Matt Damon remembered being put in his place by one of Hollywood’s finest as he reminisced on his decades-long career.
During an appearance on the “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” podcast, the Oscar-winner revealed that Clint Eastwood had a few choice words for the actor while they worked together on the 2009 docudrama “Invictus.”
While running down the list of directors Damon worked with, O’Brien admitted he couldn’t get a sense of Eastwood’s style.
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“I worked with him twice, and the first time was ‘Invictus,’” Damon recalled. “So I was playing a South African rugby player, and that’s a really tough accent to do.”
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Damon spent six months working with a dialect coach to master the accent, with little interest from his director.
“It was a long … it was a lot of work,” Damon said. “And I showed up and, and I’m, I’m ready. It’s like my chance to work with, you know, one of my heroes.”
Damon continued, “The very first take, I did it. And meanwhile, I’ve done this so many thousands of times. I have a number of different ways that I’m thinking of maybe doing the scene. So he goes, ‘Cut, print, move on.’
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“I go, I go, ‘Hang on, hang on, hang on, boss. I want to, you know, I want to do another one. I mean, I wasn’t even in costume.’ You know, that was like, that was the first one.
Damon remembered that Eastwood quickly responded, “He goes, ‘Why you wanna waste everybody’s time?'”
“I went, ‘No, I guess we’re moving on.”
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While Eastwood’s words may have seemed off-putting, the “Bourne Identity” actor insisted there was a “kindness” to his message.
“He is a lovely guy. What was really interesting is the second movie I did with him, there was this … it builds to a head with this, a scene with me and this 9-year-old kid,” Damon said. “The 9-year-old kid was a non-actor, and we had done one take for everybody, all through ‘Invictus.’
“We must have done 40 takes with this little boy … we were trying to get this; it was this kind of huge moment in the film, and we were trying to get this stuff out of him. Clint was right next to me … like, we were right next to the camera together just working with this boy.”
He added, “His whole mentality was … your crew will go to the ends of the earth for you if as long as you’re not taxing them on every shot. When we need to get in there, we get in there. But for the most part we can … professional actors are gonna show up with something good. We keep the momentum.”
