Matt Damon is arguably the finest actor working in Hollywood today. In-between The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, the 36-year-old actor has shot Syriana, The Departed, The Good Shepherd and a pair of Ocean’s movies. He scooped an Academy Award® for his 1997 screenplay Good Will Hunting, co-written with close friend Ben Affleck, and has given fine turns in The Talented Mr. Ripley, Dogma, The Legend of Bagger Vance and All The Pretty Horses. His filmography also features Courage Under Fire, Saving Private Ryan, The Rainmaker, Chasing Amy, Stuck On You, The Brothers Grimm and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.

Q. Doing these films, has your confidence in doing your own stunts grown?

Matt Damon: I’ve done everything that [stunt co-ordinator] Dan Bradley has ever asked me to do, because I know that would be fine and safe. None of these guys would ask me to do anything in which I could get hurt, otherwise they’d be out of a job! Going back to the first movie, Doug Liman and I had so many discussions about stunts, because we felt that audiences are so savvy now, they can tell when it’s a stuntman and when it’s you. So if I can do more of them than not, then it would give Doug a freedom to shoot in a certain way, so that it’d obviously be me doing it. Doug offered me the role, and no one had ever thought of casting me, even I hadn’t thought about it. I’d read the books and the guy was 45 years old, and it didn’t seem the kind of role you’d give me seven years ago. So to try and make me more believable in that role, we thought I should try and do as much as possible myself physically. If I put in all the extra work, and did all the fights, then the character becomes more believable, which is my basic job.

Q. Has there been a moment when you’re about to do a stunt and have thought ‘why am I doing this?’

MD: When I cleared the railing on the bridge in Berlin during the last movie. When I was falling, I thought to myself, ‘This is really stupid!’ I’d looked at the huge crane — in fact my cousin drives a crane — and I weigh like 185lbs, so I knew it could handle me, and I had the harness, and my mind was telling me that this was completely safe, safer than any amusement park ride.

Q. So you don’t ever feel as though you’ve taken a big risk?

MD: No, I’ve never really felt that doing stunts in these movies, but there is a little readjustment when you have a kid come along! But I don’t think that applies here. In fact, Dan Bradley is so good at his job that it informed this great story. There was a guy at a cocktail party who is a second unit director and who is a stunt co-ordinator and he made some comment that he didn’t like Dan Bradley. When asked why, he said, ‘Because he’s dangerous.’ And a friend of Dan’s who was there said, ‘Well give me an example of something that Dan has done which was dangerous.’ And this guy said, ‘He put Matt Damon in a real car impact and that’s wrong.’ So basically even though the guy was in the business, he didn’t realise that Dan had matted that shot — it was a green-screen shot and he didn’t realise. That’s how great Dan is.

Q. You do so much running and jumping, is there a trick to staying super fit?

MD: The key this time was choosing the jacket! I realised what little of a life I used to have, because I’d go home after shooting, eat a salad and then go to sleep, and then get up and do it all again. This time I had my kid, so I didn’t go to the gym once. I showed up in really good shape, but as it went on I got more and more out of shape, so the zipper on the jacket started getting pulled higher and higher to hide my extra pounds!

Q. So you did no training while shooting the film?

MD: I was probably running seven miles three or four times a week, which was the best I could bring myself to do, and then eating like a pig! And also not sleeping, because of my child. I remember Paul [Greengrass, the director] saying to me in the middle of the movie, ‘You look like shit!’ And I was, ‘Sorry, but I’ve been up all night with the baby.’ And Paul thought that was great, because he has five kids, and thought that it was perfect timing, because I was so drawn it helped with the look of the character.

Q. Have you benefited from shooting over such a long period, which has allowed you to mature and grow, like the character?

MD: I’m not sure. Those things happen incrementally and it’s like watching a child growing up. You don’t notice until you look back at a picture quite how much they’ve grown up, so I’m sure it is better that we spread them out over seven years, rather than shooting them in, say, three, but it’s tough for me to be objective about that.

Q. Did you agree to shoot the film without a script in place?

MD: Yeah, because my decision to do the movie was totally based on Paul. I agreed without the script, because when you have a director who is that good, you have a great chance of succeeding with a great movie. There are only a couple of directors I know who could have done this movie with the aggressive post-production schedule that Paul had. Soderbergh can work like that, but Paul had so little time to cut this film yet he’s so good at working under that pressure that I figured this was a gamble worth taking. There are a lot of great people involved — Frank Marshall, George Nolfi was on set every day writing, plus there was Chris Rouse doing the editing and Dan Bradley doing second unit and the stunts. So all these people feel a certain responsibility to the character, and to me, asking how we can improve each sequence. We’ve figured out what people like about the movies…

Q. Which is?

MD: People like watching the character think his way out of situations. They like it when he’s being chased and when he turns the tables. We have these rules that we’ve come up, like if he’s talking too much, that’s bad, and if he doesn’t have a clear objective in a scene, that’s terrible and totally aimless. So there has to be this urgency, and it has to feel propulsive. What Paul and Chris Rouse did so well in the edit is that the movie just takes off. It’s like you get grabbed and then the movie just shakes you for two hours and then lets you go. It’s a bit like being attacked by a shark! And that’s all by design — it’s what people come to these movies for and if it stops dead and starts soliloquising then we’re in deep shit!

Q. You shot in Madrid. Your wife must have liked that with Spanish being her first language…

MD: Oh yeah, totally. In fact after the charter plane had left and taken the crew to London, we stayed on for three extra days and had a blast. So we were very comfortable with that, and her brother lives in Spain, and he came down to see us, so we had a great time.

Q. How much of a family life can you have as a Hollywood star?

MD: Well what’s tough is the travelling and the schedules. We really don’t get it bad with the paparazzi, and we don’t get stalked in the way a lot of my friends’ do, so we’re afforded quite a lot of peace and quiet. But the travelling is hard. During shooting, when my daughter was 11 months old, and we were flying home from somewhere in Europe and I noticed that she had 11 stamps in her passport already. And you’ve got to remember that they don’t have stamps when you cross borders in Europe because they’re all part of the EU! We went everywhere together and that was a lot to ask of my family!

Q. How do you balance the action hero side with the sensitive side?

MD: I am sensitive and I am an action hero! No, seriously, you want the character to be in conflict. He’s got the impulse to do one thing, and he’s trying hard to break away from that to do the right thing. At one time he can beat up everybody in the room but then he’d feel real guilt about that. He’s a guy in conflict, a complicated character in a complicated world.

Q. Can you now handle yourself in a fight?

MD: Absolutely not. It’s choreographed stuff, so I’d be as useless in that situation as I always would have been!

Q. Doing these films, The Good Shepherd and Syriana, do you now have a special interest in the CIA?

MD: Well I do, but I’ve not chosen any of the roles because of that; I’ve just responded to the scripts. Doing The Bourne Supremacy and knowing that The Bourne Ultimatum was out there gave me the freedom to do what I thought were the three best scripts in-between: Syriana, The Departed and The Good Shepherd. And on the face of it, none of those movies looked like they were going to make much money. Marty Scorsese’s films usually don’t make huge money, even his masterpieces like Goodfellas and Raging Bull didn’t make huge sums. And Syriana was obviously a very dense, complicated story aimed at a niche audience, and The Good Shepherd was a cerebral, methodical, historical epic about the birth of the intelligence service and this dysfunctional family. It didn’t seem like what they call a ‘four-quadrant movie’! So knowing that I had The Bourne Ultimatum in the middle distance gave me the freedom to say yes immediately to all those movies, because I was responding creatively to them, rather than thinking about big box office.

Q. Do you think you may have a CIA file?

MD: No! Although I may have a FBI file! [Laughs.]

Q. There seems a lot of relevance to modern-day events in this film…

MD: Yeah, and each movie is a reflection of the year in which its made, so to end this movie with this iconic American character pointing a gun at someone and saying ‘You mislead me into a war. I wanted to do the right thing and you misled me,’ well that’s a real reflection of how I think a lot of people in America feel right now. So that’s very much a 2007 feeling and movie. And even with images of people water-boarding and wearing black hoods, and a scene where I shoot a guy to death and ask what he did, and I’m not given an answer, so this guy doesn’t have due process. He’s stripped of his constitutional protection and killed, and these are all things that speak of where we are as a country. Also, the idea that all these characters in the intelligent service are defecting. The Neil Daniels character decides there’s a line that’s been crossed so he leaves. And the Julia Stiles character defects and leaves, as does Joan Allen’s character when she says to David Strathairn’s ‘I hope you have a good lawyer.’ There’s this huge battle going on right now, which is very well documented, about the conflicts within the intelligence services, because this administration cherry-picked and misused intelligence to make a case for the war, and lots of people in there are furious about that!

Q.Do you think the country’s ready for change?

MD: Absolutely, and I think the last election reflected that, and that the poll numbers now reflect that. I think the rampant incompetence and corruption makes everyone, Democrats and Republicans, sick to their stomachs. I hope Obama does well, or that Al Gore throws his hat into the ring. My dream is Gore-Obama for eight years, and then Obama for another eight years! I also like Mike Bloomberg; he’s done some wonderful things. He’ll balance the budget in New York by cutting a $10 million arts budget, and then you’ll find that there’s a ‘mystery’ donation the next day for the same amount!

Q. Are you and Ben going to write together again? The rumour mill says so…

MD: I don’t know where those rumours came from. We did go on vacation, and people got pictures of us surfing really badly, so I don’t know where we were supposed to be writing. We were surfing. We got good in the end but the paparazzi had gone home by then! But he’s directed Gone Baby Gone, which is a great film, and that’s a real game-changer for us, because it opens up a lot of options for our partnership. We can co-write and co-direct, or he can direct me. We’ve spent 10 years since Good Will Hunting trying to get our careers on track, and now hopefully we can spend the next 10 working together.


Q. Would you like to direct?

MD: I would, I’d love to do that and I’ve been treating the last ten years like film school!