriend Sarah Silverman in “I’m F—ing Matt Damon,” a viral video that inspired an equally popular sequel, “I’m F—ing Ben Affleck.” In the years since, Damon has done cameo appearances in several pre-taped Live comedy bits, including this extended sketch from 2010′s post-Oscars episode — but he’s never sat on Jimmy’s couch for a regular interview.

This week, Jimmy Kimmel Live moved to an earlier time slot, where it competes directly against Late Show with David Letterman and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. The Damon interview could help the show regain the ratings victory it claimed on Tuesday and lost on Wednesday — even (and especially) if the whole thing ends up being an elaborate prank.

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A suite on the 31st floor of the Waldorf Towers is a study in costly surfaces. Celeste blue wallpaper, cabriole legs, curtains slung in dangling brocade. The armchairs are plashed in old silk, the prints are a-trot with thoroughbreds. It is, in short, a stage.

In a chair by the tea service, John Krasinski is talking with the fluid animation of an Ivy League grad bolstered by nine seasons of an international hit sitcom and a marriage to Emily Blunt.

“It’s not about the control,” he says, referring to the production of his new movie, Promised Land. “It was about the camaraderie.”

As if on cue, one of the world’s top box office draws—and Promised Land’s costar and cowriter—arrives. Matt Damon is polite, even courtly, although his hair is shaved in a penal crop from reshoots on Neill Blomkamp’s upcoming sci-fi flick, Elysium. After shaking hands he swerves towards the refreshments tray, his brow furrowed over the breakfast china.

“Did you try the coffee?” asks the voice of Jason Bourne.

“No, is it good?” replies the voice of Jim from The Office.

“Well, mine wasn’t. Mine was really watered down. Maybe it came from the same pot.… We’re about to find out.” He sloshes it into a hotel issue cup. “No, no, no, no. This is much more rich.”

“They give me the good stuff,” laughs Krasinski. Rapidfire, Damon tosses shreds of muffin into his mouth and scoots up a chair.

“Awesome,” he says. “I’m in.”

People didn’t expect Matt Damon’s second major co-writing credit to appear alongside the name of John Krasinski. “Matt and Ben” is as much of a pop culture cliché as “My boy’s wicked smaht.” Krasinski’s former colleague on The Office, Mindy Kaling, made her name with those names, writing a play about how Good Will Hunting got made. But when the Internet started jabbering about an upcoming screenplay by Krasinski and Damon, it seemed like a natural match. Damon was a superstar, and by the second season of The Office, Krasinski had supplanted Barney Frank as Newton’s favorite son—his eyebrow alone expresses as much submission to cosmic absurdity as Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus. And hometown ties count.

Krasinski says that when Damon and Blunt had been filming The Adjustment Bureau together, “Emily had been spewing Boston knowledge. Boston fun facts and how much I was a Boston guy. Matt thought that was hilarious, that a Brit was holding the flag for our favorite city. By the time I met him, we just dove into discussing the Red Sox and the Pats and all these different places that we grew up.”

“You have a common frame of reference,” says Damon. “You end up seeking out people from back home because they just understand you in ways other people can’t.” He laughs. “John does a good Boston accent, too.”

Double-dates ensued. “We make plans for going out for dinner, and it always ends as much more,” says Krasinski. “Sometimes we’d get wild and go straight to karaoke.”

Shared background and career is a solid basis for a partnership, and soon the two actors were talking about putting their laptops together for a screenplay. Krasinski had adapted Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace for film, but he’d never penned a narrative of his own. “I had a burning idea of talking about where we are as a people, as opposed to where we’ve been led,” he says. “No matter what happens in Washington or anywhere, we’re losing sight of the people being affected. I brought that idea to Matt, and he immediately connected with it.”

Damon’s antennae for social justice are famously sensitive— the man’s responsible for introducing the name Howard Zinn into the popular lexicon, after all. Over dinner, Krasinski floated the idea for a script, and soon the pair was spinning narrative threads. The theme for this rousing, populist entertainment: wind turbines.

“We found ourselves scouting locations, and we realized we had bad intel,” laughs Damon. It turned out, wind power wasn’t a locus for controversy, or even for drama. “We kind of built the house of our dreams on a clay foundation.” So Krasinski hit on the idea of transplanting the characters and storyline to the more topical soil of fracking, the extraction of natural gas from shale by injecting chemicals into the ground. This was the grist around which their script would coalesce. It would be a story about small towns and big business painted in the American textures of unfurling farmlands, town hall showdowns and characters of quirk. So between February and August of last year, the pair regularly met at Damon’s kitchen table to plot it out.

“It was a lot like working with Ben,” says Damon. “It didn’t ever feel like work. You could never tell who wrote what. I remember that happening with Ben. When Good Will Hunting came out, in large part because I played a character who was smarter than his character, people said to me, ‘Did you really write more of the script?’” He laughs. “I couldn’t tell you what I wrote in that script.”

There were differences from hanging out with Affleck, of course. “Matt would be asking a question or acting out a line, and then someone would just crawl up his back and another person would just crawl up his arm,” says Krasinski. (Damon’s function as a climbing wall comes from now being a father of four.)

“Our writing sessions were often interrupted by the need for me to give a piggyback ride or go get somebody a glass of milk,” says Damon. But, “I don’t think we ever had a day where we didn’t make huge strides.” On Good Will Hunting, conversely, “We had a lot of days where we just didn’t do s***. Where nothing got accomplished.” Hollywood stars are necessarily more miserly with their time than folk who don’t yet own Oscar statuettes. “And our wives would ask us what we got done at the end of the day,” he laughs.

It had been 15 years since Damon had settled down to a meaty writing project, and Krasinski had never attempted a fully-fleshed narrative, spiced with speeches from a wise old Hal Holbrooke-ish character (wisely cast with Hal Holbrooke) and one-liners from a punchy Frances MacDormand. “I hadn’t been writing in that wonderful, selfish way where there’s no green light on a movie,” says Damon. “When the whole windmill part started to fall apart, my wife said, ‘Even if you don’t make this movie, you’ve had the greatest time. You’ve woken up to this thing that you thought you were still doing, but really weren’t.’”

As in any writing foray, there’re the pitfalls of structural rot, plot splutters, tinnital lines and character arcs so brittle they fracture at the touch of human speech. Promised Land has none of that. It is very much a writerly film, but also an actorly one in that its animating spirit is to supply Damon and Krasinski with roles they wanted to play.

“The idea of a man living his life one way and trying to figure out if that’s the way he should be living it, there are tones of something like that,” says Krasinski, whose favorite movie is Sidney Lumet’s The Verdict. “The Kazan movies were really important to me,” he adds. “On the Waterfront, Wild River and all those movies are about these characters and the struggle they’re going through. They weren’t beating you over the head.”

This actor’s taste for inner turmoil, for the staged riot of hamartia and third-act twists, infuses Promised Land’s script. But the risk in empowering the inmates—as anyone who’s read a latter day JK Rowling novel knows—is that you invite bloat. An expository town meeting scene ran to 15 pages in the shooting draft.

“It would’ve been 25 minutes [on film],” says Krasinski.

“If anyone paused for a second, yeah,” says Damon.

“If you weren’t doing a Mamet play.”

But even a ruthless hand on the delete key won’t make a script take flight. You need thunderclaps. Brainwaves. The electric tang of inspiration. Like when it occurred to Krasinski that Damon’s character, a salesman for the natural gas business, ought to have been raised on a farm.

“We got to a point where we realized the obvious,” says Damon. “That happens a lot. I remember writing Good Will Hunting, and we went and met with Terrence Malick in Austin. And the original end of Good Will Hunting was that Will and Skylar, the girl, leave Boston together. We’re sitting there and we pitch the whole thing to Terrence Malick, and he’s sitting there quietly having a cup of tea.” Damon mimics a tremulous Southern accent: “‘Well, ah think she should leave first, and he should go after her.’ And Ben and I just looked at each other and said, ‘We are the two dumbest human beings on the planet Earth. Of course that should happen.’”

Inspiration sometimes takes a long time to gestate. For years, there’s been rumbling in the media about Damon and Affleck joining forces for a Whitey Bulger biopic, but Damon sounds fatalistic about a reunion. “It’s tough because Ben and I talk about it. But now, his career is just in full… I mean, it’s out in the orbit, man. It’s unbelievable. I can’t imagine the two of us being able to sit down and take the time to write something.”

Time, for Hollywood stars as for everyone else, is always stamping its hooves in the background. As well as cowriting and costarring in Promised Land, Damon originally planned to make it his directorial debut. Work pressures tamped down that ambition, so he e-mailed the script to Good Will Hunting director Gus Van Sant, who accepted the canvas chair. “The best move I made as a producer was firing myself as director,” laughs Damon. “Gus, incidentally, is John’s favorite director.”

Van Sant’s sensibility—calm, intuitive, the camera lingering on a child’s coloring book while the grown-ups haggle over Big Themes—creates the illusion of simplicity, even folksiness. “This was just pure storytelling,” says Damon, who’s worked with nearly every major director in the business, from Eastwood to Scorsese to the Coen brothers. He’s something of a connoisseur. “I’ve always chosen by director,” he says. “Maybe I should’ve been more selfish about roles, but the best chance you have of making good movies is partnering with great directors. So that’s always been the way I’ve made my choices.”

Van Sant’s film, it’s true, feels as unfussy as a drink of lemonade. While the character actors lick their chops over their lines, there’s a goodly amount of weather, flags and landscapes molded by combine harvesters. And of people washing their faces in moments of mucked conscience. The movie is a morality play dressed in shots of Americana. “What it did for me was that every time I do a film now, I’m going to prepare for it as a director,” says Damon. “I’m going to think about it as if I were directing it in detail, how all the choices influence everything in big and little ways.”

Promised Land will make a grab at the Oscar ring—it comes out in the nick, under limited release on Dec. 28—but it’s hardly Good Will Hunting 2: How Do You Like Them Frackers? For one thing, Damon is a restrained 42-year-old performer. The fuller mold of his face, the whisper of gray at his temples, the milkshed chic and dad jeans—this is a mature role. As a young actor, he says, “I was always angsting and trying to beat myself up and torture myself to feel things. Now I just relax and get out of the way, and it’s right there.”

He credits his kids for his evolution. Fatherhood, he says, has “filled me up emotionally. The only thing I can compare that to is that Christmas story. You know, How the Grinch Stole Christmas. At the end of the book there’s that part where his heart grows five sizes or whatever. That’s what it felt like being a father.” A marination in family life seasons not only Damon’s performance in Promised Land, but his approach to fresh projects. “If it’s a big job, it means moving house. We have to figure it out as a family every time I go to work.” Several years ago, scheduling conflicts prompted Damon to turn down the lead in Avatar. And while the Bourne movies inoculated his career by guaranteeing a windfall of box receipts, the future isn’t so certain without a blockbuster action franchise. “Now I don’t have that, so I wonder,” he says. “It’s tough. If it’s all superheroes… there’s gotta be something for me.”

Movies like Promised Land—with a diffident budget and a yen for storytelling—continue to disappear in a fusillade of CGI ordnance. Damon’s next film, a Steven Soderbergh picture about human cockatoo Liberace, is releasing next year not in theaters, but on HBO. “We couldn’t get the money traditionally from the feature world,” says Damon. “Steven said to me, ‘If we tried to make The Informant! now, we wouldn’t get the money.’”

Krasinski, too, is mindful that there’s a change of scene ahead. “It’s very scary to be going through a transition in your career like I am now,” he says. “And the fact that [Promised Land] is coming out right when the show’s ending… it’s weird.” He holds no illusions that The Office has welded Jim Halpert indelibly on his résumé, and on his life. “I wouldn’t be so pretentious as to say, ‘I’m ready to play a heroin addict!’ Or, ‘I’m ready to do Philadelphia!’ I’m sure I’ve been typecast,” he admits. “I’m honored to be. Being on The Office is one of those things you don’t try to run away from. You try to hold onto its pant leg as much as you can. I think it’s absolutely time to end the show, but it’s given me everything.”

Damon, too, is grateful for his breaks. “I feel lucky just to be here. I remember George Clooney said to me when we were doing Ocean’s Eleven, we went out and had a drink one night, and he said, ‘If you can survive 10 years in this business, you’ve really done something. If you have a 10-year career, that is unheard of.’ A few years ago I sent him an email saying, ‘We did it!’” He laughs. “I guess we’re probably on borrowed time at this point.”

Krasinski, too, is philosophical. He’s got two other scripts in the works, and while he’s not turning down any Halpert-esque nice-guy roles, he’s determined to dig deeper. “I’m more engaged in playing people with conflict,” he says. “This is who I am.”

But the immediate task is to put Promised Land in front of the 3-D-queasy masses, hoping that it coaxes them from their jaded shells. At a private screening in the creamy leather depths of the Revere Hotel, Krasinski watches the movie with his family, friends and a light sprinkling of Boston journalists. After the (unfeigned) applause, he takes the stage to field questions, gracefully lobbing back the answers. In character with his most famous role, he gives them a bashful spin. “There were a lot of pinch-yourself moments during this,” he smiles. “One’s happening tonight.”

In the lobby bar, Krasinski’s parents, brother and sister-in-law chat about Thanksgiving arrangements while he patiently banters with fans. A stunning woman slips him a refill of sauvignon blanc before leaning in for a snapshot. Reporters cast about for flattering, deferential observations about the script. In a month, Krasinski’s words will be echoing from theater sound systems around the country. In a month, the Academy lets slip the dogs of Oscar season.

If this, like Damon says, is indeed borrowed time, then it feels like time well spent.

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Matt Damon and John Krasinski on ‘Promised Land’

“IT’S the moment every actor actually fears,” Matt Damon said, looking around a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria in mock terror.

The night before he’d been at Cipriani, of all harrowing places, to receive a tribute at the Gotham Independent Film Awards. “It was one of those career achievements that makes me feel like it’s over for me,” he said, not entirely seriously. John Krasinski, a star of “The Office” on NBC, had presented the award. Now he sat grinning in the next chair. The two men wore suspiciously similar sweaters.

“How did you like your time here, Matt?” Mr. Krasinski asked, affecting a stern tone.

“Wait, what, sorry?” Mr. Damon said, playing along. He mimed being dragged away. “Then they take you in the back room ——”

“And shiv you,” Mr. Krasinski finished, with evident relish.

The banter was spontaneous, the rapport hard-earned. Mr. Damon, 42, and Mr. Krasinski, 33, are friends; they met through Mr. Krasinski’s wife, the actress Emily Blunt, when she starred opposite Mr. Damon in last year’s romantic thriller “The Adjustment Bureau.” They’re also collaborators and co-stars in a new movie, “Promised Land.” Their ease at improvising a scene is the result of practice. In addition to acting in “Promised Land” they wrote and produced the film, running lines and hammering out drafts in between day jobs, working weekends alongside Mr. Damon’s four rambunctious children in his Los Angeles home.

The film, directed by Gus Van Sant, concerns what happens when a natural gas company comes to a small town somewhere in the Marcellus Shale in the rural Northeast, intent on persuading the town’s working-class residents to allow the company to drill on their land. Mr. Damon plays Steve Butler, a blithely confident representative of the drilling company; Mr. Krasinski plays Dustin Noble, an earnest environmental activist with a nasty edge. At issue is the technique of fracking, the controversial method that the company in the film uses to extract gas, and the corrosive influence of the vast wealth that Mr. Damon’s character can promise and that Mr. Krasinski’s character is intent on resisting.

In an interview Mr. Van Sant described “Promised Land” as a “simple learning film,” an earnest, Capraesque meditation on the conflicting dictates of stewardship, hardship economics and fraying community values. By Mr. Damon’s standards, it’s a small movie, made for a modest budget of about $15 million and opening Friday in a limited number of theaters. (A wider release will come in January.) But it’s also a turning point — and something of a departure — for both Mr. Damon, who was scheduled to direct “Promised Land” before bowing out at the last moment, and Mr. Krasinski, whose show “The Office” is ending after an eight-year run.

“I feel like I’m on a precipice, jumping off for good,” Mr. Krasinski said. “To not be sure what’s next after that is completely terrifying.”

For Mr. Damon the stakes are equally real, if more elusive. He does not exactly lack for work. Last year he starred in Cameron Crowe’s “We Bought a Zoo,” Steven Soderbergh’s “Contagion” and George Nolfi’s “Adjustment Bureau,” among other high-profile films, and next year he’ll be in “Elysium,” a science-fiction blockbuster from the director Neill Blomkamp. When shooting went long on that film, Mr. Damon was forced to give up the director’s chair on “Promised Land” for lack of time to prepare.

Uncharacteristically “Promised Land” will be the only film that Mr. Damon appears in this year. And that, he said, is a point of pride. “It’s a different feeling to work this in depth with a movie. Usually we show up, and we’re the mercenaries.”

His longtime friend Ben Affleck noted that it was neither easy nor politically simple for an actor of Mr. Damon’s stature to take a year off to work on his own project. “His career is full of the most extraordinary opportunities that an actor could ever dream of. So naturally the instinct isn’t to just turn away from that and say, ‘Let me sit at home staring at a blank page for six months.’ ”

On “Promised Land” Mr. Damon and Mr. Krasinski did everything from recruiting the cast, which also includes Rosemarie DeWitt, Hal Holbrook and Frances McDormand, to scouting locations. That involvement provided “a much richer and deeper feeling of ownership,” Mr. Damon said.

The film may be Mr. Van Sant’s first collaboration with Mr. Krasinski, who previously wrote and directed an adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.” But Mr. Van Sant and Mr. Damon have some history together. The director is fond of recalling a wager he was once tempted to make with the producer Laura Ziskin, back when Mr. Damon was an unknown actor auditioning for a part in Mr. Van Sant’s mordant comedy “To Die For.”

“He came in, he did a regular reading like everybody else, and when he left, the producer said, ‘That’s a movie star.’ ” Mr. Van Sant recalled. “You meet a lot of magnanimous, forthcoming, attractive, intelligent, talented people in your casting sessions. But somehow she just thought he was the thing. And if I was asked to bet — like a Las Vegas bet — I would’ve voted against.”

Most moviegoers know the rest of this story. Mr. Damon did not get the part. But he and his writing partner, Mr. Affleck, did eventually win Mr. Van Sant over, persuading him to take on a screenplay of theirs called “Good Will Hunting.” That script led Mr. Damon and Mr. Affleck to an Oscar, cementing their reign at the end of the last century as “the most overpublicized writing duo in some time,” as Mr. Affleck ruefully put it.

This month is the 15th anniversary of “Good Will Hunting,” and Mr. Damon admitted he’d been thinking about the film more than he had in a while. Writing “Promised Land,” Mr. Damon said, “we’d basically just be in a room with a laptop open and kind of hashing out the scenes, pacing around the room. It’s really exactly the way Ben Affleck and I wrote ‘Good Will Hunting.’ ”

And how, a reporter tentatively asked, did Mr. Krasinski compare to Mr. Affleck?

“Strikingly similar,” Mr. Damon said, laughing. “Honestly. The writing experience is the same.” (Mr. Affleck said, by way of wry response, “I think John is very, very talented.”)

This time Mr. Krasinski originated the idea to write a film about “American identity,” as he put it, one that focused on the working people whom he saw as marginalized in the present political climate.

“My dad grew up in a steel mill town just outside of Pittsburgh, and all his stories of growing up seemed so incredibly inspiring,” Mr. Krasinski said. “I wanted to write a movie where these people were in a situation that was representative as a whole of everything that we’re going through as a country.” Mr. Krasinski called the author Dave Eggers, whom he knew from the film “Away We Go,” and the two men worked out a basic concept (Mr. Eggers has a story credit on “Promised Land”) before Mr. Krasinski took the idea to Mr. Damon.

“Promised Land” quickly found a home at Warner Brothers, where Mr. Damon has a production deal. But the financing was contingent on Mr. Damon’s directing.

“I knew that when I bowed out that we were going to lose our” — Mr. Damon used another word for emphasis — “money.” In desperation he e-mailed their script to Mr. Van Sant from an airport runway. By the time he had landed, Mr. Van Sant had signed on, and the project eventually found a new home with Focus Features.

“As a producer I like to say that the smartest thing I did on the movie was firing myself as the director,” Mr. Damon said.

The behind-the-scenes experience on “Promised Land,” both men said, was something that they were eager to repeat.

“It was my wife who said to me after we’d been writing for a couple months, ‘I haven’t seen you this happy working,’ ” Mr. Damon said.

“And it’s true. I’d forgotten how much fun it is to start from scratch.”

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The two found they worked together well on a project about wind power. Then the whole idea for the film fell apart. A new focus, director and studio brought it back to life.

In the 15 years since Matt Damon and Ben Affleck won the Academy Award for their “Good Will Hunting” screenplay, Damon has worked with some of Hollywood’s best directors, become a humanitarian in Africa and even parodied himself with the help of Kevin Smith and Jimmy Kimmel. What he hasn’t done is write another script.

Until now.

In partnership with John Krasinski of “The Office,” Damon, 42, has returned to the blank page, co-writing “Promised Land,” a script that he initially intended to direct, about a young comer in the natural gas industry who is selling the controversial practice of “fracking” to homeowners in struggling rural communities.

Despite the lengthy interlude between scripts, the process, he said, felt remarkably familiar to his collaboration with Affleck.

“John usually has his laptop, and we jump around the room gesturing at each other and he writes stuff down,” said Damon during a conversation with Krasinski, whom he credits with shepherding the project through. “It’s actually the way Ben and I did it. Ben and John are the two funniest guys I know, and it ends up that we just laugh for eight hours straight and at the end we have a few scenes that we really like.”

Krasinski would crisscross North America, meeting up with Damon on weekends in Vancouver, Canada, while Damon was shooting “Elysium,” or in New York when the married father of four was back home doting on his household full of women.

“We wrote in the middle of barbecues, pizza time. I was a villain for a month and a half, the dude that was taking their dad away,” said Krasinski, 33, whose wife, Emily Blunt, starred opposite Damon in “The Adjustment Bureau.” That’s how the men met.

Despite the almost 10-year age gap, Damon and Krasinski have a lot in common. Both hail from Boston, each could compete in a pearly whites contest with their bright Hollywood smiles and, surely if Damon were ever to hand off his “nicest guy in Hollywood” title, it would have to go to Krasinski. Still, despite the easy rapport the two have, the process of getting “Promised Land” to production was anything but simple.

First, there was their working styles. Krasinski is lightning fast; Damon not so much.

“John is like a supercomputer. His mind is fast. And I go in real time. I read at the speed in which I talk,” said Damon. “John would spit out all these ideas, and it would literally put me into brain freeze, where I would just sit there.”

Which in turn would throw Krasinski into bouts of insecurity seeing Damon’s stony reaction to his ideas. “I thought he hated me and wanted me to leave.”

That is until Damon’s wife unlocked the secret to that blank stare. “She said, ‘You know how Matt works? Before bed, I’ll say we’ve got to do this, pick this kid up, do this with this person, and he would just stare at me and I’d get really furious,’” relayed Krasinski.

“I’m just trying to make sure I can do everything she says,” Damon jumped in.

“The moment she told me that, the light bulb went off,” Krasinksi said. “The second half of [writing] was so much easier. I didn’t slow down, but I’d wait. I’d go watch a half hour of television. Then I’d come back and Matt would say, ‘Oh, I got it. I like it.’”

The next hurdle was the story itself. The project began as a story about wind farms. A two-hander, abstractly sketched with the help of novelist Dave Eggers. It featured Damon as a slick city boy in CAA-agent-quality suits and a female country mouse, to be played by Frances McDormand, with Krasinski as the interloper. But when the two writers went to scout locations in upstate New York to confirm their premise that fly-by-night companies were erecting wind towers only to collect the government subsidies and hand them over to coal companies — never actually powering up the towers — they were shocked.

“We couldn’t hear each other because the windmills were blowing so loud,” said Krasinski with a laugh. “They were working so well,” added Damon, that they quickly realized their whole premise for the film, which they had spent hundreds of hours writing, was completely wrong.

“It was devastating,” said Damon. “We had put in a lot of time at that point, and we knew we couldn’t carry out the story we had written.”

That was June 2011, and Damon was about to begin production on the sci-fi film “Elysium” opposite Jodie Foster. Rather than abandon the project, the duo, still attached to their characters, found a new backdrop to house them, landing on the natural gas industry with help from reports on “60 Minutes” and in the New York Times. Now Damon plays a representative of a natural gas company, and Krasinski, well, he’s still an interloper.

“Weirdly, not only did it work, it upped the ante and immediately became high-stakes poker,” said Krasinski. “It was no longer about neighbors pointing to a windmill and saying it’s big and makes noise. It was people saying, ‘I could be a millionaire’ and others saying, ‘Our town could be unusable in 50 years.’ The potential gains and losses were so dramatic.”

But the drama wasn’t over yet. Despite endorsements of the script from their high-profile friends, including Cameron Crowe, Affleck, Steven Soderbergh and others, and a financial commitment from Warner Bros., Damon gave up his director’s seat weeks before he was set to begin pre-production. Exhausted from his lengthy shoot and missing his family, he just wasn’t up to it, and there went their financing.

Luckily for the crushed Krasinski, Gus Van Sant, who had directed “Good Will Hunting,” stepped in quickly as the replacement, and Focus Features came in to finance and produce the film.

“Pretty much overnight I agreed to do it,” said Van Sant from an airport terminal on his way to Poland. “A lot of screenplays I read have a few things missing. To me, this one had it all. It was funny, entertaining, serious, romantic, tragic, everything. It was a nice, balanced story.”

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Even before Focus Features made Promised Land a late Oscar entry, the film’s writer-stars Matt Damon and John Krasinski came under fire from the energy industry. Their film deals with “fracking,” which mixes chemicals, sand, water and drilling to loosen underground shale deposits to harvest natural energy. Damon and Fran McDormand play gas company reps using the lure of potential riches to convince struggling farmers to allow fracking on their lands, despite the risks for their crops and livestock. Krasinski plays a grassroots activist fighting the reps as the town prepares to vote. Promised Land reunites Damon with Gus Van Sant, who directed Good Will Hunting, which brought Oscars and fame to Boston neophyte scribes Damon and Ben Affleck. Damon and Krasinski are fun guys, the type who’d be a blast to invite over to watch football…as long as you aren’t a fan of the New York Giants and the two Super Bowls they won over the New England Patriots.

DEADLINE: Matt, you’ve said recently that the Bourne Legacy spinoff didn’t make it any easier for Jason Bourne to return. What has to happen for us to see your signature character back onscreen?

DAMON: Just a couple things, really. Paul Greengrass has to want to do it, and secondly and equally important, it comes down to Paul and I knowing what the hell we want to do. We just don’t have a story, and we haven’t had one. I quietly went to Jonah Nolan, because he and his brother Chris did such a brilliant job on Batman and that whole mythology. I just said, can you put your brain on this? I can’t figure it out. And he took a run at it and he couldn’t crack it either. Paul and I have been talking about it for years. And we can’t quite see what the movie would be. If we could get line of sight on that…

DEADLINE: We are force-fed so many unnecessary sequels, and here is a smart thriller that we actually want to see more of…

DAMON: Neither of us is against it. I would love to do another one. I love that character. To me, the reason to make that movie is because people want to see it. Paul and I have said that to each other. We don’t take for granted the fact that we’ve built an audience for Bourne, that’s a real privilege. But our part of that bargain is that the movie is good and belongs with the other three. Until we can deliver that, we just can’t make it.

DEADLINE: I watched last week as Brad Pitt’s bankability got questioned after Killing Them Softly tanked. How much do stars like you and Brad worry about taking on projects like that or Promised Land? You see them as specialty pictures made at a price, but if they fail, they go down in the loss column.

DAMON: Some actors don’t make these movies for exactly that reason. I couldn’t bear to have a career like that. These are exactly the kind of movies I like to go see. That might put me in the minority of the movie-going public, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t make them. In writing Promised Land, John and I talked a lot about films like Local Hero and The Verdict, a movie I absolutely love. I don’t know what that movie would do today, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t love to be in The Verdict.

DEADLINE: How helpful then are hits like Bourne?

DAMON: It’s always nice when one hits. It buys you relevance in the industry for a couple years and gives you cover to do these other things. But I would never just protect my beach head. That would be a career built out of fear and I won’t live that way. I want to challenge myself in different genres, playing different characters, and I don’t want to get pigeonholed and forced to do the same things. If Promised Land does not do a lot of business, it’s not going to end my career. But I am mindful like we all are that you don’t get to keep doing this if your movies don’t perform at the box office.

DEADLINE: How much of the ambition behind this script was to expose the dangers of fracking? Is that what you responded to, Matt?

DAMON: Not at all. I responded to the idea of a guy going to a small town and being changed by the town, and the town being changed by him. It was about American identity, where we’ve been and where we are headed. We talked about different issues we could use as a backdrop. As we researched natural gas, we realized it was the obvious choice because the stakes are so incredibly high, and it is right now something people are grappling with in thousands of communities all over the country. It seemed a perfect fit for the story we wanted to tell.

DEADLINE: When you cover a hot-button topic like fracking, how do you make sure you don’t leave viewers feeling they’ve been lectured?

DAMON: We talked about that a lot, and worked toward having characters at the center of this that felt like people we all know. Like that guy who, as soon as he gets five grand, goes right out and buys a Corvette. Or Fran McDormand’s character, who approaches making these deals with locals as a job and makes the decisions she makes to support her kid. Those things are humanizing; the relatable characters keep it from being a dry, boring lecture. I’d never forgive myself for writing that.
And there are people on the other side who argue just as strongly and ask, do you bring your daughters to the whorehouse when times get tough? These are real arguments and real people. We wanted to be sure the screenplay wasn’t judging any of the characters, and that you would recognize some of your own decisions in the decisions these people are making when big money and real people collide in these communities.

DEADLINE: How did the writing dynamic between you and John compare with your Good Will Hunting collaboration with Ben Affleck?

DAMON: It was eerily similar. Maybe because we’re all actors, the process was absolutely the same. We’d improvise stuff, play all the different characters. It brought back a lot of really great memories. I really did forget how much I loved writing. My wife said to me in the middle that even if you guys never get this movie made, I haven’t seen you this happy and at least you’ve remembered how much you love this. It’s true. I’m definitely not going to take as much time between writing jobs again.

DEADLINE: No getting around the fact you wrote a script with another actor. How upset was Ben at this blatant infidelity?

DAMON: Well, listen. I think John just used me, to get to Ben.

KRASINSKI: Not true…but do you have his number?

DAMON: Ben is at the top of the A-list in every single category, so Ben is not hurting at all these days.

DEADLINE: I just read an Entertainment Weekly cover tribute to Ben written by his Argo producer George Clooney. Maybe it’s you who should be worried, Matt. You could feel the bro-mance in the air. It wouldn’t shock me if they are going halves on a private box at Fenway Park.

DAMON: That’s why I immediately took my next job on Clooney’s The Monuments Men. I want to head that off. I gotta put a stop to all this.

DEADLINE: Matt, what got in the way of making Promised Land your directing debut?

DAMON: I blame my damn kids. Actually, I was doing Neill Blomkamp’s movie Elysium. It’s a big sci-fi film that ran longer than expected. I realized I was going to have a two-week break before leaving my family again to go into pre-production for 12 weeks, and then shoot for another eight weeks. I just couldn’t do it. So I bowed out ungracefully at the eleventh hour. John and I wanted this movie for 2012, it was important just because of the topicality. We saw from a distance when we started a year and a half ago that this issue was gaining prominence and we felt people would really start being engaged with it around now.

DEADLINE: Matt, how humbling was it when you had one way in mind to shoot the picture, and then see this?

DAMON: That shot was just exquisite. We knew it was a great shot when we saw him do it and later, we said to each other, we wrote this thing and we didn’t think of that! It was a director elevating the material. I’d like to think that eventually I would have arrived at the conclusion that we needed the girl in the foreground, but I don’t know. He thought of it first. It was humbling.

DEADLINE: Even before anybody saw this film, the energy industry was critical of Promised Land, noting its partial sponsorship from oil-vested Abu Dhabi. How has this impacted your film?

DAMON: Well, the film hasn’t come out yet, I wouldn’t get into an argument about a book I haven’t read, and so I can’t engage with someone knocking a film they haven’t seen. I think that’s more of a fringe element. The energy industry is more sophisticated and my guess is, if they decide to attack the movie they’ll put out stories about people who’ve positively been affected, and have them talk about the movie. They won’t deal with it directly. That would be the more sophisticated play, and what I’d do if I were them.

DEADLINE: Promised Land was the last film to enter the Oscar race. It platforms December 28 before opening in January. Why enter so late?

DAMON: Normally, when we’re in a race, we like to give everybody a big head start. Actually, we badly wanted to get it out this year, and Gus has so much experience that he didn’t need an extended postproduction. I’ve never been good at handicapping this stuff. I just know I’m proud of it and we’ll see what happens. It’s hard to make a dent in the public consciousness with all of the behemoths that are coming out. John and I have considered telling people that we actually have Hobbits, and that at the end, Osama bin Laden gets shot in the face. Unfortunately, neither of those things happened in Promised Land, but it has some other merits, I hope.

DEADLINE: Matt, you outed the retirement plans of Steven Soderbergh and just wrapped his last film, Behind The Candelabra. The three of us could sit here and name 100 directors who should retire before Soderbergh. How much have you tried to talk him out of it?

DAMON: Believe me, it’s an ongoing conversation, but after a few years to absorb this, I am at peace with his decision. He is a real artist, he’s got a lot to give and I just hope he finds something that feels right at this stage of his life. My real hope is he misses us and comes back.

DEADLINE: He has done great work since your declaration made the retirement plans public. Maybe he’ll pull a Brett Favre, the quarterback who kept un-retiring.

DAMON: I want him to pull a Favre so bad, dude. I hope Steven Soderbergh becomes the Brett Favre of moviemaking.

DEADLINE: I’m out of questions, but since we are on a football track and you guys are fans, what say we reminisce about the last two Super Bowls between my Giants and your Patriots?

DAMON: Oh, please don’t. We’re hanging up on you now. Okay. The first one, David Tyree, greatest catch ever. Second one, Mario Manningham, second greatest catch ever. Two miracles. Good for you. But you were one Gronkowski sprained ankle away from an ass whuppin’ last time.

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Last time Matt Damon, star of the original ‘Bourne’ trilogy, was out doing press, he said he hadn’t seen “The Bourne Legacy,” this past summer’s extensive reboot of the franchise that placed Jeremy Renner at the center of the action. The film upped the franchise’s science-factual underpinnings by having Renner’s character (part of the next generation of government-sanctioned killers) controlled by a series of drugs that would boost his reflexes and intelligence. When we spoke with Damon about the sequel/prequel yesterday, during the actor’s press rounds for the upcoming “Promised Land,” he did confirm that he’s seen the movie but said that it might make it harder for him to re-enter the franchise.

“I did see it…” Damon said, trailing off. When we asked him what he thought of the movie, he said: “I think it’s going to make it harder for us to make another one. I’m just trying to figure out like… Because they used our characters, anything that happens in that world, that’s the ‘Bourne’ world now. So the pill popping and all that stuff happens.” When we suggested that Damon’s Bourne character was actually from a different era of the project, he conceded a little bit. “Right, I’m from a different program,” Damon said.

When we asked if he would do one with Renner, he sounded even more skeptical. “I don’t know what that story would be,” Damon said. “I love Jeremy and I’m a huge fan of him and I know him personally and love him outside of work, too. But I just don’t know what that story would be. I could never see Bourne teaming up with anyone. And all he said was – he wanted out, he wanted out, he wanted out. So how do you get that character going again?”

Damon said that this was a problem that he had faced before, back when he and Paul Greengrass (who directed “The Bourne Supremacy” and “The Bourne Ultimatum” and re-teamed with Damon for “Green Zone”) were trying to hammer out plans for the fourth film in the franchise. “Literally, we couldn’t figure out how to do it three years ago,” Damon said. He then broke down why, exactly, a ‘Bourne’ movie came out this year anyway. “The studio had a deal with the Ludlum estate and they had to get a ‘Bourne’ movie out. So they said to us, ‘Why don’t you guys do one?’ And we said, ‘We don’t know what to do!’ So once they realized we weren’t going to solve that problem, they went a totally different way.”

We’ll have more from our interview with Damon as “Promised Land” release date approaches at the end of the month.

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At the New York premiere of his new film, the activist screenwriter/actor explained the intricate politics that drive the story he co-wrote with John Krasinski.

Even as camera flashes lit up Broadway and taxis shot uptown, Matt Damon’s mind was focused on the small, rural towns that dot the American landscape.

His new film, Promised Land, debuted Tuesday night on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, providing a smooth, celebratory push for a project that has already had a stormy path to the big screen, thanks to the politics of environmentalism and corporate influence.

Damon, who co-wrote the Gus Van Sant-directed film with co-star John Krasinski, stars as a hotshot salesman for a natural gas procurement company; his job is to get residents in down-on-their-luck rural towns to sign away the rights to drill deep into the shale deposits located underneath their land. It’s a controversial practice called fracking, which many scientists believe pollutes local water supplies with various chemicals, killing farmland and endangering the citizenry. Damon’s character, Steve Butler, argues that the sometimes-rich contracts are a godsend for the fading heartland, but is frustrated when a small Pennsylvania community decides to vote on whether to allow Global’s drills into its town. He also is surprised when he learns of some inconvenient truths about the process.

The natural gas industry and conservative organizations have already attacked the film as a liberal polemic (Focus Features CEO James Schamus jokingly thanked the Heritage Foundation in his introduction Tuesday), and while the movie does explain the downside to fracking, Damon’s main concern was using the issue as a greater statement about who controls American democracy.

“One thing [natural gas companies] are very worried about is decisions being made at the local level,” Damon told The Hollywood Reporter at the premiere. “They really would rather have decisions being made at the state level. And their argument is that it’s far more efficient for them to understand what the regulations are for an entire state, rather than try to argue town-to-town about how to do things and have different zoning laws.

“Okay, that’s an understandable argument,” he continued, “but the flip side of it for these local communities is like, are we going to let somebody legislate from the other side of the state what can and can’t be done in our actual backyards? So you can see each side there and we’ll see what happens. But this definitely takes the view that we should be in charge of what happens in our communities.”

In that sense, the outcome of the deliberation — which takes twists and unexpected turns — is not the film’s main concern. “The democracy has been hijacked,” Damon explained, and “it’s not about how they vote, it’s about them taking the vote back.”

One of the many big-name New Yorkers in attendance was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the lawyer and environmental activist, and he was far less circumspect on the issue of drilling for natural gas.

“I think that fracking ultimately is going to be a big mistake in our country,” he explained to THR. “It has a promise, which is that it will help make us energy independent, but we have much cheaper ways, more efficient ways, more patriotic ways and more wholesome and safe ways to do that. I think one of the things that the producers of this film wanted to show was the subtle ways that fracking doesn’t just poison water supplies but it poisons human communities, it poisons human relationships. It’s not a good thing for our country.”

One of the movie’s more subtle displays of corporate power comes when Steve and his co-worker Sue (Frances McDormand) shop for flannels and other regional-appropriate clothing at a local store. In order to convince the residents they have their best interests in mind, they must look like them — even if they’re just playing a part.

“Well we talked with landmen who do this, and a lot of them said ‘Look, the car you drive up in matters. You drive up in a foreign car in some of these places and they’re not really going to want to talk to you,’” the star recalled. “I talked to one guy who said he always puts on a John Deere hat before he goes out. It’s just something these guys do; they’re salesmen and they’re trying to make a sale and they want the people to identify with them as much as possible. So they have little tricks that they do.”

Whether or not the film changes any minds, it’s determined to at least open some eyes.

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DEADLINE EXCLUSIVE: Matt Damon is negotiating to join The Monuments Men, the period drama that George Clooney will direct in January in Europe as a co-production between Sony Pictures and 20th Century Fox. Damon joins what continues to be shaping up as an amazing cast. Besides Damon and Clooney, the film will star Skyfall‘s Daniel Craig, Bill Murray, Cate Blanchett, The Artist’s Jean Dujardin, Argo‘s John Goodman, Hugh Bonneville and Bob Balaban. Clooney and Damon did the Ocean’s Eleven movies together and Syriana.

The drama, which was scripted by Clooney and partner Grant Heslov, confronts the final chapter of Germany’s rule, which came down to the absolute destruction of everything that makes a culture keep its standing, including the lives that are lost and the sacrifices that are made. All of this is in danger of being lost forever as Hitler and the Nazis try to cover the tracks of a murderous regime. A crew of art historians and museum curators unite to recover renown works of art that were stolen by Nazis before they are destroyed.

Heslov is producing through their Smokehouse banner. Alexandre Desplat is doing the score, and the crew is the same as from the Ben Affleck-directed Argo, which Clooney and Heslov produced and Desplat scored. Damon will next be seen in the Oscar-bait Gus Van Sant-directed Promised Land, which Damon and co-star John Krasinski wrote together and which Focus Features releases wide January 4 after an Oscar-qualifying run later this year. Damon is repped by WME.

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Matt Damon knows the power of a good suit! And that’s what he told the audience when he accepted a Special Career Tribute honor at the 22nd annual Gotham Independent Film Awards presented by the Independent Film Project in New York City last night. “I was here 15 years ago at the Gotham Awards and I remember that because it was right before Good Will Hunting came out and it was the first time my life became surreal because Calvin Klein gave me a suit for free,” he said during his acceptance speech. “I realized I was putting it on, and I added up all the clothes I had ever owned in my life, they wouldn’t be worth as much as the suit I as putting on. I feel very privileged to do what I do. I have never taken it for granted and I never will.” Fast forward 15 years, he can still get as many CK suits as he wants—and picked another one for last night’s event, a symbolic decision (even though the label sponsored the ceremony). “I was putting it on, and I saw that it was Calvin Klein, another free suit, again, that surreal part of my life,” he told InStyle.com of wearing the slate gray style when we caught up with him backstage after his speech. “My wife would tell you that I haven’t transformed at all fashion-wise,” he added. “There are these things where they give you a suit, and so it looks like you know what the hell you are doing!”

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The new movie “Promised Land,” which Matt Damon co-wrote and co-produced, came in under budget and ahead of schedule because it had a script, the actor and Oscar-winning screenwriter said Tuesday night in New York. The talk was distributed on the Internet through Livestream.

Damon, who discussed the film along with co-star and co-producer John Krasinski of the NBC sitcom “The Office” and director Gus Van Sant, contrasted that to his last Jason Bourne movie, which he said they were writing day to day while they were shooting it. “It took years off our lives. It was so much pressure because you’re so aware of how much money … once you get on set, the money is just burning.”

He added, “(Director) Paul Greengrass and I would say like we’re in the wrong country. … It was 4 in the morning and we’re on a street and I’m going, Is there anything else we can shoot in Spain?”

Damon said watching “The Bourne Legacy,” the fourth movie in the series based on Robert Ludlum’s novels and the only one in\which he did not appear, was “very odd.” “It had a lot of same bells and whistles of the Bourne series but I didn’t know anything about it.”
That movie made it less likely that Damon will appear in another movie about the assassin with amnesia though “I don’t think it makes it impossible,” he said.

Damon said “Promised Land,” which opens in New York on Dec. 28 and nationwide Jan. 4, was made for slightly less than $18 million. It deals with the controversial procedure of capturing natural gas called fracking.

Damon and Frances McDormand play energy company employees who try to buy drilling rights from the residents of a rural town in western Pennsylvania, but their characters are not meant to be villains, the speakers said.

“All the characters should feel like people you know,” said Damon, who noted that Van Sant decided that none of the actors would wear makeup.

Damon had planned to make his directing debut with the movie but backed out about a year ago because of the workload.

“It was rough, but I knew that it was the right thing for the movie and I knew it was the right thing for my life,” he said.

The morning after he told Krasinski that he couldn’t direct “Promised Land,” Damon emailed the script to Van Sant, who agreed to direct it a few hours later, after he read the script. “I told John as the producer, the best thing I did on the movie was fire myself as the director.”

Damon and Van Sant previously worked together on “Good Will Hunting,” for which Damon and actor Ben Affleck won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 1997 and on “Gerry,” co-starring Casey Affleck, in 2002.

Novelist and screenwriter Dave Eggers was involved in writing “Promised Land” early in its development and is credited with the story.

Damon said McDormand joined the cast after she read an early draft and writing went fast because with him and Krasinski, they knew three of the actors they were writing for.

Krasinski, who suggested the idea for the movie to Damon, said, “I had always wanted to write a movie about American identity.”

He noted that his father grew up in steel mill town outside Pittsburgh and said he was fascinated by how his father had described life there.

“I just wanted to bring it back to a conversation about people,” he said. “This idea of natural gas was an incredible backdrop. There’s huge potential gain and huge potential loss.”

Damon said they lost funding for the movie when he dropped out as director but later obtained backing from Focus Features and Participant Media. Participant has a deal with Image Nation, the production arm of Abu Dhabi Media, but Damon said he and Krasinski did not know of its involvement until they saw its logo on the rough cut.

Krasinski said he does not care what audiences think about the process of fracking. “Honestly, the only reaction I’ve ever wanted from this movie is to start a conversation. … I think that as a country, we just need to start taking a little more responsibility for where we’re headed together, rather than where we’re headed individually.”

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As we mentioned in our Gotham Awards coverage, this is the week when Focus Features is stepping up their game to get word out on Matt Damon and John Krasinski’s Promised Land, directed by Gus Van Sant. Earlier today, ComingSoon.net was one of a couple dozen journalists invited to a special luncheon at midtown New York’s prestigious Aquavit restaurant, specializing in Swedish cuisine and famous for kicking off the career of superstar chef Marcus Samuelsson. Damon, Krasinski and Van Sant were all on hand to field questions and talk about their movie in between bites.

Our positive review of the movie is still under embargo, but the film has Matt Damon playing the salesman for a natural gas company who comes to a small town along with a co-worker, played by Frances McDormand, with the intention of leasing land from the local farmers where they can extract natural gas. Along comes an activist named Dustin, played by Krasinski, who throws a monkey wrench in their progress at convincing the locals to sign contracts, and that’s where the film gets interesting.

Damon met Krasinski when he was working with his future wife Emily Blunt on The Adjustment Bureau in New York and they began working on the script together two years ago after author Dave Eggers helped Krasinski develop the story but then had to go off and write his own book.

The film was shot earlier this year outside of Pittsburgh in a small town much like the one in the film and during his time at our table, Krasinski talked to us about how his father’s own small town experiences inspired him to write the screenplay and how freaked out he got when his father visited the set and started pointing out places where they spent time in his youth.

Krasinski also told us an amazing story about his early years as an actor in New York and how he was almost ready to give up when he traveled to Los Angeles and two weeks later booked the pilot of “The Office.” The rest as they say is history.

All three mentioned how the films of Frank Capra and Elia Kazan were hugely influential on the writing process and the feel of the film, and they’re trying hard not to focus too much on the political side of the story and how “fracking” for natural gas has become a huge political and environmental issue in recent years.

When Matt Damon came over to our table, we spoke with him about the process of writing Promised Land with Krasinski and how that differed from writing Good Will Hunting with Ben Affleck over 15 years ago while they were both struggling actors. He told us how neither of them had any formal education on how to write a screenplay.

Damon complimented Krasinski on the speed at which his brain worked in terms of trying to figure out the mechanics of the screenplay and we heard some amazing stories from both of them about their co-stars, Frances McDormand and Scoot McNairy.

Krasinski was really impressed by what McDormand brought to her role, seemingly without even trying, although she did tell them at the very beginning of the project that she wouldn’t do any press. It’s a shame since it might be her best performance since the Coens’ Fargo, for which she won her Oscar.

McNairy’s audition so impressed the three of them that they changed one of the characters in order to give him a speech. The speech McNairy gives in the film was originally going to be performed by an older actor whose son went to war in Afghanistan, but after seeing his audition, they changed the role for McNairy. Apparently, McNairy did a reading on camera for Van Sant and after it was over, he started talking about his wife and her own struggles with the subject of the movie. Van Sant started rolling tape again to capture the emotion in McNairy’s story, and the part was changed for him. McNairy is having a bit of a moment, appearing not only in this movie but also Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly, opening this weekend, and Ben Affleck’s Argo.

Krasinski also told us how he was crushed when right before last Christmas, Damon decided not to direct the film himself after they had all the pieces in places to go into production, but having to go right into pre-production in January would have kept Damon away from his family for too long.

Director Gus Van Sant filled in the rest of the story, telling us how he came on board in the project’s hour of need when Matt texted him asking if he would read the script and he sent it right over in PDF form before boarding a plane, and Van Sant decided to do it. Van Sant talked about some of his sound design and production decisions and how his style has changed from ten years ago when he made Elephant.

Since this was a fairly informal luncheon, we also talked about more esoteric New Yorker topics like the new Barclay Center in Brooklyn (thumbs up from Matt!), living on the Upper East Side (Krasinski and a couple other journalists, not us) and such. Even though both actors are from Boston, they both try to spend as much time in the city as possible.

Hopefully we’ll have more formal interviews with actual quotes from the trio sometime leading up to Promised Land’s release in New York and L.A. on December 28 and wide release on January 4, 2013.

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Here’s the article from BBC:

Actors Matt Damon and Marion Cotillard have received career tributes at the 22nd annual Gotham Awards in New York.

The Fighter director David O Russell was also honoured at the event, the first in the yearly film awards season.

Wes Anderson’s comedy Moonrise Kingdom was named best feature at the event, an annual ceremony held to recognise the year’s best independent films.

Britain’s Emily Blunt was recognised, along with her co-stars, in another indie comedy, Your Sister’s Sister.

The film, about a man who sleeps with his girlfriend’s sibling, beat Russell’s Oscar-tipped Silver Linings Playbook to the best ensemble performance award.

Another Oscar hopeful, the critically acclaimed Beasts of the Southern Wild, saw its director Benh Zeitlin receive the breakthrough director prize.

Zeitlin also received the inaugural Bingham Ray Award, named in honour of the former United Artists president and co-founder of October Films who died in January.

Damon, who received his award from Blunt’s actor husband John Krasinski, said it felt “really weird” to be honoured and joked that “people are trying to get rid of me”.

Fellow Oscar winner Cotillard said she felt “very welcomed” and “very happy” as she arrived at the event, held on Monday at the Cipriani restaurant on Wall Street.

The Gotham Awards are held annually by the Independent Feature Project, a not-for-profit organisation that supports independent film-making.

Last year’s event saw Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life and Christopher Plummer film Beginners share the top prize for best feature.

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By Michael Douglas

In “Promised Land,” you get a chance to see Matt’s inherent likability. Some actors have that quality, some don’t. And that likability is necessary to play this kind of scam artist and still be as caring as you are for his trip.

His face is an open book from the first frame when he’s washing his face and he’s tormented and nervous about what’s to come. He handles it without pushing. And he ends the picure with a final speech before the town, telling them the entire truth and what’s he’s been involved with. It’s emotional and powerful without being pushed.

In some ways, Matt is like John Wayne, who had that inherent feeling of trust. Which you also get from Matt. There’s a direct truthfulness there that a lot of actors don’t have. They have to get tricky. Matt has this inherent shit detector. He’s a very good listener, but he also has the ability to handle lengthy dialogue, which is becoming a relatively lost art in film.

He produced this picture and wrote it, and from my own experience with doing dual roles, it never gets in the way for him. Matt has enough knowledge as a writer and producer to surround himself with the best people possible. He’s not threatened by talent. He enjoys it.

Promised Land opens on: December 28, 2012, on a limited release and wide release on January 4, 2013.

Here’s the trailer:

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The eight-part series, produced by James Cameron and Jerry Weintraub, will show the human side of climate change.

Matt Damon is committed to participating in a eight-part documentary series for Showtime from James Cameron and Jerry Weintraub, The Hollywood Reporter confirms.

Weintraub and Showtime declined to comment and Cameron did not return a call. However, sources say there is a deal with the pay TV service, but it is in the early stages, with financing and delivery date still to be determined.

The documentary, which is meant to show the human element of climate change, will be produced by David Gelber and Joel Bach, both of whom have worked at the CBS magazine show 60 Minutes. It is a timely subject in the wake of hurricane Sandy.

In addition to being a movie star and an Oscar winning screenwriter, Damon is also an active environmentalist and philanthropist. He is one of the founders of the Not On Our Watch Project, along with George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Don Cheadle, David Pressman and Weintraub. The group brings global attention and resources to prevent mass atrocities.

Damon has a range of charitable efforts. He’s a founder of what is now Water.org, a charitable group that works to provide clean water in Africa, and is a supporter of the One Campaign, aimed at fighting AIDS and poverty in the third world. He is also an ambassador for OneXOne, a non-profit that works to improve the lives of children. He’s been a spokesperson for Feeding America, a hunger relief organization. Additionally, he hosted and narrated the PBS Special Journey to Planet Earth, about the work of Lester Brown and other thoughtful environmentalists.

Damon’s upcoming movies include HBO’s Behind the Candelabra, which stars Michael Douglas as Liberace; and Promised Land, directed by Gus Van Sant, which he co-wrote with John Krasinski, Once again dealing with a controversial environmental subject, Promised Land, is about using “fracking” to produce oil. It is expected to get a limited release in late December.

Weintraub is a well-known Hollywood producer whose credits include Nashville, Diner and the Ocean’s 11 movies. He is also a philanthropist and in 2010, published a memoir written with Rich Cohen, When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead: Useful Stories from a Persuasive Man.It was also the basis of a 2011 HBO documentary, His Way.

When Avatar became a hit in 2009, Cameron came under fire from some on the right who claimed the movie was actually about the environment. The movie tells the story of an indigenous tribe whose land is taken by a big company that wants to exploit the resources. For the film’s home video release, Cameron partnered with Twentieth Century Fox, the environmental group Earth Day Network and others to promote the movie’s DVD release by planting a million trees.

Cameron has also done documentaries in the past that have explored the environmental impact of climate change in the oceans, and has lobbied governments including Canada to take the issue of climate change seriously.

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Matt Damon, David O. Russell and Jeff Skoll have been chosen by the Independent Filmmaker Project to receive career tributes at the 2012 Gotham Independent Film Awards on November 26.
“It is with pride and great pleasure that we give tribute to these three luminaries, each of whom plays an amazing role in expanding the language of film, breaking boundaries along the way,” said IFP executive director Joana Vicente. “Each has a unique voice and clearly defined vision of cinema for today’s generation, bringing perspective and relevance to the film world today.”

The honors will be presented along with seven competitive awards at the organization’s 22nd annual event, which will take place at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City.

Damon, Russell and Skoll, the philanthropist and social entrepreneur who founded Participant Media, were chosen because of their independent film roots and support for independent visions. Damon has the socially conscious drama “Promised Land,” which was produced by Participant, hitting theaters in January through Focus Features, while Russell’s latest, “Silver Linings Playbook,” opens in November through the Weinstein Co.

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