LOS ANGELES — A decade after Good Will Hunting brought him his first taste of real Hollywood success, everything is going right for Matt Damon.
He knows he's damn lucky.
“My phone had completely stopped ringing” by the time, five years ago, that The Bourne Identity, his espionage thriller with an epically troubled production history, was finally released.
“I had done Bagger Vance and All the Pretty Horses, both of which tanked, and this looked like my third strike. The word on the street was it was a total turkey, so nobody was putting me in anything. … Then it was one of those ridiculous Hollywood things.
Actor Matt Damon stars as the amnesiac former assassin Jason Bourne in the new film, 'The Bourne Ultimatum.' (AP Photo/Gus Ruelas)
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“The Monday after Identity opened, I got something like 15 or 20 movie offers.
“That was a good experience for me because the rose-coloured lenses came off,” adds Damon, now 36 and pleased as he can be with the third film in the rogue, agent trilogy, The Bourne Ultimatum, coming out Friday.
“I got that the phone will absolutely stop ringing, even if they think I'm a nice guy. …There's no malice. It's just that's the business.”
Much as Good Will set up Academy Award-winning screenwriters and childhood friends Damon and Ben Affleck as Hollywood's hottest young actors for a few years, the Boston-bred professor's son credits the success of the Bourne franchise with not only reviving a stalled acting career, but also making him bankable enough to work on the complex, socially relevant dramas that he has always wanted to make.
He says he can't imagine having been a part of Syriana, The Good Shepherd and Martin Scorsese's Oscar-winning The Departed without the clout that the Bourne films have given him.
It can even be argued that, because of Bourne, Damon is now a more popular movie star than his A-list pals George Clooney and Brad Pitt from that other successful franchise, the Ocean's crime capers.
Perhaps a sensible effort to keep the show on the screen has also helped.
After high-profile romances and breakups with actresses Minnie Driver and Winona Ryder brought unwanted media attention early in his career, Damon has more or less managed to deflect the tabloid attention that has engulfed his star buddies.
He moved out of Los Angeles years ago and lives quietly in New York and Miami with his wife, Luciana, their year-old girl, Isabella, and Luciana's daughter from a previous relationship.
That is, when they haven't been globetrotting to far-flung Bourne locations, which made Damon realize just how lucky he was. And how ... um, we'll call it mature ... he's getting.
“I started the movie in really good shape,” says the actor, who is on the run throughout the entire length of Ultimatum. “But one thing having kids has made me realize is that I used to not have any life. On the old Bourne movies, we'd work six-day weeks. I'd work however many hours a day – 12, 15 hours – then I'd go to the gym for two hours, then I'd eat a little something and go to sleep. That's all I did, and on Sundays I slept all day.
“On this movie, I showed up in my Bourne shape. But when I'd worked my 16 hours, I went home; I wasn't going to a gym, I wanted to see my kid.
“So, by the end of the production, there were some shots where I said to [director Paul Greengrass], ‘Dude, you've got to cut that out! I'm 20 pounds heavier than I was at the beginning of the movie.' That was an eye-opener for me.”
Though they are often praised for their relative realism, Damon understands that the adventures of Jason Bourne are escapist, thrill rides.
“The whole thing is kind of this middle-aged fantasy,” he notes. “Okay, I'm bonked on the head and when I wake up, I speak 12 languages and I can kick everybody's ass and this really cool German girl falls in love with me. So, to a certain extent, I think there's a little bit of wish fulfilment. But it's a fun role to play.”
That said, it's hard to think of any other major film series so influenced by current world events. Now that the Bourne trilogy has reached a natural stopping point, Damon hopes to keep making films in the vein of petro-politics thriller Syriana and CIA exposé The Good Shepherd.
If scheduling permits, he hopes his next two projects will be Imperial Life in the Emerald City, an adaptation of the bestselling report by the Washington Post's former Baghdad bureau chief, Rajiv Chandrasekaran; and The Informant, Kurt Eichenwald's non-fiction account of corrupt practices at food-processing giant Archer Daniels Midland.
While he clearly loves this kind of stuff, Damon doesn't believe every movie needs to come with a civics lesson.
“If I think the movie's good, then I'll do it,” he explains. “I'm not going in strictly to make political statements with every single movie.
“You don't want people to go, ‘Oh, it's this guy again.' ”
Damon even tries to bring a sense of humour to his political efforts. In the Clean My Ride, Flex My Fuel video he shot recently, he wears a ridiculous-looking, alternative-fuel pump costume.
The hard-working actor also makes brief appearances in two upcoming dramas, playwright Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret and Youth Without Youth, the first film Francis Ford Coppola has made since the 1997 Damon-starring The Rainmaker.
As for the future, now that he's firmly established, Damon just wants to keep standards rising.
“[I've] put my head down and worked pretty hard in these last 10 years,” he says. “Now, I've woken up with a career and family and all of the things that I wanted. Hopefully the next 10 years will be about doing better work.”
Special to The Globe and Mail
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