“I’m mildly offended by that”: how Steven Spielberg’s ruthless advice inspired Matt Damon
If Steven Spielberg had gotten his way, the title character of Saving Private Ryan would have been played by an unknown actor, only for Matt Damon to go and ruin his plans by winning an Academy Award.
When cameras began rolling on the legendary director’s immersive World War II epic in June 1997, Damon was arguably best known for his performance in Denzel Washington’s Courage Under Fire, which saw him leave the Oscar-winning actor blown away with an emaciated turn that did serious damage to his health.
Spielberg had been on the hunt for a fresh-faced all-American everyman to serve as the narrative linchpin of Saving Private Ryan, and a well-timed visit to the set of Good Will Hunting saw Robin Williams introduce him to the performer who perfectly suited the character he’d envisioned.
Unbeknown to Spielberg, though, by the time the movie that ultimately won him another Oscar for ‘Best Director’ hit cinemas in July 1998, Damon was one of Hollywood’s hottest properties. Good Will Hunting ended his days of obscurity, while Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rainmaker gave him a leading role under one of the industry’s foremost auteurs at the height of the short-lived John Grisham craze.
This had all yet to transpire during production, of course, but working with Spielberg saw Damon pick up some invaluable inspiration that would serve him very well. After the filmmaker had wrapped up one scene and made moves to embark on the next, Damon suggested that he could have done better and pitched another take or two.
“I said, ‘Steven, you know, don’t you think we should have done a couple more takes of that thing?,” he explained to The Off-Camera Show. “He turned on a dime and said, ‘I could spend another hour on that scene and perhaps make it 10% better, or I could go do another great shot. I’m going to do the shot.”
Damon recalled how his first reaction was, “I’m mildly offended by that”, before the lightbulb went off. As both an actor and aspiring filmmaker, he was trying to reconcile the differences between the micro and the macro in the moment, but Spielberg was experienced enough to always be more concerned with the bigger picture. The star wanted to be happy with the scene in isolation, whereas the director was thinking of Saving Private Ryan as a completed work of cinema.
Instead of repeating the same scene to nail it perfectly without flaws, Spielberg knew that he had a good enough version to work with that wouldn’t affect the end product in the slightest, and he carried on about his business without giving a second thought to a solitary take that Damon wasn’t entirely satisfied with.
He realised at that moment that cinema isn’t “all about any one person’s thing, it’s really about the director,” and it was an eye-opener that informed his career on either side of the camera from that point on.
