One
of Hollywood’s
most popular actors among his peers, Damon’s career
was launched by the unruly genius Will Hunting, the eponymous
hero of a film that earned Damon a nomination as an actor
and saw him and Ben Affleck scoop the 1996 Oscar® for
Best Original Screenplay. Damon's trajectory has continued
to soar. He was excellent as a fidgety, emaciated solider
in Ed Zwick's Courage Under Fire, starred in Steven Spielberg's
Saving Private Ryan and, in 1999, conjured a memorable performance
as the creepy killer Tom Ripley. He has established himself
among the Hollywood A-list with his pair of Ocean's and Bourne
films, and has made a series of fine personal choices, from
Stephen Gaghan's Syriana, Scorsese's The Departed and now
this month's The Good Shepherd, each film benefiting from
Damon's ability to project both a warm affability and a withdrawn
sourness.
Q. It’s back to the beginning for you — without
the CIA there’d be no Jason Bourne.
MD: That’s true – it’s been an agency that’s
provided me with great career opportunities!
Q. The film suggests that the film was born from this elitist
society.
MD: Well it was. The people who were there at the beginning
did come out of this set, Skull & Bones, and this is
all based on fact. It’s a very well documented time
and there have been countless biographies written about the
men who were there at the beginning. There’s a lot
of information available so we wanted to be accurate in terms
of representing how things actually were.
Q. Your character’s
a composite based mainly on James Angleton, right?
MD: Yeah, we didn’t want to come out and have it be
Angleton because then you’re making a biopic which
is something entirely different and wasn’t what we
wanted to do. He was partly a model for the character though.
Q. Looking at some
of your recent roles, if they’re
looking for a serious SOB with no sense of humor, do they
always come to you?
MD: Well hopefully not in real life. Hopefully I am a little
more fun that Edward. But in terms of this role, that’s
what was required. And that was the great thing for me – doing
this with De Niro. All through shooting he was sitting as
close to me as you are now, just off camera, watching every
detail of the performance and helping me, urging me to go
one way or another in a scene. He was very hands-on, and
a very particular, detail-orientated director. So that was
great for me.
Q. Was it unusual for you to be as understated and unemotional
as your character?
MD: It is unusual to be given permission to do that. Most
films and directors lose their nerve and want to indicate
a bit more, to show that their story is clear. I’m
not saying that’s a good thing; as an actor its anathema
to good acting, but to have someone with the confidence to
say that should I be utterly natural and minimalist was great,
because that’s what these characters are. To broadcast
their feelings is putting them in danger, potentially, so
they would mask their emotions.
Q. Did you find yourself taking on De Niro-isms?
MD: No, he’s so unique, you’d be accused of imitating
him!
Q. As a new father, are you more aware of the sacrifices
these guys make in terms of their family?
MD: Most definitely, and the price that the job exacts. We
did lots of research and met some family members of some
of the original guys in the CIA and it’s a shared sacrifice.
The family sacrificed too. The agents are very busy, don’t
come back much, and that’s a burden borne by the family
as well.
Q. Now there’s a stigma attached to the CIA. Do you
think that’s warranted?
MD: Well, it’s confusing, because it’s always
changing. The rules have changed in the last few years, too.
I think it’s something that the citizenry needs to
be vigilant about – participating in democracy, and
that includes issues like what’s going on now, and
how much secrecy and transparency there should be. That’s
an on-going thing – in a democracy you want checks
and balances and oversight, but you need a covert agency
to protect the country. It’s a very tricky balance
and I think it changes as the world changes and I think we
all need to be mindful of that.
Q. The world changed with 9/11. Do you think the agency
has a G-d complex?
MD: I think it did at this time. Obviously, going into the
Bay of Pigs, these guys must have thought they were invincible.
They’d come up through OSS, they’d won the Second
World War, had great success in Iran in ’53 and Guatemala
in ’54. They must have felt on top of the world. Now,
I think they’ve taken some hits since then and maybe
the G-d complex isn’t what it was here, like in the
scene where Richard Hayes says ‘Why don’t you
put a ‘The’ in front of the CIA? Because you
don’t put ‘The’ in front of G-d.” I
think that probably is a true representation of time, although
not of the situation now.
Q. In the film, people like your character were held as
idealists and true patriots. When did idealism get such a
bad name?
MD: Well it’s a fine line. People do things in the
names of good, and in the name of ideals, but the world isn’t
that simple. So they end up doing things that aren’t
necessarily good. Even if they think they’re doing
the right thing, but when viewed from a different perspective
they can look barbaric and crazy. I think in terms of playing
the role, my job was to understand why he did everything
that he did. And that was no problem – the script was
well constructed, and even though he does some unseemly things
there’s a reason why he does them. And there’s
a rationale to why he’s doing them.
Q. You’ve know Angelina for a few years and you’ve
become closer more recently. Did that help at all?
MD: It was interesting because she’s so unlike the
character that she plays. I can’t imagine Angelina
suffering in a relationship where she’s not happy.
She’s very independent and very strong and yet she
plays a woman very much of that time, who would live that
quiet life of silent suffering for the sake of her son. I
was joking with her that whatever her instinct was she’d
do the opposite thing, and that’s how she’d find
the character. But it’s a testament to her skill as
an actor that she’s so good at playing someone who’s
so different from her.
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