Damon ready for True Grit (From The Northern Echo)

Damon ready for True Grit

11:43am Thursday 11th March 2010 in

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After Green Zone Matt Damon is going to re-make the John Wayne classic movie True Grit with Jeff Bridges. Steve Pratt reports.

BARELY a week after doing press for Clint Eastwood’s film Invictus, Hollywood actor Matt Damon is out again promoting yet another movie. This time it’s his third collaboration with British director Paul Greengrass with whom he’s worked on the last two Bourne thriller movies.

So is he going to have a rest any time soon? “I’m on a flight in a few hours so I’m looking forward to putting my head down,” says Damon.

“But look, I just finished with Clint yesterday and that’s like taking time off. He shoots no more than ten hours a day and it’s a very civilised schedule. It’s much more civilised than Greengrass, I tell ya.”

Damon has been in London making a supernatural thriller, Hereafter, directed by Eastwood, a sign that the two got along fine while making Invictus in South Africa.

Damon plays the national rugby union team captain Francois Pienaar opposite Morgan Freeman’s Nelson Mandela. There’s a reason for all the hard work, he’s doing his homework for moving behind the camera.

“I want to direct some day and I can’t really pass up the chance to work with the people that I’m getting a chance to work with. Paul three times now, Clint twice and (Steven) Soderbergh five or six times.

“As long as that keeps happening... I’m going to work with the Coen brothers next month so, yeah, I can’t see taking time off unless the work dried up.”

That Coens’ film is a remake of the John Wayne/Glenn Campbell western True Grit in which Damon will co-star with Jeff Bridges, who picked up a best actor Oscar this week for his performance as a fading singer in Crazy Heart.

“They’ve really gone back to the source which is the wonderful book that Charles Portis wrote and most of the dialogue is culled straight from the book,” he explains.

“So I’m relying less on Glen Campbell and more on Joel and Ethan Coen for that performance. No singing, no.

You’ll all be spared.”

What he’s here to talk about is Green Zone, in which he plays a US army chief warrant officer who, with his team of inspectors, is looking for the weapons of mass destruction believed to be stockpiled in the Iraqi desert. He finds himself in the middle of scheming and plotting by various intelligence agencies to cover up the truth.

He and Greengrass are riding the crest of the wave created by the box-office and critical success of the last two Bourne movies to venture into territory – the Iraq conflict – that’s not obvious box-office material.

“The fundamental question was could we make a film that would have audience appeal and get a good chunk of the Bourne audience over into a film that was about a fictional character in the real world rather than a fictional character in a fictional world?,” he says.

Certainly the filming style is very much in the Bourne mould, and the realistic immediacy of handheld camerawork adopted by Greengrass and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd in those films and Greengrass’s 9/11 hijacked aircraft drama United 93. It appears to give the actors great freedom.

“There was never a mark that was laid down, there was never anybody who said you have to go stand here and deliver this line this way,”

explains Damon.

“On the contrary, their interest lay totally in capturing something in real time. Normally you’re restricted by your camera, by your magazine, by your film load. It’s an 11 minute load.

“What they did was have a back-up camera so they would go for 11 minutes and when one camera would dump, they’d pick up another and keep going, carry on. That allowed the actors and the non-actors – of which there were many – to stay in their heightened reality and stay in that world without everybody breaking down and going to get a cup of tea or going to the bathroom.

“These exercises would carry on for half-an-hour at a time and then everybody would say okay, take a break.

On United 93 they did the full hour-and-a-half flight – one take in the morning and another in the afternoon. It’s why acting is so good and so real because it is real, it’s really unfolding and it’s very easy to buy into that reality when the camera is doing nothing at all.

“Now I do it professionally so I’m used to the technical realities of making a film, but to be totally liberated from that really gives you something in your performance that you can’t get any other way.”

■ Green Zone (15) is now ACTION MAN: Matt Damon in Green Zone (15) showing in cinemas