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The Matt Damon-starring movie “Hereafter” was pulled from theaters in Japan earlier this week, and Warner Bros. is using the film’s Tuesday release on DVD and Blu-ray as a way to raise money for relief efforts.

According to the L.A. Times, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment is donating an unspecified percentage of DVD and Blu-ray sales to the Japanese Red Cross Society following the devastating earthquake and tsunami that hit the nation last Friday. Those familiar with the matter tell the Times that the donation will be in the ballpark of $1 million.

The Clint Eastwood-directed film focuses on grief and the afterlife, but it does contain a scene depicting a tsunami wreaking havoc on a coastal town. It’s been playing in Japan since February. A Warner Bros. rep explained to CNN, “In deference to the tragic unfolding events in Japan, we have pulled ‘Hereafter’ from the theaters.”

The Warner Bros. rep added that the opening of Anthony Hopkins’ horror thriller “The Rite,” which was originally scheduled to bow this weekend in Japan, has been postponed.

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Hollywood heavy-hitter Matt Damon has his head on straight, as CARMEL MELOUNEY discovers

MATT Damon is renowned as the consummate Hollywood professional, so it feels a little disconcerting to walk into a hotel room and be ignored by the man crowned Sexiest Man Alive in 2007.

It’s especially awkward because only two people are in the room.

In New York to discuss his new film, Hereafter, Damon is anxiously awaiting news from his wife Luciana, who is about to give birth to her fourth baby and the couple’s third child together.

The Oscar-winning actor met his Argentine wife while she was bartending in Miami in 2003.

Damon’s dedication to his family is evident as he frantically texts on a Blackberry after taking a seat, and apologises for his lack of attention.

“OK, I’m a terrible multi-tasker,” he says as he drops his Blackberry on the floor. While other actors may have appeared rude as they juggled a Blackberry and a waiting journalist, Damon is unfailingly polite about it and clearly uncomfortable with having to do so.

Damon could easily pass for 25 were it not for the flecks of grey hair on the sides of his head.

“I’m rapidly going grey – I tell my girls, ‘This side here is all because of you, and this side here is all you’,” he chuckles while discussing his 40th birthday last October.

“We had my family and a bunch of my friends come to town and we rented the back room at a bowling alley and had a big party. Forty, I don’t know, it feels a lot like 39,” he says.

Damon has almost 50 films under his belt and received critical acclaim for his dramatic roles in the Ocean’s trilogy and the Bourne films.

He is said to earn about $16 million a film and Forbes magazine recently listed him as the most bankable star, based on his films making an average of $29 for every dollar he earned.

Not bad considering Damon says he and friend Ben Affleck created careers “out of thin air,” referring to their breakthrough hit Good Will Hunting in 1997.

Damon is flying high, on our screens as the extravagantly moustached Texas Ranger LaBoeuf in the commercially successful Coen brothers remake of True Grit.

He has three more films due in the next month, too: Clint Eastwood’s drama Hereafter; a narration job for the global financial crisis documentary Inside Job; and a starring role opposite Emily Blunt in the sci-fi thriller The Adjustment Bureau.

Asked about his success, Damon reveals his humble nature by discussing advice given to him by other successful actors.

“I remember Tom Hanks saying to me on Saving Private Ryan, we were all sitting in a foxhole and he was saying to all of us young actors, ‘I don’t care if it’s your milkman, your mailman, anybody is one movie away from being the biggest movie star in the world, anybody,’ and he’s totally right,” Damon says.

“I just remember that always stuck with me, because he was somebody who stuck around and I asked him about that and he said ‘Look, they weren’t great movies – I was the guy who wasn’t on the A-list but I was dependable and if they couldn’t get any of the others, they’d go, well, what about that Tom Hanks guy, he’s a pro, he always comes in, he always does a good job’.

“That’s the other way to do it if you’re not going to write your own thing,” says Damon.

“That’s the only advice I can give because I hadn’t figured out another way to break into the business.”

In his latest film, Hereafter, Damon plays a working-class psychic uneasy with his supernatural ability and left socially isolated because of it. With a plot that encompasses three separate characters in three countries who are all affected by death, the film, directed by Clint Eastwood, has received mixed reviews in the US.

“Clint calls it his European movie because it has subtitles and we all know Americans can’t read, right?” Damon says.

He accepted the role because of his faith in Eastwood, with whom he worked on Invictus. Damon describes Eastwood as a master storyteller with a deep personal connection to all of the movies he chooses to do.

“The way he’s described it to me, and I like his description, he says, ‘I’m a tour guide, and you’re on my tour and if you don’t like it you’re welcome to get off and I’ll invite you on the next one’.”

Damon doesn’t even flinch when reminded that one prominent American critic has just labelled the role his “first boring performance”.

“I take full responsibility for the performance,” he says. “He just has to hop off the bus on this one because it’s not a ride he’s interested in taking.

“It’s why you have to make movies that are personal to you, because there is always going to be somebody out there who doesn’t appreciate it.”

Damon says he would love to join Affleck in directing films and hopes the pair can be reunited again on another project of their own.

“Yeah, I’d love to work with him again – if I can establish myself as a director that will give us a whole bunch of different ways we can work together; we can do it as actors, writers, directors, one directing the other acting, so I’m hoping to do that eventually,” he says.

They are still close, despite living at opposite ends of the country.

Damon would also like to take on a comedy role in film after enjoying his cameos on the TV series 30 Rock and his collaborations with US comedians Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman.

“But there aren’t a lot of great comedic scripts,” he says.

“The ones that come out that I think are fantastic – whether it’s The Hangover or Will Farrell or Ben Stiller’s stuff – those normally don’t come my way.

“Those guys are creating their own stuff. I’d love to do a good comedy; it’s hard. I’d love to get offered a job on one of these things, but that seems to be a much more closed group than some of the others.”

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The writer of Frost/Nixon, The Queen and The Last King of Scotland reveals how he came to work with Clint Eastwood and Matt Damon on supernatural drama Hereafter.

On the day I am due to interview the British screenwriter Peter Morgan, the eyes of the world are turned to Zurich to find out which countries will be selected by Fifa to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.

As we all now know, England’s bid to host the former tournament was doomed to failure – a situation one might imagine would appeal to this award-winning author.

Morgan, after all, is a man who – in such films as The Deal, The Queen, Frost/Nixon and The Last King of Scotland – has shown an affinity for turning the likes of Tony Blair, David Frost, Richard Nixon and Idi Amin into compelling protagonists.

He is no stranger to the beautiful game either, having brought football manager Brian Clough back to life in 2009 film The Damned United.

Perhaps surprisingly, though, the challenge of dramatising this national humiliation is not one the 47-year-old Oscar nominee is prepared to tackle.

“There are too many real-life figures there in one room,” he laughs. “David Beckham talking to Prince William is enough to turn me pale.

“That’s not dialogue I could write, though I would love to eavesdrop.”

In any case, Morgan is keen to show he has more to offer than reality-inspired dramas about the great and good.

‘Preposterous’

“I understand why someone would think that,” he tells the BBC News website. “But to always be writing historical or fact-based drama would drive me nuts.”

In this respect new release Hereafter represents something of a departure, focusing as it does on three people who find themselves contemplating mortality and the possibility of something beyond it.

Directed by Clint Eastwood, the film stars Matt Damon as a reluctant psychic whose life intersects with those of a French tsunami survivor and a London schoolboy mourning his late twin brother.

Morgan says “nothing could have been further” from his mind than the notion that the veteran director of Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby might champion his speculative script.

“The idea this would end up with Clint Eastwood and Matt Damon was just preposterous,” he admits, saluting the former for his “modesty, honesty and integrity”.

Nor did he expect the 80-year-old film-maker would choose to make the script as written, without requesting revisions or embellishments as per the Hollywood norm.

“I kept saying, ‘Please can we change a few words? Can’t we work on it a bit?’ And he said, ‘No – I want to shoot it just as it is.’”
‘Random and sudden’

The characters played by Damon, Belgian actress Cecile de France and British twins George and Frankie McLaren may be fictional constructs.

Yet the world they live in is very real, rocked as it is by natural disasters, fatal accidents and multiple terrorist bomb blasts on the London Underground.

The latter plot point might strike some as insensitive, particularly given Hereafter’s UK release coincides with the ongoing inquest into the deaths of the 52 people killed in the 7/7 bombings of 2005.

Yet Morgan says his intention was not to “exploit” those events, but to reflect a world in which “the threat of death is ever present”.

“We are living at a time where attacks are random and sudden and have no boundaries and explanation,” he says.

“I wanted to write something that meant I could come to grips with the fact death was something I had to live with on a daily basis.”

Morgan’s current project is a biopic of the late Queen singer Freddie Mercury, a script he was asked to write by the film’s putative star Sacha Baron Cohen.

The father of four admits “it took a couple of years to find a way into the story,” which will focus on the period leading up to Mercury’s seminal contribution to the 1985 Live Aid concert.

“I’m just mixing it up I suppose,” he says of a successful career that has taken him from Queen Elizabeth II to a different kind of Queen altogether.

And with that he is gone – just as Fifa president Sepp Blatter begins to open a rather significant envelope.

Hereafter is out in the UK on 28 January.

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