He says being a star is a job, not a privilege. He says that only the Maoists are “to the left” of him. He says it’s his children’s responsibility to know about the world outside of their “comfort zone.” And, most importantly, he says what he thinks. A meeting with an actor who does not replace his face with an image.
To be honest, the film with which he came to the Berlin Film Festival – “Treasure Hunters” by George Clooney – is not very successful. And it seems that Damon’s colleagues have already managed to inform about this. In any case, our meeting in the Hyatt’s suite does not begin with my question, as it seems to be supposed. On the contrary, Matt Damon asks me: does the film seem sluggish to me too? Yes, it seems, I confess to him. And to myself – that I did not expect a question from him about the film. I did not expect questions from him at all, especially such …
But the person in front of me seems to be an exception to all stellar rules. Refusing to talk to the tabloids. (“To hell with their circulation! And besides, I live the boring life of a father of four children.”) Lack of gloss and grand gestures. An attentive look from behind glasses. Black jeans, black boots, black hoodie. An unexpected wide smile. The plastique of a strong man who is cramped in any space except the prairie – this seems to happen only among Americans … No, among Americans and among the military.
Matt Damon looks the most like a plainclothes military man. A person accustomed to following duty, a person of discipline and routine, a person with a solid system of priorities. And even a person who, with natural humility, obeys orders …
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Unpredictable
Matthew Page Damon was born in the town of Cambridge (USA) in 1970 in the family of stockbroker Kent Telfer Damon and university teacher Nancy Carlsson Page. They both won an Oscar for co-writing the screenplay for Good Will Hunting with childhood friend Ben Affleck. Damon played with the main directors of our time – with Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Steven Soderbergh, Clint Eastwood, was nominated for an Oscar, and everyone knows this. But few people know that after romances with famous actresses Minnie Driver and Winona Ryder, Damon chose an obscure Argentine who worked as a barmaid in Miami to build a family. That he is one of the most energetic political activists with whom Barack Obama debates from the podium. That he established the Water.org Foundation to bring clean water to the most underdeveloped African countries. Damon gives to charity all the income from filming in advertising and uses his fame to raise funds for charitable foundations … And finally, he is the father of four girls – 15-year-old Alexia, daughter of his wife from his first marriage, 8-year-old Isabella, 6-year-old Gia and 4-year-old Stella, whom he considers the most important achievement of his life. V. B.
Psychologies: Have you been told that you look like a military man?
Matt Damon: They spoke, moreover, in the Pentagon. Well, and at the CIA, where I consulted for Bourne. But mostly they said that I was the perfect spy: my appearance is a commonplace. I can be taken for anyone. And as a convinced democrat, I like it.
And how did a person with “appearance – a commonplace” come up with the idea of uXNUMXbuXNUMXbbecoming a film actor?
M.D.: So Ben lived around the corner. Ben Affleck, my childhood best friend and best friend in general. Ben was an actor, he acted in films at the age of nine. And of course, even then I wanted to be “like Ben”. And my mother… My mother, you see, is a professor of psychology. And he specializes in child development (specifically, early childhood development). And she was categorically against the child on the professional stage and the child on the set. She even tried to reason with Ben’s parents. Mom was deeply convinced that being in an adult team, with adult obligations and monetary rewards, causes uncompensated damage to the child’s psyche. Even my father, who, in fact, indulged my brother and me – he and my mother divorced when I was three years old – could not convince her to let me try. As a result, my childhood was exemplary: Latin at school, in the summer – intensive study of foreign languages with immersion in the language environment. Thanks to my mother here – I speak Italian quite well and almost like my native Spanish. Which, by the way, helped me a lot in … arranging my personal life: my wife is an Argentinean, and she was simply fascinated by my knowledge of her native language …
Did star status matter?
M.D.: Do I look like a man who will choose a woman who chose him because of his star status?
So parents…
M.D.: So, when I stuttered about acting, my mother, and even my father, said: “But why a professional actor? A lot of people play in amateur theaters!” They believed that it was necessary to consciously, adultly decide who you want to become. And, pay attention, this is my mother, who always said that a child should not be prevented from realizing his inclinations. My brother is an artist and sculptor, and my mother began to nurture these talents when he was four years old – everything was clear to her with him. And acting is not an obvious thing. These are not only abilities, but also character: the ability to transform, and also to obey. The last thing my mother did not notice in me. But she approved of reincarnations: when a kindergarten teacher complained that I was stuck in the locker room, trying on the clothes of other children, my mother ironically answered: well, don’t bother him.
And as a result, months before graduation, you dropped out of the university – Harvard! – and did not receive a diploma in philology …
M.D.: … and the parents reacted calmly to this. Because, apparently, they understood that I grew up. In general, it never occurred to us to lie to our parents, we never had to hide something from them. I’m not talking about the fact that after the divorce of my parents, my mother and brother lived in a commune – in a sense, in a cooperative of six families. There, in general, no one … ran into you. Everyone opened doors for each other and made way. Therefore, later I was not at all afraid to tell my parents that everything was over with the university. Using my mother’s example, I concluded that psychologists are more likely specialists in the atypical. And they know better than others that a person is a story not about patterns, but about exceptions to the rules.
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You just said that your mother did not notice your ability to obey. But your first success and screenwriting Oscar was Good Will Hunting, written with Ben Affleck and played at his suggestion. You star in the projects of another friend – George Clooney. It seems that these are your soloist friends, and you are helping them.
M.D.: Yes, I sing! And it’s true – I sing along to my friends. For me, this is friendship – mutual support. We are a team, you know? It’s always been like this: in my youth, Ben and I had the same bank account for two, after the first year we went to work together at the cinema – they sold popcorn and checked tickets … George loves to mess with my girls. It’s a shared life – not filming, not writing scripts, not making pasta. And all at once and together. That’s the only way I understand friendship. And is it possible to determine who is the soloist here? In friendship?
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Do you have a soloist in your family?
M.D.: Oh no, everything is decided by the choir. And the choir of girls, as you know. There are four of them – from four to fifteen, will they let someone else open their mouth? And I’m almost serious. Because they are our priority … More precisely, not even they themselves, but the fact that we are always with them. We even have a rule, I call it the “two weeks rule”. The point is, I’m not away from home for more than two weeks. Actually, I’m not even two weeks away. Yes, you have to make certain sacrifices. I remember we lived in New York and I was filming in Vancouver. It’s 6 hours of summer. So every Friday I ran to the plane so that on Saturday morning the girls could see me at the door. And then he also flew away on Sunday to fly to Vancouver at one in the morning, and at half past six already be on the site. I say “sacrifice”, but in fact it is not even a sacrifice for me. In fact, I’m afraid of losing time with them – with Lucy (Damon’s wife, Luciana Damon-Barroso. – Ed.), with the girls … No, we have a choir. And I, as a convinced “leftist” – and to the left of me only “commies” of the Maoist persuasion … just kidding! But yes, I trust the choir, not the soloists.
You are a “leftist” and a democrat, but you are a movie star, and your children, by definition, are in a privileged position …
M.D.: This is really a problem. It is a problem for me. When I was a teenager, my mother and brother and I traveled through Mexico and Guatemala, lived with families, traveled by bus – in crowded buses, with chickens and goats, I, a Boston boy, traveled for the first time. I have seen very poor people, poor but not crippled by poverty, living life to the fullest. It is important to understand that there is another world outside your world… My task is to protect children from the consequences of my fame. Well, as Mickey Rourke once said to me on the set of Coppola’s The Benefactor… Imagine: superstar Rourke and me, who was incredibly lucky to get into the same film with him. So, Mickey then said: “Boy, you are in the film of Francis Ford Coppola himself. It shows everyone that you have a future. This is a huge opportunity. Don’t blow it like me!” Then I realized that fame is a social contract, an agreement between you, the lucky one, and society. And my job is to comply with an important point of this contract – to raise children in such a way that they have a normal value system. That’s why we didn’t leave New York for a long time – there the girls could walk the streets, and no one with cameras ran after them. And that’s why it was so dramatic for me to send them to a private school in Los Angeles. I am against educational privileges! But public schools are… terrible. I fight for the rights of teachers, for the level of public schools. But my kids go to private school. I can’t sacrifice their future for principles. But I can do something else: shoot in South Africa in Invictus and organize a trip there for the whole class of Alexia, my eldest daughter, so that they understand who Nelson Mandela is, what a feat he accomplished … And Alexia and her classmates visited the suburbs of Cape Town, cardboard , littered, in the prison where Mandela was imprisoned … I’m sure they have become different after this trip.
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Your mother, a parenting specialist, does not interfere in the upbringing of children?
M.D.: We are stressed with this. Lucy demands her professional advice, and she gives it – but as a psychologist, detached. She believes that it is impossible to be a grandmother and a family counselor at the same time. That is why she is a grandmother. She spends a lot of time with the children, but she never discussed our parenting activities with us.
What is it like to be the only man in the family?
M.D.: This means giving sober advice that few people listen to. But seriously, I have a small male space – a quiet room where it is forbidden to enter from 9 to 14 when I teach roles or write there. But at this time, all the same, everyone is at school or on business. So there is no special meaning in the enclosures in our family. And… you know what… I don’t see the point in shutting myself off at all.
genius control
Director Terry Gilliam is considered a madman and a visionary. Only the bravest dare to become a part of his baroque-hypnotic world. But Matt Damon was one of them. In The Zero Theorem, he plays a representative of power, directing an extravagant genius in his search for the source of all things … And it is not at all strange that the voluntarist Gilliam chose Damon for this role – the embodiment of stability and loyalty to those for whom he is responsible.
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