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Matt Damon Reveals Which Famous Scene Took Him Months to Prepare For

Aug 10, 2024

The Big Picture

Collider’s Steve Weintraub talks with
The Instigators
stars Matt Damon, Casey Affleck, and Hong Chau.
Directed by Doug Liman,
The Instigators
is a heist comedy that also stars Michael Stuhlbarg, Paul Walter Hauser, Ron Perlman, and Jack Harlow.
Damon, Affleck, and Chau also look back at their careers and discuss their most challenging scenes from past projects.

Matt Damon and Casey Affleck team up again and hit their old stomping grounds in Boston in Doug Liman’s heist comedy The Instigators. The duo star as two unlikely partners in a robbery gone wrong that lands them in a high-speed chase across New England. Along the way, they take one of their therapists, played by Hong Chau, hostage—with her consent, of course—leaving a trail of trouble in their wake.

Ahead of the movie’s release on Apple TV+ on August 9, Collider’s Steve Weintraub spoke with Damon, Affleck, and Chau while at San Diego Comic-Con. Since the movie was filmed in Boston, Weintraub jokingly asked them if anyone thought they were making a Good Will Hunting sequel. They also take a look back at their careers and share some harrowing scenes from previous films, like The Bourne Supremacy, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and Downsizing.

You can check out the full conversation in the video above or in the transcript below.

The Instigators (2024) Follows two robbers who must go on the run with the help of one of their therapists after a theft doesn’t go as planned.Release Date August 2, 2024 Runtime 0 Minutes Writers Chuck MacLean , Casey Affleck , Jeff Robinov , John Graham

‘Good Will Hunting’ Could Enter the Multiverse
Damon and Affleck versus Deadpool and Wolverine

COLLIDER: I’ve got the most important question upfront. You’re filming on the streets in Boston—how many people are coming up to you saying, “Oh, so you guys are finally making that Good Will Hunting sequel?”

MATT DAMON: Were we accused of making a Good Will Hunting sequel?

CASEY AFFLECK: I never got that one.

DAMON: I think people were smart enough to know we’re never going to make a sequel to that movie. [Laughs]

I’ve learned something: never say never in this business.

DAMON: That’s fair. Who knows? We might be really desperate someday.

Look, Hugh Jackman and Wolverine—he swore he was done.

AFFLECK: And then they brought him back.

DAMON: I mean, maybe there’s a multiverse where Good Will comes back.

AFFLECK: With Wolverine and Deadpool. [Laughs]

Related Ryan Reynolds Reacts To Deadpool Beating Jesus at the Box Office The Passion of the ‘Pool.

Like I said, I’m at Comic-Con, and I am curious for the three of you, is there anything that you’d actually collect? If you were at Comic-Con, would you be walking around looking to buy something?

AFFLECK: I don’t know what they have. I’ve not been to Comic-Con. I collect first-edition books and still have my comic book collection from when I was a kid, but I don’t buy them anymore.

DAMON: I don’t collect anything, actually.

AFFLECK: I collect bad reviews. [Laughs] Got a couple of those.

DAMON: I do, too. I throw them away. I don’t like them.

AFFLECK: I got a couple with Steve Weintraub’s name on top.

Read Our ‘The Instigators’ Review

No, all the reviews on Collider are from somebody else. I take no responsibility.

HONG CHAU: Oh, I have not had the pleasure of going to Comic-Con, and I don’t collect anything, but I have little kids—a three-year-old—so maybe soon I will start collecting something. I’m not sure.

‘The Instigators’ Trio Take a Look Back at Their Careers
“I’m not complaining, I’m just saying there are circumstances…”

For all three of you, what do you consider the toughest scene or sequence of your career thus far in terms of whatever it entailed, whether it be a weird oner or the action or you had one take to get it right? Is there one scene or sequence that you think is the hardest of your career?

DAMON: Wow, that’s an excellent question. One thing that was really hard for me was there was a scene in the second Bourne movie where my car goes into a river, and Franka [Potente] has been shot, and I realized she’s dead, and then I gotta go get air from an air pocket, but it all happened underwater. So for that one, I spent a couple of months in a swimming pool after work every day, just practicing with the stunt guys being underwater and getting my air taken away. It was really smart what they did; they gave me little tasks like tying a shoe underwater or little things, and they built a car out of PVC pipe, so I could swim up and out if I had to, but just to be used to being in an enclosed area underwater. They just worked with me to get me comfortable underwater in an enclosed space.

When we finally shot it in this tank, they put milk in the tank in the water to make it look like river water and particulate and all this stuff, so you couldn’t really see. So I was just getting ready to be able to be underwater in an enclosed space without any vision. That took a while. It wasn’t hard when we shot it because we shot it relatively easily because I’d worked so hard in prep, but it kept me up at night a lot. That was definitely one that got my attention.

Image via Universal Pictures

AFFLECK: I’d never thought about that, but while Matt was talking, I wasn’t listening, I was just thinking of my own stories, and I was thinking it’s kind of fun to think about the old, super difficult sequences now without all the emotion attached to it or feeling like a failure. I’ve got two for you. One was on Gone Baby Gone; there was someone who had taken a child, and the child ended up dying, and I found that. I was trying to imagine, what that reaction would be because it wasn’t scripted as being anything one way or the other. I saw the dummy that they were using, and it was just so, so horrible. I thought, “It would be upsetting. I would vomit.” So I said, “I would think this is what’s gonna happen.” I didn’t want to do it with, like, a can of soup or some tube behind my head. I wanted to be able to turn around and do it. I’m looking at it this way, at the body, and then turn this way, so I wanted to really just do it. So I filled my stomach, and then I drank as much liquid as I could, but I’ve got a really strong stomach for some reason.

So, I went up there, and it was take after take of trying to vomit and not working, so putting in more liquid and more food, and then trying to sort of finger-gag, and then it was like, “Damn it, that’s not gonna work. We’re gonna have to figure something else out.” But I was determined that was what felt like the real response. We paused to reset what was gonna happen and to move the camera so that I could find it one way, do it in a separate shot, and in that reset, it just rose up on me, and I puked while they were moving the camera, just like a gallon. So that was enormously difficult physically, and I also felt a disappointment, so it was hard on me.

DAMON: [Laughs] That’s a horrible story.

AFFLECK: That’s a bad story. I got another one for you, which was in The Assassination of Jesse James. Typically, audition scenes are very hard. I don’t know if it’s because you’ve done it once and you’ve done it well, and then months later you have to redo it again. I had auditioned for that movie many times to try to get it, and so I knew this one long monologue. He’s already killed Jesse James, and now he’s tried to remake his life, and he’s living in the mountains. The way he’s remade his life is it was the late 19th century, he’s got a few brothels, and he’s in this little mining town. Some young woman has come to work for him, and he’s telling her, “Don’t work for me…”

Image via Warner Bros.

Anyway, it’s a really long, long monologue, and we’re in the Rockies in Canada at night in the winter, and it’s period clothing—I’m not complaining, I’m just saying there’s circumstances—it was like minus 50, and I had to deliver this monologue that I already felt like I’d done well in the audition process. I was not doing it, and the director is a madman for, like, “Do a thousand takes.” I couldn’t feel my face, I couldn’t feel my limbs, and I was having to say it over and over and over and over again. I was looking around at the faces of the crew and everyone hating me for not getting it right, and then finally, the sun came up, and I felt like I just never got that important scene right. The director came up, and I said, “I’m so sorry.” And he was like, “Man, I think we got it in take one.” And I was like, “Well, why did you just put me through hell?” And he was like, “Oh, I wanted to see if we can get better.” That was it. So, those were two difficult sequences. What do you got, Hong?

CHAU: With Downsizing, that was my first really big role, and I’m just thinking specifically of that monologue where we’re at the kitchen table with Christoph Waltz and Udo Kier. They very unkindly scheduled it for right after lunch, and I’m my worst after lunch, after eating a meal, and so I was kind of worried about that. I don’t know if I ate because I was afraid of getting, like, food coma that you get after lunch.

DAMON: You got it one take. You got it in the first take, and then he had to do another, which was equally incredible. And he can shoot takes if he needs them. It was so good. Then the corresponding shot was a three-shot of Udo, Christoph, and me sitting there just stunned. [Laughs] Oh man, I remember that so well.

CHAU: Yeah, but I just remembered that it was after lunch, and I was like, “Oh my god, I’m so screwed.”

Image via Paramount Pictures

DAMON: What’s so crazy to me is I remember that as being a sign of a virtuosic talent. I remember it not seeming hard to you, and it was such a hard monologue and you crushed it so completely that I was like, “Wow, maybe for some people, things aren’t hard for them or something.”

CHAU: No, it was hard. I was definitely white-knuckling that one.

The Instigators is now streaming on Apple TV+.

Watch on Apple TV

Disclaimer: This story is auto-aggregated by a computer program and has not been created or edited by filmibee.
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