Matt Damon on reuniting with Ben Affleck for Last Duel and the real story behind Good Will Hunting

Matt Damon is one of the most well-paid and bankable actors around, but life wasn’t always so good for the Hollywood star.

The last time Hollywood superstars Matt Damon and Ben Affleck wrote a movie together was more than 25 years ago, when both were struggling actors on the rise.

Back then, the two friends were trying create work for themselves, famously sticking to their guns by turning down large sums of money from studios hot for their idea of a troubled young maths genius and his working class mates but preferring bigger names to star in it.

That movie was, of course, the beloved 1997 drama Good Will Hunting, which would go on to make the pair the youngest winners of the Best Original Screenplay Oscar, as well as earning Damon his first Oscar nomination for Best Actor, and set them on the path to being two of the most respected talents of their generation.

Despite that film’s success though, its long and arduous journey from concept to execution is exactly what put them off wanting to repeat the experience of writing together. According to Damon, the single-minded focus and time-consuming task of churning out thousands of pages, between drinking beer and playing video games, papered over the fact that “we didn’t know what we were doing”.

Ben Affleck, Jodie Comer and Matt Damon the New York premiere of The Last Duel this month. Picture: Arturo Holmes/Getty Images/AFP

“We just kept writing scenes until we had thousands of pages and the we kind of tried to jam it all into something that looked like a script,” he says with a laugh over Zoom call from his newly adopted home of New York. “And that was Good Will Hunting. So, for years, we never really even had the conversation – it was just a given that neither of us had the time to do that anymore.”

Thirty-three years after he made his film debut with a single line in the rom-com Mystic Pizza, Damon says he has a deeper love of making movies now because he understands them better. Thanks to his roles in hugely successful franchises including the Bourne spy thrillers and the Ocean’s comedy-crime capers, not to mention his Oscar-nominated turns in Invictus and The Martian, Damon’s movies have made more than $5 billion at the box office and made him one of the best-paid, and most bankable, actors around. So, while he has a certain nostalgia about a simpler time when trying to crack the big time was his overriding ambition, the father-of-four who recently sold his LA pad for a cool $25 million, also remembers the not-so-good side.

“I have real, solid memories of the stuff that wasn’t great – about being broke and being a struggling actor,” he says. “That’s a tough road to hoe and there are hundreds of thousands of people out there doing it right now and they know what I am talking about. I don’t miss that. It’s a tough life and you have to love it – you have to really love it – to hang in there. And there are people who will maybe see this interview we are doing right now who will be the ones who are going to hang in there and get to do interviews like this someday.”

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck with their Oscars for Best Original Screenplay for Good Will Hunting at the 1998 Academy Awards. Picture AFP PHOTO

Given their family and professional responsibilities as actors, directors and producers these days, Damon and Affleck took a completely different and much more disciplined attitude into their latest collaboration as writers and co-stars on The Last Duel.

The historical drama is based on Eric Jager’s 2004 book of the same name, which recounts the true story of the last legally sanctioned trial by combat in France’s history, when Marguerite de Carrouges said she had been raped by her husband’s best friend, setting up a duel to the death between the two men. By even speaking out, Marguerite put her own life in danger in a medieval era when women were considered second-class citizens at best and property at worst.

Damon immediately saw movie potential after reading the book and persuaded his Martian director Ridley Scott – no stranger to historical epics after Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven – to drop the project he was working on to devote his attention to it. Damon shared his plan with Affleck over dinner, who suggested they finally team up again to write the script.

Given the story is told from three perspectives – Marguerite (Jodie Comer), husband Jean De Carrouges (Damon) and the accused rapist Jacques Le Gris (Driver) – they also brought on writer-director Nicole Holofcener to bring a vital woman’s take on what both Damon and Affleck describe as a feminist film.

Matt Damon as Jean de Carrouges and Adam Driver as Jacques LeGris The Last Duel.

“We had such a streamlined idea of what the story was and what this movie was, so without trying to hustle or anything, we wrote the script really fast,” Damon says. “It kind of felt like it wrote itself.

“The fact that this is a true story and we had never heard of this woman before and how incredibly heroic she was, that really pulled us in.

“It felt relevant to today and an interesting way to examine this antecedent culture that we have evolved from and to help understand what vestigial aspects of that are still with us today.

“The movie is not there to lecture anybody – that would never be the intention, but a lot of those themes felt incredibly resonant in today’s world and that’s what we thought was really interesting about it.”

Like so many other productions last year, the Covid-19 pandemic played havoc with the filming of The Last Duel, with the Irish leg of the shoot delayed by several months. Rather than return to the US, Damon’s family took a vote and elected to stay on the Emerald Island for the duration.

Matt Damon, Chris Hemsworth and Taika Waititi, in an Instagram post in Sydney this year.

“We had the best time,” says Damon. “All these guys had rented these beautiful houses for, like, three months, that they abandoned because they all went back to their homes. So, we took them all over. We turned one into a school for our kids. But it was great. We were, like, freerolling in a beautiful town in Ireland for three months.”

Apart from his recent brush with the Delta variant of Covid, despite being fully vaccinated, Damon has had a pretty charmed life during the pandemic. In addition to his stint in Ireland, he also spent five months in Australia earlier this year after being given special dispensation to film a small role in friend Chris Hemsworth’s latest Marvel movie, Thor: Love and Thunder.

Matt Damon zooms into interview with US Today show from Australian pub. Picture: TODAY

During his stay here with wife Luciana and their three daughters, he found time to hang out with his celebrity mates in Sydney, climb the Sydney Harbour Bridge, hit the shops in Brisbane and film one of the all-time great live TV crosses, then jetted out just before the lockdowns hit.

While promoting his crime drama Stillwater, a slightly dishevelled Damon surprised US Today Show hosts by bobbing up on his mobile dressed in a T-shirt, live from his local Byron Bay pub.

“That was the only place that I could get a signal,” he says with a laugh. “The Airbnb we were in I was like, ‘I can’t trust the signal in this place – it goes in and out’ so we went up to the pub. They kept it open for us that night, which was very nice of them.”

The Last Duel opens in cinemas where restrictions permit on October 21.