Matt Damon’s new film, Stillwater, draws on the real-life Amanda Knox murder case
Matt Damon’s latest film is inspired by the notorious case of the young American student. He opens up about the gritty role, a close encounter with soccer fanatics and his love for Australia.
When Matt Damon filmed a pivotal scene for his latest movie, Stillwater, at a live football match among some of Europe’s most volatile fans, no one, it seems, recognised him. Damon, one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars, jokes that “Barack Obama could have walked in there and nobody would have noticed. They are completely stark raving mad about their football.’’
The scene in question was shot at Marseille’s vast Stade Velodrome, home ground of Olympique de Marseille, a top-tier French football team. The Velodrome has seen thrilling championship victories and outbreaks of violence and vandalism: last month, a Marseille game was disrupted by rival fans fighting and throwing flares and firecrackers at each other.
Despite the febrile atmosphere that can engulf this venue, Damon stood with his charismatic child co-star, Lilou Siauvaud, alongside thousands of Marseille supporters who were chanting, singing and letting off flares, as the cameras rolled. Speaking on Zoom from New York, where he is based, The Martian and Invictus star laughs as he recalls: “I’ve been to a lot of football games through Europe. I’ve never been to one at the Velodrome, that’s pretty famous in Europe for being particularly crazy, so I was excited to go in and see that. The energy there was just incredible; it’s very different from the energy in America.’’
Damon, whose films including the Ocean’s trilogy and the Jason Bourne series have collectively grossed billions of dollars, reckons the football crowd didn’t catch on that he was performing, partly because he was kitted out as a working-class oil rigger, with the extra kilos he gained for the role, a goatee and a baseball cap pulled low over his brow.
“I had that whole kind of look with the hat, and all of the focus was on the pitch,’’ he says. Seeking a gritty authenticity, Stillwater’s Oscar-winning director, Tom McCarthy, preferred to use real locations in Marseille, including a crumbling women’s prison, rather than artificial sets. “It was grounded in reality. It was all about getting it to be completely accurate,’’ Damon says.
Stillwater is a fractured family drama with shades of Mediterranean noir, in which Damon plays laid-off Oklahoma oil rigger Bill Baker, who is trying to free his daughter from a French prison. Damon’s emotionally withheld performance contrasts sharply with his demeanour over Zoom: the actor is as smoothly articulate and courteous as Baker is sullen and close to monosyllabic.
Baker is a lonesome yet often sympathetic figure who drives an oversized ute, dresses almost exclusively in plaid shirts and prays a lot, even before tucking into his fast-food takeaways. He feels like a fish out of water when he travels from his rural American home to Marseille to visit his jailed daughter, Allison (Abigail Breslin).
In a fictional scenario inspired by the real-life Amanda Knox case, Allison has been imprisoned in France for the murder of her girlfriend – a crime she swears she did not commit. Despite her strained relationship with her father, she urges him to follow up a new lead that could exonerate her. However, this is no action fantasy, with an American dad hurtling to the rescue, guns locked and loaded, to liberate his daughter. Rather, Baker is an inversion of the all-American hero: he calls himself a “f--k-up” due to his past drug and drink addictions. When he confronts legal and cultural barriers in his bid to free his daughter, he makes rash decisions that that put him on the wrong side of French law and of his new girlfriend, played by Call My Agent’s Camille Cottin.
Damon says Baker “is a guy who’s carrying a lot of grief and pain and regret around his failings as a father – he’s trying to repair this relationship with his daughter. He feels responsible for where she finds herself and so I don’t think he feels heroic at all.’’
To research his role, Damon spent time with Oklahoma “roughneck” oil riggers (roughneck is an American term for manual labourers, especially those who work in the oil drilling industry). “That was absolutely pivotal to building the character; all the physical details came from those guys,’’ he says. He adopts an Oklahoma drawl in the film and says that “certain words, certain pronunciations, they were incredibly helpful (with)’’.
Stillwater’s Australian cinema release was delayed several times by pandemic-related lockdowns. It will now launch on digital platforms including Google Play, Apple TV and Amazon Prime from December 1. It is also streaming on Pararmount+.
McCarthy captures Marseille’s different textures and tribes – from alienated French-Arabs living in high-rise towers to middle-class theatre actors – and Baker becomes caught up in some of the city’s racial tensions.
McCarthy says of this: “We were a country (during the Trump era) that was suddenly being driven by an ‘America First’, ‘me first’ mentality … It begged the question, what do we sacrifice to achieve this? What is the cost? And again, casting Matt was key here. Audiences know him as a hero … What happens when we puncture that myth?’’
The director, whose film, Spotlight, won the best picture and best original screenplay accolades at the 2015 Oscars, says Damon was indispensable to his movie: “The entire cast is just terrific but it’s Matt’s central performance that anchors this film. There are few actors in the world that can bring their full persona and weight to a performance and still disappear in a role so completely.’’
That knack for subtly yet fully inhabiting his roles – from the baby-faced maths genius working as a cleaner in 1998’s Good Will Hunting to the CIA assassin suffering from amnesia in the Bourne films – underpins Damon’s extraordinary success as a chameleonic American everyman.
As mentioned previously, Stillwater was partly inspired by the sensational, real-life case in which American university student Amanda Knox was wrongly imprisoned in Italy for the 2007 murder of her British flatmate. A biased Italian media painted Knox as an oversexed psychopath and she spent four years in an Italian prison, before she was exonerated.
Knox has accused McCarthy, who co-wrote Stillwater’s script, of profiting from her case without her consent. McCarthy has said the film was inspired by the case. Nonetheless, major aspects of Knox’s story have been fictionalised. The movie is set in France rather than Italy, defendant Allison is a lesbian, unlike Knox, and the murder victim is Allison’s French-Arab lover, rather than a British exchange student.
Damon says the director used Knox’s case “as a jumping off point to get us into this fictional story … Tom was really more interested in what happens after the case ends and all the cameras go away – what becomes of that family.’’
Allison’s innocence or guilt is central to the plot, and Damon says he was drawn to Stillwater because of its “three-dimensional characters” and moral ambiguities. When he first read Stillwater’s script, he said it was “unlike anything I’d seen before … I really liked that it doesn’t have any easy answers. This guy goes on an incredible journey, but he’s such a different man at the end of the movie, he’s been forever changed.’’ Damon has also described Baker as “a guy who the (US) coastal elite look down their nose on …. I hope people feel empathy for Bill by the end of the movie.’’
Unlike Baker, Damon is an involved father of four daughters who travels widely with his brood, including to Australia. “I’m a different father than Bill Baker is,’’ he says, adding that it’s not such a leap to imagine himself into Bill’s “nightmare scenario’’: “Bill’s got a history of addiction and it’s like he lost those years. He wakes up and finds himself in this damaged relationship with his daughter (and) she’s in this terrible situation.’’
In August, Damon was widely criticised when he told the UK’s Sunday Times he only recently stopped using the anti-gay “f-slur” after his daughter objected to him including it in a joke. He later clarified in a statement: “I have never called anyone ‘f----t’ in my personal life and this conversation with my daughter was not a personal awakening. I do not use slurs of any kind.”
The 51-year-old worked around Europe’s pandemic restrictions to star in the recently-released historical film, The Last Duel, in which he portrays a 14th century French knight – he sports a spectacular mullet atop his armour. Hollywood legend Ridley Scott, with whom he worked on The Martian, directed the film, and Damon becomes animated as he describes how “it’s a true story about these two knights, one of whom (Damon’s character) accuses the other of raping his wife. It’s the last sanctioned duel that took place in medieval France. It was a fight to the death.’’
He co-wrote the script with Nicole Holofcener and Ben Affleck, his close friend. Along with Affleck, he snaffled the 1998 Oscar for best screenplay for Good Will Hunting. He was just 27, and he recently joked that he and Affleck “didn’t know what we were doing” as they drank beer, played video games and wrote thousands of pages of scenes.
Damon was also nominated for a best actor Academy Award for his performance in that film. Virtually overnight, the twenty-something who had dropped out of Harvard to pursue his passion, became a household name. Prominent roles in Steven Spielberg’s war epic, Saving Private Ryan, and Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley soon followed.
The Last Duel’s cast includes Jodie Comer, of Killing Eve fame, and tells the story from conflicting viewpoints. Damon says “we saw it as a story of perspectives – Ben and I wrote the male perspective and Nicole wrote the female perspective”. He has described the film as feminist – Comer’s character risks her life by speaking out, while his medieval persona is not exactly a new-age husband. He told one journalist: “It felt relevant to today and an interesting way to examine this antecedent culture that we have evolved from.’’
Many critics gave The Last Duel the thumbs up but it has struggled at the US box office, underlining how the pandemic is playing havoc with ticket sales for non-action, non-superhero movies.
In contrast, at a packed cinema during the Cannes Film Festival in July, Stillwater was given an extended standing ovation and Damon was spotted tearing up. He agrees his emotions crept up on him as life in Europe returned to relative normality after months of Covid-19 disruption. “It was partly getting the movie out to an audience, in conjunction with being in a movie theatre again with 1000 strangers, and being reminded of how great it is to go together to the movies … You could just feel that people were coming out the other side.’’
He was in Australia earlier this year to film a role in the forthcoming superhero blockbuster, Thor: Love and Thunder, with his friend, Chris Hemsworth.
“I don’t have a very big part in that movie; that’s very much Chris’s movie, but I did a cameo in the last one and we reprised it this time around and I just had a ball,’’ he says modestly.
Damon may have recently sold his Los Angeles mansion for almost $24 million, yet during his extended visits to Queensland and northern NSW, he has channelled his inner ordinary bloke. In May, he gave an interview to America’s Today show in front of the TAB machines at a Byron Bay pub, and in 2019, he posed for selfies with young fans while shopping at Kmart in Ballina.
He tells Review how the death of his father, Kent, in 2017, prompted a lengthy trip to Australia with his wife, Luciana Barroso, and the kids. “We went all over,’’ he says. “We went to Western Oz; we went to Perth. On the east coast (of Queensland) we went to Moreton Island, Straddie and Double Island and we were just kind of camping, little trips. We were in Byron, really, for most of the time but we’d take off for a week and drive up the coast – it was an adventure and we had such a good time.’’
While he and his family recently relocated to New York, further visits down under are on the cards. Asked for his overall impressions of Australia, his upbeat response reinforces just how different he is from his taciturn alter ego Bill Baker.
“Oh man,’’ he says, “I have nothing but love for that place; it’s a real special place for our family and we go whenever we can. Hopefully, we’ll get through this pandemic and everything will open up again; we can’t wait to go back.’’
Stillwater is available on Apple TV, Google Play, Amazon Prime, Telstra Box Office and Fetch from December 1. It’s also streaming on Pararmount+ and out on DVD from December 8.
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