A ‘LAND’ OF PLENTY FOR MATT DAMON By Donna Freydkin
If you want to collaborate with Matt Damon, you’ll need to be of a certain stature. “I only write with tall people,” says Damon. He’s only sort-of kidding. Damon’s first foray into celluloid partnership was with his lanky buddy Ben Affleck, and the product was the 1997 breakthrough hit Good Will Hunting, which garnered the thennewcomers a screenwriting Oscar and global acclaim. Now, Damon again is teaming up with a lofty scribe, John Krasinski, in the drama Promised Land. The two actors co-wrote the film and play the leads. Damon’s Steve is a myopic energy executive who travels to small towns to buy fracking drilling rights from the local residents, and Krasinski’s Dustin is a slick environmentalist who tries to block him. In Damon’s everyman hands, Steve is an earnest politician and fervent believer that he’s selling financial freedom to destitute people hungry for it, pollution be damned. “I hadn’t been able to play that part before. So we wrote it,” says Damon, 42. The project came together thanks to the actors’ wives, Lucy and Emily Blunt, who became close when Blunt and Damon were filming together. “Matt was working on The Adjustment Bureau with Emily. We got to know each other and quickly became good friends. We did a whole lot of double-dating with Matt and (his wife) Lucy and we got along really well. Matt had 130
mentioned that he wanted to direct and asked me if I was working on anything. I told him about this, and we started writing pretty much right away,” says Krasinski. “I’m sure there was a camaraderie built in with both of us being from Boston.” Initially, Damon was hoping to go behind the camera. However, once he and Krasinski sat down together and fleshed out the idea of using the larger issue of fracking as the foundation of the film, the lure of script-writing was fairly irresistible. “John and I took it and we started on it. It was a really seamless thing. It was easy to write with John and really fun. I’d forgotten that. I’d written - there’s writing on every movie, even if it’s not a screenwriter sending me their Word document and I start tinkering. It’s writing in the manner of problemsolving. The process with John reminded me how much I love writing and how much I love sitting down and building something from nothing,” says Damon. His wife noticed, as well. “Lucy said to me in the middle of the whole thing, ‘No matter what happens with this movie, I haven’t seen you this happy.’ And I realized that she was right,” says Damon. Like Affleck, who’s this year’s awards season darling for the Iran hostage drama Argo, Damon says he understands the visceral power and lure of crafting and telling your own story. “With ‘Good Will Hunting,’ the feeling of real connection was so deep.
Every movie feels like a birth. You put a whole year of your life into it. You care about it and love it. To work on something at this level, it’s an even deeper feeling of connection,” says Damon. “I know it’s what Ben is going through with directing. The feeling of authorship and ownership is more intense.” To be more active off-screen, Damon and Affleck operate a production company, Pearl Street, based in Los Angeles. It’s the main reason Damon is decamping from his long-time Manhattan home base later this year and relocating west with his brood: daughters Alexia, 14, from Lucy’s first marriage, Isabella, 6, Gia, 4, and Stella, 2. “It’s going to be better for our company, for me and Ben, and we looked for a place here for four years. People have an over-inflated idea of what their place is worth,” says Damon. “We were just looking for a place to raise the kids. That precipitated the move to L.A. We went there to look for schools. We love our school here.” Here, he loves his almost singular ability to live as normal a life as possible. Damon has lunch with his family. He goes to playgrounds and drops his kids off at school, and no one looks twice, enabling him to pretend that he’s not actually famous. “It doesn’t feel like that. It was worse downtown. That was a beehive. Where we are now, I live under the illusion that no one has ever seen a movie,” he says. “It’s really nice.”