The director Matt Damon compares to Stanley Kubrick
There are few filmmakers more emulated and enamoured than Stanley Kubrick. A precise filmmaker with a penchant for controversy, a number of his creations have come to be accepted as some of the greatest films of all time, from 2001: A Space Odyssey to The Shining. His distinctive style even led to the terming of the ‘Kubrick stare’, an intense look into the camera by an increasingly unstable character.
As one of the most celebrated filmmakers of all time, a comparison to Kubrick can only be taken as a compliment; one Matt Damon was more than willing to dish out to a director he has never even worked with. Sharing the story of a time he visited Ben Affleck on the set of Gone Girl, which contains its own version of the Kubrick stare, Damon compared David Fincher to the A Clockwork Orange director.
When the actor’s good friend Affleck took on the role of Nick Dunne opposite Rosamund Pike’s Amazing Amy, Damon paid him a visit on set and observed Fincher’s directorial style. Widely known to be a similarly specific visionary behind the camera, willing to shoot countless takes until this vision was achieved, Damon found his approach to be comparable to Kubrick’s.
“Fincher has that Kubrick thing,” he declared, “He can’t unsee what he sees.” There was one occasion, in particular, that Damon observed this precision in Fincher’s filmmaking. During the shooting of the scene with Affleck and Pike in the library, he recalled how the director was immediately distracted by the actions of an extra.
“They call background, which is for the extras, the people in the bookstore, and then they call action – so when he calls background and then action, a background actor walks across the frame,” Damon recalled, “And the scene is about to start, but Fincher is already monologuing. He’s going, ‘Who the fuck walks like that?’”
As Fincher silently seethed over the tiny indiscretion, Affleck and Pike continued with the scene. “They get through the whole scene,” Damon explained, “They’re acting their hearts out, but it doesn’t matter because the scene ended before it began.” After the scene ended, Fincher turned to Damon to share his bewilderment before pointing to a makeup artist and declaring, “I mean, that’s how you walk.”
Damon concluded that the tendency to get caught up in the details was both a curse and the cause of his genius, a statement that could just as easily be applied to Kubrick. Each of their specific visions have spawned some of the most precise films of all time.
