Matt Damon picks his favourite Steven Spielberg movie
Manifesting a career peppered with diverse and impactful roles, Matt Damon has seamlessly woven himself into the tapestry of contemporary cinema. An actor whose repertoire spans from gritty, intense dramas to light-hearted comedies, his modestly enigmatic presence on screen has always managed to capture the audience’s undivided attention, cultivating quietly profound respect in the industry.
Since his major breakthrough with long-time friend and collaborator Ben Affleck with the powerful and poignant 1997 drama Good Will Hunting, which the two also co-wrote as well as starred in, Damon has carved a markedly distinct career which has seen him working with some of the industry’s biggest directors, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Soderbergh, Terry Gilliam and the Coen brothers. Unlike many actors of the 1990s who faded into obscurity, both he and Affleck have managed to not only stay relevant but make regular and consistently good contributions to Hollywood.
On top of leading roles, most prominently and recently in Ridley Scott’s The Martian and opposite Christian Bale in James Mangold’s sports biographical drama Ford v Ferrari, Affleck has established an amazingly prolific strain of his career as a supporting actor. This year, he received critical acclaim for portraying General Leslie Groves in Christopher Nolan’s nuclear biopic Oppenheimer.
Before that, it was in the Affleck-directed Air – an unexpectedly popular hit exploring the marketing decisions of Nike in creating the Air Jordan shoe line. It was during the premiere for Air that Damon shared with Letterboxd his reverence for several other filmmakers and actors, whittling down his favourite movies to four – and giving us his favourite Steven Spielberg movie of all time.
After throwing nods to The Godfather (Parts I and II, as he made sure to point out) and Pulp Fiction, which he credited as showing him “what movies could do”, the actor decided that “I have to pick one of Steven’s [Spielberg] there.” Considering Spielberg has a career spanning over 50 years, with dozens of titles under his belt, it might be a daunting task to distil the legendary filmmaker’s career down to just one definitive movie.
Not for Damon, who was pretty quick to identify an early example of Speilberg’s work, saying: “You’d have to put Jaws up there.” Released in 1975, Jaws marked Speilberg’s third directorial effort at only 29 years old. However, it signified his first major breakthrough as a filmmaker, with the previous Duel being a television movie and The Sugarland Express his debut feature project.
Based on the 1974 novel of the same name by Peter Benchley, it tells the story of a police chief in a small coastal New England town who enlists the help of a young marine biologist and a wizened, legendary shark hunter to help kill a huge white shark terrorizing their beach, thus putting an end to a slew of gory killings that have plagued the summer. It was an undeniable masterpiece, re-shaping the cinematic landscape by setting the formula for the blockbuster we know today.
