Syriana - Matt Damon interview
Compiled by Jack Foley
Q: This is not an easy film for the audience. Does the complexity come through in the process of making the film?
A. Yeah. It’s a pretty complicated topic. We all did a lot of reading. [Stephen] Gaghan had a pretty good-sized reading list. He sent me 12 books and I read some of them. I did my best.
Q: What kind of books did he send you?
A: Well, I read both of Bob Baer’s books, which are terrific. He’s just a really fascinating guy; really smart, really dedicated. And everything from books on oil, such as The Prize, to one of Tom Freedman’s books, From Beirut to Jerusalem. They’re basically a syllabus for all of his actors. Maybe there are actors who can just show up and say lines and not have any idea what they’re talking about, but I’m not one of them. I have to be somewhat grounded in what I’m talking about. Having said that, they had a couple of these oil guys there who were trying to explain to me the derivatives. I’m totally lost when these guys are talking. It really is complex stuff.
Q: How much did you know about derivatives beforehand?
A. I knew absolutely nothing. I would sit there and I would talk to these guys and we were talking about mergers and deals that I think anybody can relate to. So, if you just make emotional sense of that in your mind, then the minutia of what you’re talking about can be Greek.
Q: Can you talk about the emotional stuff your character is going through?
A. That’s the real part of my role that is important to the movie as a whole, the balance of the movie. You’ve got four storylines going. Mine is the most emotional from the outset because of what happens. So in that sense, it’s the least complicated of the four stories. It’s very easy for an audience to follow what’s going on with the Bryan Woodman story because it’s this big visceral occurrence at the beginning of it. That was my job in this one – to try and make that stuff believable. One of the things I really liked about it is Gaghan is not reductive with his characters. It’s not that the guy is just ambitious. All the characters are pretty complex, they’re human. They’re various shades of gray.
Q: What were your impressions of how the people thought of you being there? Did you come to respect that community a little more?
A: What, in Dubai? Everyone was very nice. Dubai is a pretty popular tourist destination, certainly for a lot of Europeans; lesser for Americans. But I wouldn’t say that I gained an insight into the Middle East. Dubai is very different from other parts of the Middle East. It wasn’t like we were shooting in Saudi Arabia, Syria or Jordan. We stayed in a very nice hotel right on the Persian Gulf, and it didn’t feel like a cultural trip, necessarily. It felt like we were shooting 12 hours a day, eating and sleeping and getting up and shooting again. It didn’t feel like a cultural exchange programme or anything like that.
Q: Do you have any insight into what’s going to happen over there?
A. That’s a very good question. Bob’s second book is all about Saudi Arabia and it’s really interesting. He talks about it as this giant welfare state that’s about to collapse. It’s really on the verge of collapsing. The families keep growing and the oil’s running out; it’s going to collapse. Meanwhile, they’re funding a lot of these fundamentalist colleges. So, these guys are coming out of these colleges with no possible job opportunities but having this hard-line philosophy. It’s like a doomsday scenario over there. The way Bob talks about it, he doesn’t make it seem too complicated.
Q: How did you like playing a family man?
A. I liked it. I had fun. I really like the little boy, Nick. I hung out with him a lot, and he was a real cool kid.
Q: Do you come away from this politically more aware?
A. I know a little bit more about it. I’ve read a few more books than I’d read. I met some people that really do this for a living, and were really interesting to listen to, so there is a change. But the movie was made really to spark conversations. Hopefully, if people go see the movie, it’s the type of movie that they’ll go with someone and grab a drink afterwards and talk it through. It’s not meant to give you answers. It’s not like there’s a, ‘ta-dah! Here’s the solution.’
Q: What did you and George do when you were not shooting? Was there a nightlife in Dubai? Did you hang out?
A. No, no, no. He had put on all that weight, and he was really depressed. Did you guys see Super Size Me? The guy puts all the weight on but he gets depressed. And George was like that, because he’s a really active guy and he couldn’t move around. He had to just sit there, and I had never seen him like that before. He’s normally like the life of the party, but he was just really depressed. He also had his neck problem, so he was immobile and a little angry. But, coming out of it, he literally wrote and directed Good Night and Good Luck, and edited it and put it out. It was like he had so much drive coming off that experience because he was made to sit still for four months or so.
Q: What do you think the reaction will be from audiences to this movie?
A. My hope is that people will really like it; people have been missing movies like that. There’s a lot of pressure on people who make movies to not make them confusing because you have two hours to tell a story, and the story costs x amount of dollars and you want the maximum number of people to see it. The problem with that is that you get movies that are just so stupid that audiences don’t like them. I think people want the discourse to be elevated a little bit, to be a little more challenging with your subject matter, and with your characters, and not reductive about them.