Matt Damon on his ponytail and CGI arrow shooting in new film The Great Wall
MATT Damon talks George Clooney, ponytails and the biggest movie he has ever been part of where he unleashes his boyhood dream.
Entertainment
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- Damon: The Great Wall backlash a ‘f**king bummer’
- The Great Wall film accused of ‘perpetuating the racism myth’
- ‘Matt Damon’ wedding photo from 1961 goes viral
- George Clooney’s wife Amal is expecting twins in June
HOW did you spend your weekend? Matt Damon spent his talking about George Clooney’s impending double bundle of joy.
“It was the first question out of everybody’s mouth so I was like, ‘I guess the internet figured it out!’,” Damon laughs of the news that Clooney and his wife Amal are expecting twins.
Clooney let Damon in on the secret late last year when they were working on Clooney’s latest film as director, Suburbicon. But given Amal was only eight weeks along at that stage, Damon quickly advised his mate to “shut up” for another month.
Now he’s just thrilled for his friends and planning on being an awesome uncle.
“Those kids will have a lot of uncles,” he says. “George is a very well-loved person; he’s got a lot of friends.”
While Clooney’s been busy making babies, 46-year-old Damon’s been busy making more movies back to back than he can ever remember. As such, for the rest of this year he’ll likely be found planted on his couch.
“I’ll probably go back to work again at the end of the year or next year or something like that,” he says. “But right now I’m pretty beat up because I’ve done five movies in a row without a break; it’s more than I’ve done at any point in my career. So I’m on the chaise lounge for a while.”
Damon’s rush of work came after a near-18 month drought that broke with Ridley Scott’s The Martian. The drought had been self-imposed in part (he’d planned to take time off when his family moved across country to Los Angeles) and self-perpetuating in others (“It became easier and easier not to work ...”).
So after all that “sitting on my couch jonesing for work,” he then made the mistake of lining up “way too much work”.
After The Martian came his triumphant return as Jason Bourne. Then two prestige dramas, Suburbicon (Clooney directing a script he co-wrote with regular sidekick Grant Heslov and the Coen brothers) and Downsizing (another weird but wonderful Alexander Payne creation), which should be released in late 2017.
Before that, there’s the small matter of what he calls “the biggest movie I’ve ever been a part of” — The Great Wall.
A Chinese/American co-production directed by the revered Zhang Yimou, The Great Wall draws on Chinese mythology to tell the story of two nomadic warriors — Damon and Game Of Thrones’ Pedro Pascal — travelling through 12th century China on a mission to steal black powder.
Upon reaching the Wall, they find an awe-inspiring army fighting a wave of mythical monsters and must decide whether to join the battle or grab the powder and run.
“This story’s about a guy who starts out as a scoundrel — he’s a sellsword who’ll fight for anybody, who wants to steal black powder and conquer people,” Damon explains. “Then he has this epiphany through his interactions with this other culture and it changes him.”
Everything on this fantasy epic was big. Big budget — it’s the most expensive film ever shot in China. Big sets — Damon recalls one sequence “where we walk through the whole interior of the Wall, past a water wheel and an elevator ... and that’s the only time you see that set! It really was nuts. It was like being on an old school Cecil B. DeMille movie from a hundred years ago”.
Big crew — 100 translators were required to mesh the half Mandarin-speaking and half English-speaking crew.
And big commitment — the entire Damon family upped sticks to live in China for six months.
“They were game,” Damon says of his wife Luciana and their four daughters. “Which was great, because I never would have been able to do it if they weren’t up for it.”
During their Chinese adventure, the clan expanded: Damon likes to joke that his family adopted co-star Pascal.
“Pedro and my wife have very parallel stories — he’s Chilean and she’s Argentinian and both of them, with their parents, fled their countries when they were babies and moved to America. So when they met each other it was like they were a long lost brother and sister. She joked that within a week or two we’d adopted him legally.”
Pascal — “Tio Pedro” to the kids — could not speak any more highly of his co-star’s generosity, not only in welcoming him into the family, but also in the way he worked with The Great Wall’s sprawling crew.
“What anyone famous or unknown can learn from Matt is that it takes incredible generosity and patience to provide everyone with a good experience,” Pascal says. “In that respect he was an incredible leader. I learnt from the best.”
On screen, Damon and Pascal make as good a comedy act as they do a fighting unit. The particular skill of Damon’s character, William, is archery. But besides some summer camp pinging way back when, Damon’s skills with a bow and arrow are non-existent.
“I am one of the best CGI arrow shooters around,” he cracks. “I’d give Orlando Bloom a run for his money.”
While the cinephile inside Damon was doing cartwheels over working with Zhang Yimou, his inner kid was in party mode on The Great Wall.
“It was different than anything I’d ever done. I liked the whole look — the beard, the long hair. I geeked out over all the weapons. I’d never really done a sword and sandals type thing ... it was my 12-year-old dream job. To basically get paid to put on armour and ride around on horses and fire a bow and arrow, it was a pretty good gig.”
Damon’s ponytail became worldwide news after the production held a press conference in Beijing upon wrapping filming. “And I was probably less than a week away from cutting it off at that point,” he says.
The next unexpected news story to blow up out of The Great Wall was the whitewashing outcry that greeted the release of the trailer last December. The finished film doesn’t bear out the accusations that Damon had taken a job from an Asian actor or that he was playing the white hero saving the Chinese; knowing this is what most frustrated Damon at the time.
“It’s literally that phrase of judging a book by its cover that your mother warns you away from doing as a child,” he says. “But that’s the reactionary Twitterverse that we all live in right now. Hopefully some of that stuff will get reined in as we live with this technology more.
“Having said that, the issues that the people who were attacking the movie were worried about are very real and do need attention paid to them. But I feel ultimately you undermine your own argument if you’re attacking things you haven’t done the work to understand.”
Understanding is something Damon’s big on these days — now that the Trump show has taken over the White House.
“Movies are a tool for empathy,” he says. “The more stories about different people we can tell, the more we come to an understanding that we’re all sharing the Earth. Not to get too hippie dippy about it. But particularly with the political climate in my country, it seems to me the more movies you can get out there expressing different perspectives, the better off we’ll all be.”
A believer in the theory that rough political times can foster great art, he reckons over the next four years “there’s going to be plenty to make art about”.
“I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not,” he adds, laughing, “but it should make for good viewing.”
SEE THE GREAT WALL OPENS TODAY
MATT GOES TO THE OSCARS
Matt Damon is an under-the-radar Academy Award nominee this year, 19 years after he and Ben Affleck won their Oscar for writing Good Will Hunting.
As a producer on heart-rending Manchester By the Sea, Damon is in the running for Best Picture.
“We’re thrilled,” he says. “We made Manchester for US$8.8 million which is the catering budget on The Great Wall. So to have it punching above its weight and have it be recognised is a big deal for us. So many more people will see it because of that.”
Damon was initially signed on to play Casey Affleck’s role in the film, that of the uncle obliged to take custody of his nephew after his brother dies, who struggles with his grief and his new responsibilities.
But when The Martian got in the way of Manchester’s shooting schedule, Damon handballed the role to the younger Affleck, who is now the favourite to win the Oscar for Best Actor.
“Casey remains one of the few actors I’ll give things away to, just because he’s so damn good,” Damon says with a laugh. “I look at that movie and I’m so happy for him, he deserves everything that’s coming his way.”
Originally published as Matt Damon on his ponytail and CGI arrow shooting in new film The Great Wall
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