The one film Matt Damon called a “terrifying, perfect movie”
Alongside his Hollywood wingman Ben Affleck, Matt Damon became an overnight hero in 1997 following the success of their debut movie, Good Will Hunting.
Damon and Affleck co-wrote and starred in the classic Gus Van Sant-directed film and took home Academy Awards for ‘Best Original Screenplay’. To crown its achievement, Robin Williams also won an Oscar for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for his work on the movie. It signified a moment that the two men would never forget. It would propel their careers into the stratosphere.
“Ben has always had an incredible charisma. People are just getting introduced to it through film,” Damon told The Los Angeles Times while reflecting on their friendship in 1999. “It’s hard to think of your best friend as a movie star, but the fact that he is [stems from] the extent to which parts of the real him come through. He is somebody that everybody wants to be around.”
Following the success of their movie debut, Affleck and Damon remained close friends and pursued respective acting careers. The latter established himself as an indelible presence with appearances in 1999’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and the Bourne action franchise thereafter.
Damon’s talent and cinematic range can be traced back to his upbringing, during which he immersed himself in high-quality New Hollywood cinema. When selecting his five favourite movies of all time for a feature with Rotten Tomatoes, Damon revealed himself to be a particular fan of Robert De Niro, with Goodfellas, The Godfather Part II and Midnight Run making up three of the choices.
“I guess so,” Damon replied when asked if these selections reveal an affection for the legendary actor. “I put three of his movies in there! I didn’t do that on purpose. I am a huge fan of his, though, and I love him a lot.”
After revealing his love for the idiosyncratic wit of Stanley Kubrick and Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Damon revealed Steven Spielberg’s 1975 classic, Jaws, as a favourite in the horror realm.
“That’s a terrifying, perfect movie,” Damon said of the selection. “It’s simple and kind of perfect and beautiful. It’s early Spielberg, and it just shows … I mean, I know it was a mistake that the shark wasn’t ready, but the idea of not seeing the shark is just absolutely brilliant”.
He added: “It tapped into the most primal and terrifying aspects of swimming in the ocean. And the acting is great, all the characters are great. And it’s almost impossible to shoot on a boat, and yet he did it with such unbelievable mastery.”
Elaborating, Damon used the author Ernest Hemingway as an example of channelling simplicity into masterful works of art. “It’s like when Hemingway writes, I always go, ‘I know all those words. I just never thought to put them in that order.’ So, there’s nothing that Steven’s doing that’s a trick. He’s got the same equipment everyone else has. He’s just better at telling a visual story.”
Based on Peter Benchley’s best-selling novel, Jaws is one of Spielberg’s most famous and brilliant works. It features a terrifying white shark who acts as a constant reminder of our mortality. Police chief Martin Brody, ichthyologist Matt Hooper and ship captain Quint, team up to battle this threat but fighting nature is always a losing battle. Spielberg tapped into the vulnerable psychology of fear, and the film’s impact was so great that many people avoided water bodies altogether.
“I was naive about the ocean, basically. I was pretty naive about Mother Nature, and the hubris of a filmmaker who thinks he can conquer the elements was foolhardy,” Spielberg reflected. “But I was too young to know I was being foolhardy when I demanded that we shoot the film in the Atlantic Ocean and not in a North Hollywood tank. But had I to do it all over again I would have gone back to the sea because it was the only way for the audience to feel that these three men were cast adrift with a great white shark hunting them.”
The picture has gone down in history as one of the most perfectly put-together pictures ever put to celluloid.
