Bourne again
Matt Damon on anti-celebrity and the death of movies
In a universe not unlike our own, Matt Damon is sitting in a comfortable chair by Sydney Harbour, beside a life-sized poster of himself in a sweater.
The actor is also wearing a blue sweater, with matching blue trousers, blue shoes and blue eyes. He’s not so much a riot of colour as a mild-mannered disturbance.
He sits forward, elbows on knees, and discusses the likelihood that life, the universe and everything are all part of an elaborate simulation run by a super-intelligent civilisation. ‘‘If you believe that any intelligence has surpassed where we are right at this moment, then you would have to believe that these simulations could exist,’’ he says.
‘‘And if those simulations exist, you would have to believe there would be multiple simulations – and not like three, but 3 billion. Then, if you look at it, what are the odds we’re in the real thing and not the simulation?’’
The odds, he reckons, are that none of this is real.
Damon is 45, with a stocky frame, stub nose and short, greying hair. He has the stolid face of a man who from certain camera angles will always have a double chin, no matter how fit and fatfree he is. He’s in Sydney to promote Jason Bourne, his fourth time playing the trained assassin with memory retention issues. But he’s happy talking about other stuff, too, so we do.
Theoretically, we could be having 3 billion different versions of this 15-minute interview, across 3 billion different simulations. Or we could be not speaking at all, which would suit him fine. ‘‘Anything I say about myself can only detract from people’s enjoyment of my performance,’’ he says, politely.
‘‘I’ve always lamented that you have to go out there and promote your movies, or it will get drowned out. But I felt that the less I know about an actor, the more I will believe them in any role.’’
‘‘I think of those early De Niro performances, when nobody knew anything about that guy and there is an unpredictability that comes with that kind of mystery. You can suspend your disbelief and watch them as a character. So it’s too bad that any of us have to submit to interviews.’’
He recalls going to a Hollywood party with his older brother Kyle, a sculptor and artist, after the release of Good Will Hunting in 1997 – for which Damon and Ben Affleck won an Oscar for best original screenplay. ‘‘The next morning, he [Kyle] goes: ‘I think I have figured it out. I think you stop growing at the age you become famous’.
‘‘The heady thing about celebrity is that one day it happens
Damon has long prided himself on being so dull that even the paparazzi won’t stop by his home in Los Angeles.
and you wake up, and the world has changed in its relationship to you. I can see how people get wrong-footed by it, because it’s a surreal experience.’’
Damon has long prided himself on being so dull that even the paparazzi won’t stop by his home in Los Angeles. ‘‘I can live a pretty normal life. I can walk around and if people recognise me they don’t freak out,’’ he says. ‘‘Fame can be overwhelming for some people. It distorts their understanding of how human beings engage with one another. They can’t play real people, because they don’t know what it is any more.’’
Damon has walked into rooms with Brad Pitt and George Clooney and watched people swoon. He likes to think of himself as the other guy in the room, in a universe where the other guy earns up to $US20 million a film.
He is more an enigmatic everyman actor than leading man. A shape-shifter, quietly playing a chilling chameleon (The Talented Mr Ripley), a lumpen corporate whistleblower (The Informant!), Liberace’s lover (Behind the Candelabra) or an indefatigable astronaut (The Martian).
And yet, here he is by Sydney Harbour, spruiking his fourth time playing the same character in a blockbuster film franchise. Jason Bourne is about as real as real gets, I guess, for a martial arts expert, master spy and trained killer. Relatability is part of the appeal for audiences – for Bourne and Damon. Bourne wears sweaters and has a cheap haircut. He bleeds. He employs household items with lethal efficiency.
The film raises questions about surveillance and cyber warfare (whistleblower Edward Snowden is namechecked twice), but Bourne is focused on his own past and identity. He’s arguably among the most self-centred action heroes in recent cinema. ‘‘Yeah, self-centred maybe,’’ Damon says. ‘‘He’s like the anti-Bond. He’s sceptical of institutional power. He has a conscience. He’s a serial monogamist.’’
It’s been 14 years since Damon, then 29, starred in The Bourne Identity. He says the 2002 film saved his acting career, after consecutive box-office flops in The Legend of Bagger Vance and All the Pretty Horses.
His phone started ringing again when audiences stumbled on this new type of hero: haunted, lowkey, non-shouty.
Damon has complained that blockbusters were destroying the market for the type of mid-budget, character-driven movies that were his stock in trade – such as The Informant! or TV movie Behind the Candelabra, both directed by Oscar-winner Steven Soderbergh.
I ask him if a big-budget franchise sits comfortably with him. ‘‘I’ve never wanted to say I won’t do certain types of movies. I want to do all types and all budgets, so long as they’re good.
‘‘The business has changed during my career. Four years after The Informant!, we couldn’t get $23 million to do Behind the Candelabra, with Michael [Douglas] and Steven and me. No studio would touch it. Steven said to me: ‘If we were doing The Informant! today, we would be on [TV network] HBO.
‘‘The DVD market has gone and the margins are so much smaller now that they are always looking for franchises and something big.’’
For such a down-home guy, Damon often features in sciencefiction films. So I ask him what the future holds. ‘‘Movies will be gone at some point, I would think,’’ he says. ‘‘It will evolve into some other kind of storytelling – whether it’s immersive, with virtual reality going where it’s going... it’s all in play now.’’
Damon gave a speech last month to graduating students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in his home town of Boston, in which he listed some of the biggest challenges we face: economic inequality, the refugee crisis, global insecurity, climate change, institutional racism.
He also spoke about simulation theory – the notion that reality is a simulation of which we are unaware. Do you think this might all be a simulation, I ask. ‘‘Definitely,’’ he says.
‘‘I mean, if we believe in God, what is God? Could it be possible that that’s some teenager from some other universe?’’
The suggestion that the universe is the plaything of a superintelligent adolescent is a little disquieting, I say. But Damon approaches the conundrum with the same steady hand that Jason Bourne uses to match betterequipped opponents (‘‘Sure, he has a knife. But I’ve got a biro!’’).
‘‘You would still have to imagine that there’s a point,’’ he says. ‘‘It’s still incumbent on you to engage with the more intractable problems and try to fix them.’’
Jason Bourne is released on July 28.