The “douchey” 2011 moment Matt Damon wants everyone to forget: “Stupid and unprofessional”
Unless you’ve got a particular aversion to Matt Damon, he’s not really known for being a douche. He’s said some douchey things, as every famous person has, but by and large, not a douche.
Objectively, Ben Affleck has usually come off as more of a douche than his lifelong best friend, but most of those douchey antics occurred in the pre-Gigli era, before he screwed his head on straight and realised that his career and reputation weren’t circling a drain, but a garbage disposal.
Generally speaking, Damon is a popular actor. Audiences like him, and the industry’s highest-profile directors like him even more, which is why he’s worked with so many of them. He’s also an Academy Award-winning screenwriter, which gives him a bit of leeway to comment on the strength of a script.
However, when he unleashed a tirade in the direction of one particular script, it made headlines. Back in 2011, the Jason Bourne figurehead absolutely savaged Tony Gilroy’s draft of The Bourne Ultimatum, with the inference being that he’d completely phoned it in, thanks to the deal he’d made to pen it.
Gilroy, who was the sole credited writer on The Bourne Supremacy, negotiated to write a single draft of the trilogy-closer, after which he’d take no notes from the studio or do any rewrites. Damon saw the script, fucking hated it, and it’s not a coincidence that Ultimatum was the only one of his four Bourne flicks that listed more than two screenwriters in the credits.
It’s never a good look for anyone to badmouth one of their colleagues, especially when it’s an Oscar-winning writer bashing an Oscar-nominated writer, but having been caught in the heat of the moment and gone full scorched earth on Gilroy’s take on the threequel, Damon wanted to apologise.
“My feelings were hurt, that’s all,” he reflected. “And that’s exactly why I shouldn’t have said anything. This is between me and him. So, saying anything publicly is fucking stupid and unprofessional, and just kind of douchey of me.” Unfortunately, once you let the genie out of the bottle, you can’t put it back in.
In the end, Gilroy’s draft, which The Odyssey star called so bad it was a career-killer waiting to happen, was polished by George Nolfi, who’d worked on Ocean’s Twelve, and Scott Z Burns, who penned The Informant! Given that, not to mention Damon’s close relationship with the director of both those films, Steven Soderbergh, you’d have to think he had a hand in their recruitment.
We’ll never know if Gilroy’s Ultimatum script was really that bad, because when the picture was released in August 2007, it debuted to rave reviews and cemented the triptych as one of the 21st century’s greatest big-screen trilogies, at least until Damon and Paul Greengrass made a fourth one.
