The fame game

Sunday, August 29, 2004

Charles Wooley goes on the road with actor Matt Damon, surely the nicest guy in Hollywood, as he plays the fame game promoting his new movie and charming his Australian fans from coast to coast.

INTRO — CHARLES WOOLEY: His publicists are really going to love this but Matt Damon really is the sort of bloke who gives Hollywood a good name. He was here this past week to promote his latest movie The Bourne Supremacy, but in the event, what he promoted most was his own reputation as an all-round good guy. He's famous for movies like Good Will Hunting and The Talented Mr Ripley and I have to say for being nice. And, in an industry full of men and women behaving badly, Mr Damon is, sadly, something of a rarity. So perhaps it was not surprising he charmed the pants off the local media, this crusty old reporter included.

STORY — CHARLES WOOLEY: By definition, stars are out of reach that twinkle remotely from another constellation. They are mysterious and unknowable and, in fact, nothing like the nice obliging down-to-earth Matt Damon who redefines all our notions of fame.

CHARLES WOOLEY: You love the work. Do you love the fame?

MATT DAMON: No, no, no, no, that's the kind of drawback.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Is that the down side?

MATT DAMON: Yeah, I mean, but as down sides go it's not that bad, you know, you get good seats in restaurants and, you know, people kind of kiss your arse so it's, you know, not that bad.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Yeah, that's alright. I've haven't experienced that.

MATT DAMON: The loss of anonymity is what's a pain. You don't really realise how great anonymity is until you lose it.

CHARLES WOOLEY: He copes by being nice, so nice that he even took time on the red carpet this week to make a birthday call to the unknown friend of an unknown fan. Not only time for fans, but time for early-morning DJs, and still at it late at night.

CHARLES WOOLEY: I read — I don't know your figures this time around — but last time you were here, you did 101 interviews in 4.5 days.

MATT DAMON: Exactly, which is exactly a quarter of what I normally do. I've done as many as 94 interviews in a day in America.

CHARLES WOOLEY: My fear would be being interviewer number 102.

MATT DAMON: Well, you'd want to be — if it were me I'd rather be number 1 or number 102, you know, it's better than 56.

CHARLES WOOLEY: When fame enters a room, everything changes. Even at an exclusive cocktail party, the temperature drops. But Matt works the room and everyone warms to his role as the ordinary bloke, a part he plays so well it mightn't even be an act.

CHARLES WOOLEY: So you try to draw the cloak of an ordinary life around you to maintain your mystery.

MATT DAMON: Yeah, I think it's more of a kind of hiding in plain sight.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Hiding in plain sight?

MATT DAMON: Yeah, you go out and you do the interviews...

CHARLES WOOLEY: It's a nice expression.

MATT DAMON: …and you're perfectly personable and polite but you don't really give up, you know...

CHARLES WOOLEY: So, as an actor, I mean to learn your trade or the ongoing learning of your trade is to move among people and observe them but you can't do that, can you, because you change them by virtually being there?

MATT DAMON: That's exactly right, yeah, that's the big drawback. That's why you see people's work kind of fall off the longer they're famous. It's really hard to try to — I mean you have to be vigilant in trying to find ways to keep observing people. Because if you're walking into a room and everybody's behaviour is changing, you're never going to be able to see people behaving as they do, you know, in the wild, as it were.

CHARLES WOOLEY: We're here to promote a movie too, aren't we?

MATT DAMON: Nah, we don't have to talk about the movie.

CHARLES WOOLEY: No, well, I better ask you something about the movie. The car chase. I had the misfortune to sit too close to the screen.

MATT DAMON: Oh, that's a problem, yeah.

CHARLES WOOLEY: You appeared to me to be in that car and I, of course, working in television, I was trying to work out how you did it.

MATT DAMON: They had a steering wheel and a seat put on the roof of the car that I was in, a professional driver who sat on the roof of the car, and they had a stunt driver in the other car and they had my steering wheel disconnected and the camera operator was sitting to my right. We just took off at 100k and went through this...

CHARLES WOOLEY: So you're just along for this rough ride?

MATT DAMON: Yeah, and slammed into each other...

CHARLES WOOLEY: You must trust those guys.

MATT DAMON: Oh, yeah, implicitly. They're great.

CHARLES WOOLEY: The movie is a spy thriller, The Bourne Supremacy, from the Robert Ludlum best-seller. Matt plays Jason Bourne, a disaffected CIA assassin with amnesia. But forget the unlikely plot — it's been a huge success overseas and it's expecting a long run here.

CHARLES WOOLEY: And you sprint and you run a lot.

MATT DAMON: I do a lot of running.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Are you a great runner?

MATT DAMON: No, I'm not a great runner. I actually saw some of the playback and slightly altered the way that I ran...

CHARLES WOOLEY: Really?

MATT DAMON: …because I looked a little goofy. When I ride the subway in New York, if I hear the train coming, you know, and I'm coming down the stairs, you know, I go, "You know what, there's gonna be another one." I kind of walk down.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Even if you saw the movie Mystic Pizza back in 1988 with Julia Roberts, you might have missed Matt Damon. The 17-year-old high school student had just one line but a line he's never forgotten.

MATT DAMON: The line was, "Mum, do you want my green stuff?" because we were sitting around eating lobster in the scene and that was my one line.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Sometimes it's one line — like Tony Curtis was a telegraph boy — one line and you're discovered.

MATT DAMON: Yeah, that definitely wasn't the case with me. I mean, I ... you know, it was another 10 years before my big break.

CHARLES WOOLEY: The film was Good Will Hunting in which he co-starred with his best mate, Ben Affleck. They wrote it together and won an Oscar for Best Screenplay. He was on a roll. Next came the part of the bisexual, murderous, but charming, con man in The Talented Mr Ripley. It was a great film and a courageous role, hinting perhaps at behind the smile there's a steely, talented actor making brave choices.

MATT DAMON: To play a character with, you know, whose sexuality was in question, who was, you know, who was doing the things he was doing for the reasons he was doing them which, you know, weren't kind of cut-and-dried kind of Hollywood, you know, easy-to-follow reasons. It's a complicated story. I just knew it was a once in a lifetime. It felt like a once in a lifetime kind of role.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Then, from completely outside the square, came the comedy Stuck On You, directed by the celebrated and very off-the-wall Farrelly brothers who wooed him over a beer at Matt's place.

MATT DAMON: We were sitting there and Pete Farrelly says to me, "Hey, can I use your bathroom?" and I said, "Sure, sure, it's right down the hall there." So I'm sitting there talking to Bobby and a minute later he comes out and he's soaking wet, absolutely naked except for a towel around his waist with shampoo in his hair, and he walks out and he goes, "Have you got any conditioner?" So that was kind of...

CHARLES WOOLEY: You said, "I gotta make this movie."

MATT DAMON: Yeah, I said, "I've got to work with these guys."

CHARLES WOOLEY: In matters of real-life romance, Matt used to date, famously, the likes of Minnie Driver, a one-time co-star. And later, there was Winona Ryder.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Can I talk about girls?

MATT DAMON: Yeah, yeah, sure.

CHARLES WOOLEY: You don't have a high-profile girlfriend anymore.

MATT DAMON: Right.

CHARLES WOOLEY: What did you learn from dating the famous?

MATT DAMON: From my own experience and from watching what happens to other people, it just looks like the fame component, which is not the part that I like, is magnified kind of exponentially if you have two people who are both celebrities. For me now, it would be very … I can't see a world in which I'd date a celebrity again just because I don't want to be … it's just not worth it, you know, it's just not worth … I don't want that attention.

CHARLES WOOLEY: And now there is the lovely, but totally unknown Florida bartender Luciana Barroso, whose only celebrity comes from being at his side.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Where did you meet Luciana?

MATT DAMON: Off the set in Miami.

CHARLES WOOLEY: And she stays well back from the fame game?

MATT DAMON: Yeah, I mean I think anybody who gets close enough to it, you know, to see it for what it really is, you know, any normal person goes, "Oh my god," and they stay away from it.

CHARLES WOOLEY: There's scarcely a scandal in his life. Virtually the only pitfall was early in his career when the American media reported that he'd announced his break-up with Minnie Driver on Oprah before he told Minnie about it.

CHARLES WOOLEY: The Oprah story, breaking up with Minnie Driver...

MATT DAMON: Yeah, total horseshit, yeah.

CHARLES WOOLEY: …before Minnie knew about it.

MATT DAMON: Yeah, no, complete … which, actually, you know, she acknowledged, I think, at some point in an interview, like, you know, that that wasn't true. I mean, we'd broken up three weeks before that. But it's a story that, I mean, six years and three relationships later...

CHARLES WOOLEY: I'm still asking it.

MATT DAMON: Yeah ... is still there.

CHARLES WOOLEY: So it's official, it didn't happen?

MATT DAMON: No, it did not happen.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Until now, Matt Damon has skillfully avoided media controversy. With the looming American election, like his mate Ben Affleck, he's wading in on Senator John Kerry's side, questioning why America went to war in Iraq.

MATT DAMON: I mean America right now is like a 49 percent nation, you know, we're really, really divided, you know, and I don't know if that's the case with Australia. The Australians I've met don't all seem to be, you know, leading the charge to kind of be over there. I think they feel like a lot of Americans do, like we went in there on, you know, with some bad information and someone should be accountable for that. I don't understand why … you know if this were a movie, you know, shoot, someone would have lost their job by now. I don't understand why government officials are held to some different standard.

CHARLES WOOLEY: In his media blitz of Australia this week, Matt Damon left everyone smiling in his wake.

MATT DAMON: And I wanted to come back and, without going too much into detail about my personal life, I bought a bunch of people with me this time because I wanted to show them Australia too.

CHARLES WOOLEY: No tantrums, no paparazzi punch-ups, here was an actor who wasn't carried away with himself, a star who can tell the difference between Hollywood and reality.

CHARLES WOOLEY: You're a movie star, but you're also one of those movie stars who, actually, can act.

MATT DAMON: Thanks.

CHARLES WOOLEY: I'm looking at some of the roles that you played and they're pretty elliptical sometimes, aren't they? You played an angel of death, the genius, con-man murderer, the troubled mathematical whiz kid and an assassin and a conjoined twin, there's just a handful. It's an interesting spread, isn't it? Where's it coming from?

MATT DAMON: Hopefully, not from a place that can be defined because if it can, then...

CHARLES WOOLEY: There's trouble.

MATT DAMON: Yeah, then there's trouble. I want to hopefully stay one step ahead of being pigeonholed and being forced to play the same guy over and over again. So, so far, I've been able to do that.

CHARLES WOOLEY: How have you managed to get so older head on such young shoulders.

MATT DAMON: Oh, thanks, you know...

CHARLES WOOLEY: You're only … not even in your mid-30s yet, are you?

MATT DAMON: Yeah, don't think I'm that … I wouldn't call myself that wise, I mean I'm still figuring it out.

Reporter: Charles Wooley
Producer: Sandra Cleary, Shaun Devitt