Matt Damon names the single best director he ever worked with: “I couldn’t believe it”
One of the only things Matt Damon has left on his to-do list is directing a movie of his own, but despite talking about it for years, he’s never taken the final plunge and stepped behind the camera.
Since they’re basically a hive mind, it’s not unreasonable to assume that he could potentially be as good as Ben Affleck if and when he decides to cash the cheque his mouth has been writing for a long time, and he’s worked with enough top-tier filmmakers to have picked up a few tricks, tips, and hints.
That was the main difference between the lifelong best friends in their post-Good Will Hunting years; whereas Affleck chased movie stardom and started collaborating with the likes of Michael Bay and John Woo to headline blockbusters, Damon preferred to surround himself with an eclectic array of auteurs.
Francis Ford Coppola, Anthony Minghella, the Farrelly brothers, Terry Gilliam, Clint Eastwood, Paul Greengrass, and Martin Scorsese were all added to the collection, while Affleck toiled to restore his credibility in the wake of a disastrous 2003 that saw Daredevil, Paycheck, and Gigli threaten to turn him into a laughing stock for good.
Even now, Damon will always answer the phone when Steven Soderbergh calls, he’s become an increasingly important part of Christopher Nolan’s repertory, and he’s worked under Ridley Scott, Taika Waititi, Zhang Yimou, and, of course, Ben Affleck. However, only one of them was bestowed with the “genius tag,” and it’s fitting for one of the undoubted all-time greats.
“He’s a prodigy now who has years and years of experience,” he mused, reflecting on his dalliance with Steven Spielberg. “The thing that always struck me about working with him is that he didn’t storyboard Saving Private Ryan. I asked him one day where the storyboards were, and he just looked at me and said, ‘I don’t use storyboards, I’m just doing this off the top of my head.'”
You’d have thought that was a risky move for a World War II epic with a blockbuster-sized budget, never mind one that featured several immersive and eardrum-shattering set pieces involving hundreds of extras, multiple cameras, explosions, squibs, smoke, and plenty more bells and whistles besides.
And yet, Spielberg was completely unbothered. “And the shots, I mean, they go on for minutes at a time,” Damon marvelled. “There are tanks, and explosions and people running, this incredible tension in all these shots. I said, ‘How are you doing that without storyboards?’ And he looked at me and said, ‘That’s the rush. That’s the rush’. I couldn’t believe it.”
Saving Private Ryan didn’t win over everyone in the industry, but it sure as shit won over Damon. That’s the only time they’ve ever partnered up on a picture, and even after almost three decades, he can still barely wrap his head around how on earth Spielberg managed to shoot the entire thing on the fly.
