‘Gerry’: The movie Matt Damon said was “going to really piss people off”
Ever since his Academy Award-winning breakthrough, Matt Damon has made a point of alternating between expensive studio-backed enterprises and smaller, more character-driven movies, which has played a huge part in ensuring his star power hasn’t waned since Good Will Hunting.
Of course, he was already a relatively experienced actor before he and Ben Affleck’s screenplay won them the Oscar that changed their lives forever, but Damon wasn’t interested in either resting on his laurels or coasting by on its success by chasing the easiest paycheques or most bankable productions.
There’s been plenty of that, in fairness, but more often than not, there tends to be an auteur involved whether it’s working with Doug Liman and Paul Greengrass on the Bourne franchise, earning an Oscar nomination for Ridley Scott’s The Martian, teaming up with Christopher Nolan for Interstellar and Oppenheimer, headlining Zhang Yimou’s The Great Wall, or Steven Soderbergh’s star-studded Ocean’s trilogy.
Terry Gilliam, Martin Scorsese, the Coen brothers, George Miller, Francis Ford Coppola, and Alexander Payne are among the other names Damon has been directed by in an eclectic career, but he had an extra level of involvement in a film he was confident would split opinion down the middle to the point audiences could potentially be actively irritated by the result.
Reuniting with Good Will Hunting‘s Gus Van Sant, Damon also co-wrote the screenplay for the experimental drama Gerry alongside the filmmaker and co-star Casey Affleck. The story is basically 103 minutes of the two leads wandering in the desert and undergoing an existential crisis of sorts while doing so, with the sparse dialogue and meandering dialogue gaining exactly the reception Damon expected.
It’s either intensely profound or heavy-handedly pretentious, depending on a person’s preference, so it makes sense that Damon would describe Gerry to The Guardian as a movie that’s “going to really piss people off.” On the plus side, he was proud of the end results and even nodded towards the overall theme of this career at large.
“And, you know, if in 20 years I’m finished, then I’ll be able to think, ‘Well, at least I did something challenging instead of a bad movie I took for the money.'” It’s just as well he had those eight-figure salaries in his back pocket when Gerry barely even managed to cobble together $250,000 at the box office during its theatrical run, but at least Damon was able to stretch himself as a performer.
Bizarrely, Van Sant opted to compare his intimate character piece to Tomb Raider of all things, particularly “the way the camera works in Tomb Raider – if you want to call it a camera – is that it sort of swings and swims around, always keeping the central figure somewhere in the middle of the frame”. That was the style he sought to emulate, which ended up with the director calling the finished film “Bela Tarr fused with Tomb Raider“.
