The Hollywood star Matt Damon is speaking out this week to recall when he was once put in his place by the legendary Clint Eastwood on a movie set.
Damon Recalls Working With Eastwood
Eastwood, 95, directed Damon, 55, on the 2009 docudrama Invictus. While appearing on the “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” podcast on Monday, Damon remembered a moment on the film’s set when Eastwood had some choice words for him.
“I worked with him twice, and the first time was Invictus,” Damon recounted. “So I was playing a South African rugby player, and that’s a really tough accent to do.”
Damon spent six months working with a dialect coach in the hopes of mastering the accent. However, Eastwood had little interest in this.
“It was a long … it was a lot of work,” Damon said. “And I showed up and, and I’m, I’m ready. It’s like my chance to work with, you know, one of my heroes.”
“The very first take, I did it. And meanwhile, I’ve done this so many thousands of times. I have a number of different ways that I’m thinking of maybe doing the scene. So he goes, ‘Cut, print, move on,'” he continued. “I go, I go, ‘Hang on, hang on, hang on, boss. I want to, you know, I want to do another one, I mean, I wasn’t even in costume.’ You know, that was like, that was the first one.”
Eastwood, however, was not having any of it.
“He goes, ‘Why you wanna waste everybody’s time?'” Damon recalled. “I went, ‘No, I guess we’re moving on.'”
Eastwood ‘Is A Lovely Guy’
Though Eastwood’s words may sound harsh to some, Damon insisted that there was a “kindness” to his message.
“He is a lovely guy. What was really interesting is the second movie I did with him, there was this … it builds to a head with this, a scene with me and this 9-year-old kid,” Damon said. “The 9-year-old kid was a non-actor, and we had done one take for everybody, all through Invictus.
“We must have done 40 takes with this little boy … we were trying to get this; it was this kind of huge moment in the film, and we were trying to get this stuff out of him,” he added. “Clint was right next to me … like, we were right next to the camera together just working with this boy.”
“His whole mentality was … your crew will go to the ends of the earth for you if as long as you’re not taxing them on every shot. When we need to get in there, we get in there,” Damon concluded. “But for the most part we can … professional actors are gonna show up with something good. We keep the momentum.”
Sure enough, there was a method to Eastwood’s madness. Indeed, Damon ended up being nominated for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for Invictus. Though he lost that award to Christoph Waltz for the Quentin Tarantino-directed movie Inglourious Basterds, it was still a highlight of Damon’s career.
Eastwood is a true living legend, and there will never be another one like him. It’s nice to hear that he’s as down to earth in real life as many of the characters that he’s portrayed on the big screen.
God bless you, Clint Eastwood!