The Departed
Damon Talks Research for The Departed
Matt Damon went on an actual drug bust to prepare for playing a member of the elite state police unit. “I had a real advantage because I'm from Boston, so I didn't have to learn an accent or do anything like that, I got to get straight to investigating this sort of subculture of state police,” Damon said. “What I knew of the state police was from the times that I got pulled over for speeding on the Pike. And so to get in there and really see what these guys do was great and any time you get access like that, it's really the most amazing part of this job of acting because it's your own time and it's months ahead of time and there's no production around you. I spent a lot of time with these guys just sucking it in, not really having to have a goal but just sitting there and spending time, meals and you just start to pick stuff up and most of that stuff ends up, for instance, this raid on the crackhouse. I got to see them do it.”
They kept him in the back for the main action, lest anything happen to that million dollar face. “I was a lot closer to the action than I was comfortable with, I'll tell you that. They actually gave me a bulletproof vest and put me at the end of the line of people who go crashing through the door. So you know the house was cleared. It was really humbling to watch these guys, I have to say it was. We did the whole deep breathing, the little huddle before we went in and they showed this guy, they had pictures of him and he was wanted on gun charges, drug charges, and he was on trial once for murder but hadn't been convicted so it wasn't a room I would have gone running into.”
Hearing the tech talk and watching the procedure inspired Damon’s character. “I told Marty and Bill [Monahan] this is a good way to establish Colin rising up because it follows this kind of progression. He keeps getting promoted and so one of the ways of showing that was showing the extremely aggressive and violent world that he's in, hitting a house and what happens and how they do it. And the guys that are in the shot with me are the guys who were really in the house with me that night when it happened. I mean, ultimately it's a giant magic trick. We're just trying to be believable. And if you're taken out of the movie at all, then we haven't done our job right. So there's all of this legwork that goes into beforehand just so when we show up hopefully the process is really smooth and the result is believable.”
DiCaprio did his best to investigate the criminal world, since his character goes deep undercover with the Boston mob. “We had a great technical advisor named Tom Duffy who was there throughout the entire filmmaking process who knew the entire history of Boston and knew what the streets were like and the police gave us unbelievable advice,” said DiCaprio.
Even Vera Farmiga researched her role as a police psychiatrist. “I had met with a woman by the name of Debra Glasner who is a police psychiatrist of the LAPD, who happens to be a woman, and she's a cop psychologist,” said Farmiga. “I gave her the script and she looked at and goes, ‘Oh, dear, no, she's doing everything wrong. No way would she sleep with a client.’ And that's the moment that my character became really interesting to me. And we started it from there. Talking about whether this is a woman who is good at her job. But it was a true collaboration, I mean we had a lot to do with improvising and discarding and bringing things back.”
The Departed opens this Friday, October 6th.
For the trailer, posters, stills and more movie info, go to The
Departed Movie Page.
Stay tuned for updates.
|
Add to Heffee!
