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Updated
6/02 We're Hangin' With.... (check the picture) MATT DAMON The
"Bourne Identity" novel about a spy with anmesia was written
in 1980 and made into a t.v. movie starring Richard Chamberlain in 1988.
Now, amnesiac Bourne resurfaces as Matt Damon. No wonder the poor guy
has an identity crisis. Scenes were added and re-written until Matt probably
wondered who HE was. This is Damon's first action hero role. When we talked to him, he compared his spy experience to buddy Ben Affleck's in Sum of All Fears, talked about the physical demands of the part, getting homesick and having stage fright in a play. Matt and friends plan to throw Ben a big 30th birthday party. We chuckled at the fact that Matt, in black shirt, white tee and jeans, was wearing exactly the same outfit as Ben was when we recently interviewed him. AGW: Did you and Ben Affleck compare spy notes? Matt: No, we didn't. The characters are in different fields, so they wouldn't cross paths in Washington. AGW: Is Bourne tougher that Jack Ryan? Matt: (laughing) Oh, without a doubt. AGW: Is that movie's CIA more real than this movie's? Matt: I can't give you a real educated idea of what day to day life at the CIA is. Ben actually went there and visited, spent a day there. I think my character is certainly not the guy who ever spent any time in Langley anyway. I think this is someone who's more freelance. AGW: So do you feel like James Bond? Matt: No. I think it's very different from that style of movie. Doug (director Doug Liman) really wanted the action to drive the story and never be gratuitous, whereas the Bond movies, the fun of them is that the action is gratuitous. Suddenly he gets thrown out of a plane and he doesn't have a parachute, but he figures it out anyway. AGW: There is an exciting but funny chase in a little Mini-Cooper car. Were you driving? Matt: There is actually one shot of me driving the car. Doug was squeezed in in the back right seat and the steering wheel was on the left and I was up front and he was shooting at me. The car had two steering wheels and the stunt driver was in the front really steering the car. We went at breakneck speed with all these stunt drivers coming at us doing 360s and going all over the place. Part of it's in the movie and that was the highlight of my driving experience. I was turning a fake wheel and pretending not to be scared. AGW: Did you hit the nightlife in Prague (Czech Republic)? We hear it's pretty intense. Matt: It is pretty cool. We were shooting six day weeks, so on Saturday nights, the whole crew would go somewhere. These city bars or clubs seemed strange. I'm not much of a club goer, so seeing that kind of THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP bananananananana and people with glow sticks, it's like what is going on here? Am I in Hollywood or Prague? But it was really lively. People seemed to be having a really good time. (The cast from) Hart's War was there too. So, it was me, (co-star) Franka (Potente) and Doug and then suddenly these 20 GI's show up with their shaved heads. AGW: Did you have to learn the languages phonetically like Ben learned Russian for Sum of All Fears? Matt: I didn't know any of them. There are a couple of lines I say off camera. This guy, Olivier, comes in and starts to speak French and I try [to copy him]. If they ever played the whole tape, it's me just fumbling, trying to get it and then I'd say one thing and he'd go, "Zis is correct." AGW: Your character discovers he has all these hidden skills. Have you ever discovered you could do something you never thought you could? Matt: Doing a live performance of something is like that. It's like skydiving and there's a moment before it happens that you think you'll never be able to do it and then you do it. That was always my experience from the time I started doing plays when I was 14 years old. There was always this terrific fear right before the event, I mean horrible, horrible fear. Then it all seemed to work out and you go back to wanting that fear again. AGW: Did you think about the old movie with Robert Redford, "Three Days of the Condor"? Bourne's relationship with (girlfriend in the film)Marie is similar. Matt: Yes but we didn't want this movie to seem like a '70's movie. So, we went back and forth with the whole scene when I cut her hair and Marie eventually kisses me, we had these huge, epic conversations about to what extent are we weakening her character if she kisses me first or if I kiss her. Then Franka said, [German accent] "No, I will kiss him." And that was the end of the conversation.(laughs) AGW: How did you get into physical shape? Matt: I was in probably as good shape as I've ever been in because I was boxing and doing martial arts and all this weapons training. I really went overboard. Doug said he wanted Bourne to walk with the directness that a boxer walks with. He wanted him to move in a very efficient way. When I first saw Doug, he said, "Pull up your shirt." And I pulled up my shirt and he said, "Oh God, oh God." I said, "No, in three months, don't worry. It's going to be hard as a rock."
Kali. It's a Filipino style. It has a lot to do with clubs and knives and it's a trapping technique. To watch these guys do it is beautiful. If somebody throws a punch at you, there are these destruction moves. Rather than go directly for somebody's throat, you just slowly take them apart. AGW: What is your natural high? Matt: I like exercise. Also, doing this play ("This is Our Youth") in London has been great. We know exactly what we need to do every day. We show up for work for four hours a night, or a longer day if we're doing a matinee, and the routine of it is something that I wasn't used to at all. You go to a movie set and you might have a gut-wrenching scene or you might be sitting doing a crossword puzzle all day. But that fear, that element of danger in doing live theater is great because different things happen every night. AGW: When you are on set in Europe, do you get homesick? Matt: Yeah. Generally when I get homesick, I miss my two nephews because they're young and so a couple months away from them is a big deal. They're going to go through a lot of changes. That was the hard part about taking this play because for them to come over for a few days, from Boston to London with the jetlag, it's just too much for little kids to deal with. AGW: Do you want to be a father? Matt: Not yet. I mean, nephews are enough for me. But someday I definitely would, yeah. AGW: What's happening with Project Greenlight? Matt: We just got picked up. We're going to do it again and hopefully launch the contest in July. AGW: Will the next project be different from the first (Stolen Summer)? Matt:
It depends on the material. Brendan Murphy, who was one of the runners
up last year, we really liked his script so Ben and I put up half the
money, Miramax put up half the money, so he's shooting his movie right
now. We're excited about that because we didn't want just one person to
get their movie made last year. We think we're going to get more submissions.
We had 7,500 last year.
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AGW:
What fighting style did you learn?