The Matt Damon movie accused of exploiting a real-life murder: “Sure to profit handsomely”
In comparison to the 100+ film and television credits he’s amassed in his career, Matt Damon hasn’t played a huge amount of real-life figures, and it wasn’t even one of those that saw him accused of exploiting a tragedy in the name of Hollywood entertainment.
For whatever reason, he’s been taking the biographical route more often as he’s gotten older. Between his feature-length debut in 1988’s Mystic Pizza and Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! 21 years later, Geronimo: An American Legend‘s Britton Davis was the only real person he’d ever inhabited onscreen.
Technically, you could include Wilhelm Grimm, but only with a huge asterisk next to his name, since Terry Gilliam’s big-budget fantasy was hardly a biopic. Since then, the star has been a South African rugby player, Liberace’s lover, a 14th-century French nobleman, a World War II-era military general, and more.
After adding a solitary real person to his filmography in the first two decades of his professional life, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter has notched another eight since 2009, and while Stillwater‘s Bill Baker was written for the screen and directed by Tom McCarthy, its inspirations didn’t go unnoticed.
In the 2021 crime drama, the leading man’s blue-collar worker travels to France to prove his daughter’s innocence after she’s imprisoned for a murder that she’s adamant she didn’t commit. It wasn’t marketed as being a true story, or even based on one, but Amanda Knox immediately saw the parallels to her life.
When studying in Italy, Knox was convicted of the murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher, and sentenced to 26 years in prison. Maintaining her innocence, the conviction was overturned two years later, and she was acquitted, only for that to be overturned, after which she was tried again, convicted again, and in 2015, ultimately acquitted again.
Stillwater was obviously inspired by the case, whether anyone involved wanted to say it out loud or not. “In those four years of wrongful imprisonment and eight years of trial, I had near-zero agency,” Knox shared. “Everyone else in that ‘saga’ had more influence over events than I did.”
Focusing her ire on McCarthy and Damon’s film, she blasted it for the way it had “erased the corruption and ineptitude of the authorities.” Through its fictional lens, Knox accused the director of making something that “reinforces an image of me as a guilty and untrustworthy person,” before calling out the star.
“And with Matt Damon’s star power, both are sure to profit handsomely off this fictionalisation of ‘the Amanda Knox saga’ that is sure to leave plenty of viewers wondering, ‘Maybe the real-life Amanda was involved somehow,'” she concluded. Knox conceded that the filmmakers weren’t obligated to consult her about Stillwater, but that didn’t make her any less indignant toward the movie exploiting her ordeal.
