Matt Damon is usually Mr. Charming in movies, whether he’s the doe-eyed thief in Ocean’s Eleven or the bitter action hero in The Bourne Identity or the cocky poker shark in Rounders. The Good Shepherd asks him to shed all of that to play the stone faced, emotionless, “get it done” founder of the CIA.
Interview: Matt Damon on The Good Shepherd
“I was nervous about that and I think with another director I would have given into my fear and indicated more and pushed it more and been a little more over the top,” said Damon. “The reality was that [Robert DeNiro] just insisted on absolute emotional honesty and subtlety all the time. I think something that I certainly have fallen victim to in the past is, because I’m also a writer, you look at every scene and you deconstruct the script and you go, ‘OK, this scene is in the movie for this reason. The audience needs to come away with THIS.’ Which as a writer, you can do that, but as an actor that’s deadly. You can’t think in those terms or else you’re going to end up just pulling faces and indicating and ultimately losing the movie because people don’t believe what you’re doing.”
DeNiro is famous for his total immersion into characters, and working as both a director and costar taught Damon to go with it. “Bob was just insistent on absolute naturalism and realism. He’s a student of human behavior. I’ve never seen an actor as famous as him walk into a room and do what he does, which is he just disappears. He absolutely disappears and he sits there and he watches everything. He sees absolutely every interaction, and the reason his work remains so good and he remains so relevant as an artist is because he sits there and he is constantly just downloading human behavior. Oftentimes actors become famous and they end up doing imitations of their own performances or imitations of what they think people might do in certain situations. Very few of them sit there and do the kind of rigorous observation that it takes to embody people in a subtle, nuanced and real way. We’d have these conversations where I’d say, ‘Well, I’m listening to him here,’ and he’d say, ‘You’re listening to me now. You’re not doing anything. You hear what I’m saying.’ You know what I mean? And to get permission from somebody to do that, normally a director is telling you exactly the opposite because normally a director is panicking that the audience isn’t going to understand, that the audience is going to be confused. And Bob would not worry about that. He would just say, ‘You play the scene for its absolute honesty and moment to moment, and don’t worry about anything else.’”
Damon in The Good Shepherd
The Good Shepherd
The Good Shepherd
The Good Shepherd
As the director, DeNiro carried that detail with his filmmaking also. “There were the things with the glasses, those glasses had a real prescription, so I'd wear a negative prescription contact lens and then put the glasses over because Bob, again, it's all details with Bob. He wanted, if it was an over the shoulder shot and you were catching just a piece of the glasses to see that. It's like the incremental effect, it's like the aggregate effect of all those things added up makes you go, 'Okay, I believe what I'm watching.'”
Edward Wilson is a fictionalized version of the founder of the government organization that becomes the CIA. He does many dirty deeds to protect America, but of course he doesn’t see himself as a bad guy.
“Well, nobody sees themselves as ruthless. If you look at it from his point of view, if you look at the stakes of the game he’s playing, you’re talking about the middle of the Cold War, and in his mind he’s doing things to stop huge conflagrations. It’s like, ‘World War III is going to happen if I don’t do what I have to do.’ These tough choices have to be made and he’s the good shepherd and he’s taking care of his flock. And he’s sacrificing, essentially, his own soul to make those decisions. That is another way to look at it.”
The Good Shepherd is out in theatres now.
For movie stills, trailer, full synopsis, review and more movie info, head over
to the The
Good Shepherd Movie Page.
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