It’s not surprising that Matt Damon’s currently in the news. It’s surprising as to why he is though. In a recent interview, the 44-year-old’s remarks on actors keeping their sexuality a secret have caused much backlash. It’s a classic case of foot-in-the-mouth. On his part, Damon clarified that his intention was not to be homophobic, but stressed that it’s a mystery that adds to an actor’s efficacy. Which leads you to think there is no such thing as bad publicity, especially with the actor’s film, The Martian , set to release on October 2.
The Martian comprises an impressive star cast: Jessica Chastain ( Zero Dark Thirty ), Jeff Daniels ( The Newsroom ), Kristen Wiig (former SNL member), Sean Bean (the man who ‘dies in every movie’, The Lord of the Rings ) and Kate Mara ( House of Cards ), among others. A film with reportedly a budget of $108 million, it’s set in the near future where botanist and astronaut Mark Watney (played by Damon) is stranded alone on the surface of the Red Planet, while his crew finds its way back home in the midst of a sudden storm. The crew is convinced that Watney is killed. Only, it turns out that he is alive with a limited supply of rations, and instead, Watney becomes the first farmer in Mars (and space) trying to grow food.
Directed by Ridley Scott, who also gave science-fiction films Alien and Prometheus , The Martian is said to resemble Apollo 13 -meets- Cast Away . When I meet with Damon in Hong Kong to talk about the film, he is only happy to acknowledge the comparison. “I think if we can just compare this movie to every Tom Hanks movie, that’s good. It’s very different from other sci-fi movies because this is much more based in science and reality, whereas traditional sci-fi is not.”
Coincidentally, this is Damon’s second film where he is abandoned in outer space, after Interstellar . But the characters he plays are different. Does Matt Damon have something in common with Mark Watney? “He’s definitely smarter than me and more resourceful than I am,” Damon admits. “As an actor, if you stranded me on Mars, I’d turn around and ask for a cappuccino. If you left me in Hong Kong by myself, I might have a hard time, let alone on Mars. But I think the sense of humour is similar.”
Adapted into a screenplay by Drew Goddard based on the eponymous novel by Andy Weir, Damon says he bought the book after reading the script, although it wasn’t made mandatory by the director. “The script had everything I needed to prepare but I was just curious. And the book is really popular too, so I wanted to make sure we got everything from the book into the script.” Goddard, says Damon, described the story as a “love letter to science” when he first met with the actor.
Playing an astronaut who is trying to survive on Mars all by himself meant that Damon shot most of the scenes alone. And the most challenging part of acting alone was the responsibility to keep the audiences engaged and keep the film moving at a good pace. Damon says that most of the challenges fell on Scott, who balanced it out. “Luckily, we have the B-side of the story, which is the NASA element, and everybody on Earth trying to save Mark, so you’re not just stuck in a habitat with a guy for two hours.” This also meant that the scenes with his co-actors were almost next to nothing. “That was probably the one drawback to this movie — there are all these great actors (Jessica Chastain, Jeff Daniels, Chiwetel Ejiofor) that I didn’t get to do a lot of scenes with. It’s like they’re in a whole other movie.” So a big part of the film, according to Damon, is the “loneliness of the character and the concept of being 140 million miles away from anybody, which is terrifying.”
Ridley Scott’s method of simultaneously cutting the film while shooting, reminded Damon of working with the Stevens — Spielberg and Soderbergh. “Ridley’s similar to Soderbergh in the sense that they both cut in camera and dissimilar in the sense that he usually has four cameras going at once.” And with Spielberg, when Damon worked on Saving Private Ryan (SPR), the latter notes that the former had a bank of monitors who would just point to them and who “had the whole thing cut out in his head, basically in real-time.”
If you notice carefully, coincidences are a big part of The Martian ; in particular, of Damon’s acting career. Damon plays the protagonist in Saving Private Ryan and The Martian , he is believed to be dead in both the films, and the major plots of the films spend time in his rescue. Damon’s resounding “No”, echoes in the hollow interview room. “It actually felt similar in the sense that when I arrived on the set of SPR , they’d shot most of the movie and I came on for the last six weeks of it. And on this one, when I arrived, they’d already wrapped 55 actors — so it felt like SPR in that sense, definitely.”
Described as “Hollywood’s everyman”, Matt Damon has been named as the industry’s most bankable actor by Forbes magazine in 2007. Perhaps, it’s due to the rich variety of his roles. Although he co-wrote, acted and won an Oscar for Good Will Hunting , acted in movies such as Saving Private Ryan , understated ones like We Bought A Zoo and Monuments Men , Damon is best remembered for playing the amnesiac CIA spy Jason Bourne. Filming for the fifth, known as Bourne 5 , has started. And Damon says he is every bit proud of those movies. “I always said I’d do another one if Paul (Greengrass) wanted to do it and it just took us nine years to decide to do it, and once he said he wanted to do it, it was an immediate yes from me.”
(The writer was in Hong Kong at the invitation of Fox Star Studios India.)
