Matt Damon opens about why he's taken more seriously as an actor while speaking to Brut at the Festival de Cannes.
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00:00I think it was really helpful early on in my career to be known as a screenwriter
00:04because I was invited into the kind of creative circle with the directors that I was working with.
00:15Oftentimes actors, we're very well known for being a little vain and for, you know,
00:21the notes we give on a script are kind of about, you know, I think my notes were taken a little
00:27more seriously because the directors and the writers that I was working with knew that I was
00:32a writer too. To what extent do you envisage your work as that of a storyteller? Yeah, I think it's
00:38a hundred percent that and it comes from that same impulse that we had, you know. I was in Australia
00:45and I saw aboriginal art that was 20,000 years old and I'm like, this is what we do. We write
00:52things down. We tell our story, you know, in any way we can and this is the best medium we've come
00:57up with to tell stories, in my opinion. In the movie, I noticed Camille Cotin is an actor and she
01:02asks your character what he thinks about the play and he tells her there's nothing true about it,
01:08that it doesn't sound true. What makes, in your opinion, a true performance, Matt?
01:14Well, I think it's all about, you know, believability, you know. It's got to be
01:19interesting enough to keep your attention, but it has to be believable and there are a thousand
01:24different ways you can ruin that as an actor and it's little things that people, I think,
01:31people are observant in ways that they don't even understand and they kind of unconsciously
01:36understand if they believe something or not based on little cues that they're receiving.
01:41Body language and, you know, what happens when they look in your eyes, do they believe what
01:46you're saying? All of that stuff makes something true.
01:56What makes a good hero?
01:57Well, it's interesting. Say, with a movie like this, for instance,
02:02you know, the protagonist is somebody that we might have certain judgments about coming in and
02:10I think the movie beautifully has a lot of empathy for him. I always walk away feeling like
02:16what connects us is so much greater than what divides us and this was no different. So I think
02:22it's an interesting, I don't know if you would call him a hero or an anti-hero, but I certainly
02:27felt like, you know, enriched after spending a couple hours with him.
02:32And also, it seems to me that you have often played kind of split characters. We were talking
02:36about the complexity of characters from the talented Mr. Ripley to the departed or even in
02:41my favorite movie, Interstellar, people who are not what they seem to be. To what extent is it
02:47something you look for and something you compose also?
02:50Well, it's always really me responding to the director, you know, who's the director and
02:55those are all really incredible directors of those films that you just named. It's Anthony
03:01Minghella, Martin Scorsese and Chris Nolan. I mean, three of the best, right? And so I'm less
03:07strategic about roles I select and more interested in the director because if a director says that
03:13they want me for their job, if it's a director that's that good, chances are they see a way for
03:17me to do it and I don't really even need to read the script. I trust them enough to know, okay,
03:23if they see me in the role, then I can probably do it.
03:25You know what I love about the movie is how it mingles American and French cinema.
03:29What do you like as an actor, but also as a screenwriter? What do you seek in French cinema?
03:34Well, I thought the script was great and I think that it was exactly that. It was that it was
03:39one of our best writers, Tom McCarthy, with Thomas, you know, Thomas Noé, like two incredible,
03:46yeah, and two amazing French writers, right? And there was that partnership that
03:51kind of made this movie that's not quite American and not quite French, but a beautiful mixture.
03:58What do they bring to the story, in your opinion?
04:03I think that they're, the movie's really unpredictable and it goes places that you
04:10can't predict where it's going to go and I think that's what makes it French and that's what makes
04:16it not, you know, because it feels like a very American, kind of Hollywood setup, right? And you
04:22think the movie's going to go, you think that around on page 20 it's going to be revealed that
04:27I was in the special forces and I have a special set of skills that I can bring, you know, and it's
04:31like, as we expect, right? But no, this is a movie about a guy who has done damage to his relationship
04:39with his daughter and he's trying to repair it. He carries all this shame and all this guilt.
04:44So how French are you now? How French have you become?
04:47Well, I still don't speak French, but I do feel like we were adopted by the city of Marseille.
04:57you