Matt Damon: Transfer Heat

How does Matt Damon sustain his string of successes? With a lot of help from friends like new costar Emily Blunt. (And just maybe a little talent of his own.)

On a Wednesday morning, Matt Damon and his wife, Luciana, delivered their fourth child, a baby girl. The following Monday, he’s talking to me.

But not about birthday methods. He doesn’t consider his family to be interview fodder—would yours be? So we talk about something any farther can identify with: the urgent desire to perform well on the job.

And as we talk, he shows an unusual trait for a walking franchise: reflexive, impenetrable humility.

“It’s always hard to talk about yourself, but…” He stops. Redirects. “There are actors who are just movie stars, you know? They just are. You can’t take your eyes off them when they’re on the screen. I know what that thing is, and I see it in some of my friends, but that’s just not who I am. My movies being really good or watchable always depends on everybody being really good, not just me. I’m particularly sensitive about making sure we secure the best possible people in each role because I am not somebody who can overcome if we don’t.”
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Hollywood brings out Matt Damon’s true grit

Judging from Matt Damon’s body of work, one would think that Hollywood has definitely been kind to him. In fact, with his latest movie, it seems Damon’s lucky streak still holds. “True Grit,” his upcoming starrer directed by the Coen (Joel and Ethan) Brothers, is creating quite a buzz in the Oscars; but more so, it has been an opportunity for Damon to finally suck it up to the two directors he’s been dying to work with.

An adaptation of Charles Portis’ novel with the same title instead of a remake of the 1969 film, expectations are high considering the original movie was a John Wayne classic for which he won his only Oscar. “It’s hard to find material that feels like it’s not just a retread of something,” Damon says. “But this is a western that deserved to be made. I think Clint (Eastwood) did it to great effect 15 years ago but I read everything and I hadn’t come across a script that was this good, with directors of this caliber and a role like this. It was a very easy decision for me.”

The fact is, even Damon admits that choosing movie roles hadn’t been too hard for him since he did the Bourne series. “Suddenly my choices became really easy –like Paul Greengrass would call or Martin Scorsese. It’s ridiculous! Like, someone would ask me ‘why did you do this movie?’ Well, that’s easy, if Martin Scorsese asks me to do a movie I’m there. It’s not even a choice. If the Coen Brothers ask you to work with Jeff Bridges on ‘True Grit,’ that’s easy. I was in before I knew what the movie was. And then I looked at it and the script is great.”
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Matt Damon’s playing cowboys

IT’S every little boy’s dream to be in a western, but for Matt Damon, True Grit had certain magic ingredients.

It was being directed by the Coen brothers, starred the double-punch talent of Jeff Bridges and Josh Brolin, and was based on a classic 1968 novel by Charles Portis.

The last time True Grit was worked into a film, it won its star, John Wayne, an Oscar, for his portrayal as US Marshal Rueben “Rooster” Cogburn.

So for Damon, who plays interfering Texas Ranger LaBoeuf, it was simply a case of “where do I sign?”

“This project, it’s like a dream,” says Damon.

“I get a phone call. The first phone call is, like, `The Coen brothers are considering you for a role in their next movie.’

“That’s really exciting. Then I find out that they’re doing True Grit.

“I go talk to them and they give me the book. I had never read the book and the book is fantastic. It really is. It really is a great piece of American literature that I totally missed and then I read their adaptation – I write scripts – and it’s really great. It’s a really great adaptation.”

This time Bridges takes on the role of Cogburn, the ageing, drunken, one-eyed marshal, hired by 14-year-old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) to avenge her father’s death.

It was the role that won Wayne a long-awaited Oscar in 1969. But the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, who built their reputation on films such as Fargo, O Brother, Where Art Thou and No Country for Old Men, didn’t consider that they were doing a remake. They were going back to the book and by the book.

Their story focuses on Mattie’s tale, with newcomer Steinfeld stealing many scenes and Elizabeth Marvel providing the voice of her adult narrator.

“What they did, which was so smart, was that they used all this dialogue that Portis had written in the book,” says Damon.

“Charles Portis is still alive. He’s down in Arkansas. He’s almost 80 years old and he just had this incredible ear for dialogue.”

The Cohen brothers, who meticulously plan each scene in advance, sent Damon a series of storyboards to look through.

“You get this chunk, this big, thick book and you can literally just look at the movie, how it’s going to be shot.

“They have such a mastery of the whole process that there’s none of the anxiety or stress. I was just like, `Wow. What a great experience’.”

A little surprisingly, Damon has still not seen John Wayne’s version. He owns the movie on DVD, he promises, but it still remains in its plastic shrink wrap.

The busy actor, who has also been working on Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter, in which Damon plays a factory worker who can communicate with the dead, and thriller-romance flick The Adjustment Bureau opposite Emily Blunt, simply hasn’t had a chance to watch it.

“I kept saying that I had to see it because I knew I was going to be asked (about it), but I just haven’t had time. I asked (the Cohen brothers) about that, I said, `Should I see the movie?’ And they said, `Well, no we’re not really doing a remake. We’re going to the original source material and we’re doing the book. So the book is what we really need you to focus on’. ”

The interesting thing about True Grit essentially a tale about tough grown men is a little girl.

Steinfeld, only 13 at the time of filming, impressed her directors and co-stars in her portrayal of Mattie.

Against the advice of her elders, self-assured Mattie hires a reluctant choice of marshal Cogburn to hunt down her father’s killer Chaney, played by Brolin.

Damon’s character, a ranger who is on the hunt for the same man for a different crime, is more headache than hero. It’s Mattie who displays the “true grit” of the film’s title.

“I think the central character, the true grit of Mattie, the girl who’s on the cusp of womanhood,” he says.

“It’s about the loss of her innocence, but this incredible spirit of this girl and then these really colourful characters that come around to flesh out the story.”

Damon knows all about raising girls. He and his Argentine-born wife Luciana Bozan Barroso have four of them. Alexia, 12, is her daughter from a previous marriage, then there’s Isabella, 4, Gia, 2, and Stella, who was born in October last year.

An experienced dad, Damon was impressed with Steinfield’s maturity when he first met her and how she would take direction from the Coen brothers in the same way as he or Bridges would.

“I met her in New Mexico to rehearse and I just remembered being more struck by how poised she was, shockingly. I mean, I have a 12-year-old, but to see a 13-year-old (like that), it was alarming.”

True Grit is Steinfeld’s first movie and she was chosen from a pool of 15,000 to take on the role.

One of the most challenging scenes to shoot was where the weak-willed LaBoef loses it and takes to spanking her.

“Well, I’ve had a lot of practice,” father Damon laughs.

“They put a board over her and I’m hitting this board. So she couldn’t even feel it. She was laughing, saying, `I can’t even feel you hitting me’. But it had to be brutal enough that Jeff would pull his gun out and point it at me. So that was it.”

In an age in which high technology and fantastic tales of superheroes and futuristic characters reign supreme, True Grit proves there is still a place for a classic, character-driven western story.

How does Damon approach that as an actor?

“What we’re doing is setting up a sequel where Transformers come in and that’s the big play here. That’s the big idea,” he jokes.

“We’re just using the first one to set that up and then we’re going to do like 14 of these things back to back.

“Every summer there’s going to be a new Transformers meets the True Grit cast. No, I think that sometimes you see these lurches in different directions, like suddenly it’s all 3D or suddenly it’s all superhero movies.

“There’s always a kind of correction and I think at the end of the day people love good stories.”

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