The betrayal Matt Damon will never forgive: “The whole thing was completely nuts”
If the combined might of Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker can’t save a movie, then maybe it’s doomed. Matt Damon refused to believe it, though, and persevered for years through behind-the-scenes woes, post-production troubles, and legal action to support a friend.
He’s always been the type to support his nearest and dearest, whether it’s he and Ben Affleck dragging themselves up by the bootstraps to achieve Academy Award-winning success with Good Will Hunting, his repeated insistence that Casey Affleck is one of the greats, or the fact that he’ll show up in anything whenever he gets a call from Steven Soderbergh.
Another long-time member of Damon’s inner circle is the filmmaker Kenneth Lonergan, who he met in the early 2000s. They quickly became close, and when the writer and director needed someone who’d happily take ninth billing as Aaron Caije in his second feature-length outing, Margaret, he knew who to call.
The sprawling psychological drama would wrap shooting before the end of 2005, but it wouldn’t premiere until 2011. Between those two points, Lonergan and the studio argued over the film’s length and final cut, which reached such a point that the dynamic duo of Scorsese and Schoonmaker were brought in to appease both parties, which was still rejected by producer Gary Gilbert.
Fox Searchlight sued Gilbert and his company, Camelot Pictures, alleging that he hadn’t paid 50% of the production costs, as had previously been agreed. Meanwhile, the outfit sued both Searchlight and Lonergan, claiming they’d actively sabotaged his attempts to bring Margaret across the finish line, suggesting the production banner had paid for “a clearly inferior and unmarketable film.”
While all this was going on, reports emerged that Lonergan had borrowed a million dollars from Matthew Broderick to try and finish his version of the movie, with Damon ultimately being deposed. He had to watch all this from the side-lines until he had his day in court, and he couldn’t believe what his friend was going through.
“I knew it was in trouble, and I was talking to him a lot through all of that,” he explained to Bright Wall/Dark Room. “And I was definitely involved in the whole thing. I mean, it was a real mess. I just remember back in 2008 spending hours and hours on the phone with Fox Searchlight and a lot of email exchanges back and forth and all that. And then the whole regime at Searchlight changed, and a whole new regime came on, and this all went on for years.”
He even tried to circumvent the studio by going directly to the company’s founder and “an old friend of mine,” Tom Rothman, to no avail, leaving him to comment that “the whole thing was completely nuts.” The studio mogul was deposed, too, which Damon said devolved until “eventually it was a big ugly lawsuit.”
It wasn’t released exactly how he wanted it, but Lonergan’s Margaret eventually saw the light of day at 156 minutes, half an hour shorter than he would have liked. The Bourne figurehead has been involved in almost 40 movies or documentaries as an actor, voiceover artist, and producer since then, none of which have been Fox Searchlight or Searchlight Pictures productions, which tells its own story.
