Newly minted movie action hero Matt Damon is in Chicago awaiting the arrival of a genuine Pizzeria Uno cheese pizza — that is, not one of those chain Uno pizzas he’d get in his native Cambridge — when the discussion turns to why he never considered being in an explosive thriller.
“This genre in particular is harder to be original in,” he said. “Suddenly you had ‘Die Hard’ on a boat [‘Under Siege’], and then ‘Under Siege 2,’ which is ‘Die Hard’ on a train, and then you had ‘Die Hard’ on a bus [‘Speed’] and then you had ‘Die Hard’ on a cruise ship [‘Speed 2: Cruise Control’].”
And, of course, “Die Hard” on a plane, a.k.a. “Die Hard 2.”
“And ‘Executive Decision’ and ‘Passenger 57’ and all these movies,” Damon continued. “Somebody told me that one studio executive was finally pitched ‘Die Hard’ in a skyscraper, which is great. He was like, ‘That movie is called “Die Hard.” ‘
The 31-year-old actor laughed his boyish, crooked-smile laugh. Since his 1997 one-two punch of Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Rainmaker,” his first leading role, and “Good Will Hunting,” for which he and his childhood friend/co-star Ben Affleck won a screenwriting Oscar, Damon has managed to eschew formula while defining his own identity.
Now he is playing the lead in “The Bourne Identity,” an adaptation of Robert Ludlum’s 1980 spy novel about a guy who wakes up with bullet holes in his back, no memory, a multitude of deadly adversaries and his own set of lethal skills. Damon said he didn’t change his mind about action films; he just found one that seemed different.
“Just the idea of a guy having a gun in a consulate and being converged upon by a whole team of Marines, and he throws the gun away and gets a radio and a map,” he said while visiting last week to promote the movie. “There’s just a lot of stuff that I haven’t seen before that I really liked.”
Plus, “The Bourne Identity” (which opens Friday) was directed by Doug Liman, whose previous films were the energetic, idiosyncratic indie films “Go” and “Swingers,” each made for a fraction of “Bourne’s” $60 million budget.
“I wouldn’t have been interested in doing this movie if it were directed by the kind of people that normally direct movies like this,” Damon said, noting that few other filmmakers would have cast the relatively obscure Franka Potente of “Run Lola Run” as the female lead or would have insisted that the movie be shot on location in Paris with a French crew.
“He complained that movies shot in Europe by Americans tend to look like they were made by tourists,” Damon said. “If you don’t want to make Paris look like a postcard the entire time, hire Parisians to shoot it. They won’t be framing the Eiffel Tower in every shot because they see it every day.”
Damon’s desire to stay grounded in reality carries over to his life off screen. On “Project Greenlight,” the HBO series about a screenwriting contest winner’s maiden attempt at filmmaking, Damon, who produced the resultant movie with Affleck and Chris Moore, came across as the cool-headed one who injected logic when others were cruising on emotion.
A fan favorite
At a party after the March premiere of the “Project Greenlight” movie, “Stolen Summer,” Damon was mobbed by fans at Chicago’s House of Blues and graciously posed for pictures and chatted on a cell phone thrust at him by a pushy mother trying to impress her son.
After lunch, (“God this pizza is excellent,” he said), he offered to pose for a photo with the five guys at an adjacent table who had been snapping shots of each other just to catch him in the background.
“He does that everywhere he goes,” “Stolen Summer” director Pete Jones said. “I’ll never forget going with him to Boston, and the airline has a special person assigned to Matt just to walk him to the VIP lounge and walk him to his plane. I said, `Wow, real special treatment,’ and he said, `I don’t know why. I’m too embarrassed to say no. It’s like they think because I’m famous I don’t know how to walk in an airport.'”
Damon certainly doesn’t appear to take for granted the privileged life he has been leading since he and Affleck made “Good Will Hunting” for the expressed purpose of getting them better roles. A tossed-off line spoken as he rose from the lunch table seemed telling: “My chit is going to get called in if this one doesn’t make money.”
Is he really worried?
“I’m not worried,” he said. “I’m just aware of it. I’ve been really lucky already. I’ve made all the movies that I’ve wanted to make.”
Damon has worked with an all-star slate of directors in compiling a highly varied resume: Coppola in the John Grisham suspense film “The Rainmaker,” Steven Spielberg in the war epic “Saving Private Ryan,” Billy Bob Thornton in the moody western “All the Pretty Horses,” Anthony Minghella in the prickly murder drama “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” Robert Redford in the golf fable “The Legend of Bagger Vance” and Steven Soderbergh in the caper flick “Ocean’s Eleven.”
The so-called trouble is that the only true smashes had Damon as part of a big-name ensemble: “Saving Private Ryan” and “Ocean’s Eleven.” The most frustrating failure, he said, was “All the Pretty Horses,” which Columbia Pictures ordered cut from its original three-hour-plus length to less than two hours.
“They never released the movie that we made,” Damon said. “That was probably the most depressing and painful thing I ever dealt with professionally.”
Box office is secondary
No one would accuse Damon of just chasing the box-office dollar. His next movie scheduled for release this fall, Gus Van Sant’s “Gerry,” is an experimental, largely improvised art film in which Damon and Casey Affleck, Ben’s younger brother, go wandering in the wilderness in some beautifully photographed but seemingly endless shots.
“We had everything from, `This is a masterpiece and it’s years ahead of its time’ to, `You will only ever see this movie if you are being tortured,'” Damon said of the film’s Sundance Film Festival reception.
He also took to the stage for the first time in eight years to receive enthusiastic reviews as Hayden Christensen’s replacement in the London run of Kenneth Lonergan’s play “This Is Our Youth.”Damon will perform in London for another couple of weeks and then plans to return home, at which point he hopes he and Affleck can coordinate their schedules to write that long-awaited follow-up to “Good Will Hunting.”Damon’s non-acting interests extend beyond writing and “Project Greenlight 2,” scheduled to kick off next month. As the Tribune photographer was taking his picture, Damon asked very specific questions about the camera and lens.
Does he want to direct?
“Definitely,” he said. “First time out I’m going to make a lot of mistakes, so I’d rather do it with my material than somebody else’s. But, yeah, I definitely want to do it. Every part of making movies really fascinates me. I love writing. I’ve been treating [my career] kind of like a master class in directing the last few years.”
Given his movies’ directors, he certainly has had a distinguished set of teachers.
“They’ve all been really cool about answering my questions,” he said. “I was actually talking to Anthony Minghella once. He was asking me about what was it like working with Spielberg and what was it like working with Coppola and what was it like working with Gus Van Sant?
“I was looking at him kind of quizzically, and he said, `You don’t understand. Directors, we’re all on our own island. As an actor you get to go from island to island and see how these guys do it. We never have that luxury.'”
Seeing the whole movie
Moore offered Damon a vote of confidence as a potential director.
“Matt sees the whole movie,” the “Project Greenlight”/”Good Will Hunting,” the producer said. “He’s a storyteller, and that’s what I think makes him a great actor.”
At this point, Damon said, he just wants to keep working. He wasn’t buying one newspaper’s contention that while Affleck has been creating the career of a movie star, Damon has taken the route of a serious actor.
“We both were taking roles that were available to us right after `Good Will Hunting,'” he said. “If mine were deemed more serious, then that’s just luck. A good example is before `Good Will Hunting’ came out, I got cast in `Saving Private Ryan,’ he got cast in `Armageddon.’ Either of us would have done the other movie. We needed the job.”
