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“The Legend of Bagger Vance”: Matt Damon Interview

NEW YORK, Nov. 1, 2000 — He may be a heartthrob in his own right. He may have one of the hottest film careers in Hollywood. But Matt Damon is not above being star-struck. At least not by the likes of film legend Robert Redford, his director in the upcoming inspirational drama The Legend of Bagger Vance.

“When you talk to Redford, you’re drifting out of Roy Hobbs [Redford’s role in The Natural] and all of his other characters. You feel like you’re going to have a seizure or something,” says Damon. “I think he’s
got really good radar for it, so he knows when you’re totally phasing out and he brings you back in. I think he’s so used to it. For so long, he’s been walking down the street and watching people pass out. He’s so
down to earth, so strangely normal, he really kind of dispels that.”

Damon can’t be blamed for this awe for the Oscar-winning director of Ordinary People, however. It runs in the family.

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“My dad came down and we took some gloves from a prop room and we were outside on this golf course having a catch. And Redford came over, grabbed a glove and started having a catch with us,” says Damon. “All of a sudden, my dad yells, ‘I’m having a catch with Roy Hobbes.’ It was really funny to hear a 58-year-old guy say that. He was totally star-struck.”

But for Damon, getting past his Redford jitters was only part of several obstacles he faced as Rannulph Junuh, the down-on-his luck golfer who is looking to find his “authentic swing” in the film. He also had to learn to golf. To do so, he spent a month with golf pro Tim Moss in Hilton Head, S.C., learning to play a man who was supposed to be one of the most talented golfers of the 1930s. For 30 days, he taped his hands (golf gloves weren’t invented in the ’30s) and parked himself on fairways, putting greens and sand traps hitting hundreds of balls to find his perfect swing.

“That was my big concern,” explains Damon. “I told Robert Redford I didn’t know much about golf, I heard it was pretty hard, and I just didn’t want to look like a jackass. And he said since I played baseball, I would be fine.”

And though he may not be as fanatical a golfer as his Bagger Vance co-stars Will Smith and Charlize Theron, Damon has caught the bug. “I
never played and I still suck, but I like to play. I have a whole new appreciation for it. I had opinions about golf without having every played it. It’s an incredible, really deep game. It’s a fascinating game,” he says.
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Also fascinating for the Good Will Hunting star was working with an accomplished actor behind the camera. “He gives really simple, really practical direction,” Damon says of Redford. “Some people I’ve worked with—not recently, but in the past can really give a lot of chatter. A lot of talking about nothing. Acting is really easy to talk about, but really difficult to do, so you can get bogged down in too many conversations. You’re really defeating yourself in the end. I find that really simple and direct the direction, the more helpful it is to me.”


In fact, getting behind the camera is a goal Damon hopes to attain. He plans on writing a second screenplay with his Good Will Hunting co-star Ben Affleck, and the duo plans to direct the film.

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“I wouldn’t do anything that I didn’t write because I would feel way too responsible if I screwed up,” Damon says. “So if I screw up, I’ll sink my own ship.”

But first they need to free themselves up from their busy film careers. “I definitely want to collaborate with Ben. That was fun. Writer’s block alone is just hell. Writer’s block with your best friend is hysterically funny,” laughs Damon. “We just want it to evolve organically. We’re going to get crushed the next thing we do. We’re going to get killed no matter what, so we just want to make sure we think it’s good. We’re kind of letting it evolve. [In Good Will Hunting], so much of it was getting work as actors. Now that that’s happened, we really don’t have time.”

Up next, Damon will star in Billy Bob Thornton’s All the Pretty Horses and will make a cameo appearance in The Third Wheel, the first project he and Affleck produced under their Pearl Street Productions banner.


The Legend of Bagger Vance opens November 3.

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