The one director Matt Damon knew everyone wanted: “Incredible”
The rise of Matt Damon wasn’t accidental.
He and Ben Affleck were out there to create their own luck whenever they worked on Good Will Hunting, and even though their careers took totally different paths, Damon was still looking to do everything he could to leave an impression whenever he got onscreen. He would probably tell you that not everything that he has made has been absolutely perfect, but he felt that there are a few players in Hollywood that no one wants to say no to for a second.
Then again, Damon has had the kind of resume that not many people get to have at this stage in the game. Some of the biggest directors in the world have taken a swing at him, and when looking at all of the classic movies that he has made, the fact that he got to learn how everyone from Steven Spielberg to Christopher Nolan to Francis Ford Coppola works every single day was a different lesson for him in how to centre an actor in the story.
He knew that every movie was a much different beast whenever he worked on them, but there were also going to be movies that had box office smash written on them before they were even made. The Oceans series all came together through pure fun on the part of every actor, and when looking through the rest of his filmography, no one would have been able to come anywhere close to what he did when he was making the Bourne movies.
There were a lot of ways for him to knock it out of the park at the box office, but he felt that there was a special place in cinema history reserved for Martin Scorsese. Damon was always looking for visionaries whenever he worked on some of his greatest works, and while Gus Van Sant did help him with a lot of pointers on his earliest works, he felt that working with someone like Scorsese had the potential to be huge if he happened to have the right script for him.
He wasn’t exactly going to have the same relationship Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio did or anything, but when you look at the way that both of them worked together, there was still some electricity in the way that they worked. Damon was honoured to even be on one of those sets, and even though he had been working on the Bourne movies around the same time, there was no way that he could see anyone passing up the opportunity to work with someone like Scorsese.
It was going to be hard work, but even if Damon felt that some of Scorsese’s movies didn’t draw the biggest audience all of the time, every actor would feel it was worth it to work with the cinema legend, saying, “His movies classically don’t make a lot of money, even the masterpieces, Goodfellas, Raging Bull, they don’t actually make a lot of money at the box office. It’s this incredible experience because you’re working with him, which is why he can get any actor he wants, everyone will cut their fee and go and work with Marty, but in terms of looking at your career, you go, ‘Well, okay, so that’s number two.’”
And the reason why Scorsese’s films worked so well was that you could still see the visionary who started everything off back in the day. There are certain themes that still run through all of his movies, but there are also moments where you can get the sense that he’s still that kid trying his best to make whatever new smash comes his way every single time he gets the right script.
So while he might make back the same kind of profit that a Marvel movie does these days, Scorsese is the kind that still feels like an auteur in cinema. And for someone like Damon who thrived on the energy created onscreen, he could see the passion in pretty much every single frame that he and Scorsese worked on.
