The movie Matt Damon knew was doomed from the start: “This is exactly how disasters happen”
Every lead actor in Hollywood who has enjoyed a long career has experienced the same feeling at one point or another. After signing up for a film with the best intentions to deliver something great, they’ve had a horrifying revelation that the entire project is a sinking ship. No matter how they try to change things, they feel in their gut that the movie is a disaster waiting to happen. In that situation, they can only give their best for something they know will fail. To his credit, Matt Damon was open and honest about the time this happened to him – and how awful it felt every single day during production.
In 2021, Damon appeared on Marc Maron’s superb WTF podcast to discuss his storied career. When talk turned to the handful of misfires on his CV, the Bourne Identity star admitted that his daughter – who was 15 at the time – loves busting his chops when he makes a flop. In fact, he revealed that she purposely doesn’t watch the films she thinks stand a chance of being good. Instead, she prefers solely to watch the bad ones, so she has ammunition to fire at her dad.
He chuckled, “She just likes giving me shit. She’s playfully hard on me. She doesn’t go to see my movies on purpose, the ones she thinks might be good. She crushes me on the ones that don’t work.”
The movie that gave Damon’s daughter the most mileage in her quest to make him feel like an idiot came in 2016. This was the year that saw the release of The Great Wall, a misbegotten $150million blockbuster in which Damon played a European mercenary who sides with the Imperial army to battle an invading alien race attempting to breach the Great Wall of China. It was directed by House of Flying Daggers icon Zhang Yimou and co-starred Chinese superstars Andy Lau and Jing Tian, so it’s easy to see why Damon thought it was a good idea. Unfortunately, the movie was a critical and commercial disaster, and Damon took the brunt of the flak aimed at the production.
In truth, Damon knew almost from the very start that The Great Wall was destined to go down in flames. When he found out that Yimou was altering his vision for the film at the suggestion of its Hollywood backers, he knew it was doomed. He admitted, “I was like, ‘This is exactly how disasters happen. It doesn’t cohere. It doesn’t work as a movie.”
However, by then, Damon was committed to the film and decided he wouldn’t cut and run. The experience of making The Great Wall, therefore, taught him a valuable lesson about doing your best every day, even in dire circumstances. He explained, “I came to consider that the definition of a professional actor; knowing you’re in a turkey and going, ‘OK, I’ve got four more months. It’s the up-at-dawn siege on Hamburger Hill. I am definitely going to die here, but I’m doing it.’ That’s as shitty as you can feel creatively, I think. I hope to never have that feeling again.”
Fast forward to 2023, and Damon admitted to feeling depressed during a particularly tough movie shoot. He didn’t specifically mention The Great Wall by name this time, but most observers were pretty sure he was talking about that film again. He told Jake’s Takes, “I remember halfway through production, and you’ve still got months to go, and you’ve taken your family somewhere…and you’ve inconvenienced them.”
Luckily for Damon, his wife noticed the black cloud hovering over her husband and stepped in. He revealed, “I remember my wife pulling me up because I fell into a depression about, like, ‘What have I done?'” She told him, “We’re here now,” and encouraged him to make the best of it, and he admitted her advice truly helped him approach every day with the “best possible attitude.”
At the end of the day, every actor is bound to make a dud from time to time – and The Great Wall is one Damon’s daughter will never let him forget. He laughed when he told Maron that she refers to the film as The Wall because she knows he will correct her and say, “Come on, it’s called The Great Wall.”
With the setup in place, she can deliver the perfect punchline: “Dad, there’s nothing great about that movie.”
