Work and life besties! Matt Damon said that he wants to continue collaborating with his longtime friend Ben Affleck after they reunited for their upcoming movie, The Last Duel.
“I think we’ll write a lot more in the future just because it didn’t turn out to be as time-consuming as we thought,” Damon, 50, told Entertainment Tonight on Wednesday, July 21.
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The duo previously collaborated on their Oscar-winning screenplay, Good Will Hunting. According to the Stillwater star, writing The Last Duel “was actually a lot of fun” compared to the 1999 hit.
“I think that [the] writing process for Good Will Hunting was so inefficient,” he said. “You know, because we didn’t really understand structure so we wrote thousands of pages. … We’d be like, ‘Well, what if this happened?’ and then we’d just write different scenes. So, we had all these kind of disparate scenes and then we kind of tried to jam them together into something that looked like a movie.”
The Massachusetts native said the upcoming Ridley Scott movie was easier because “it’s a story about perspective.” In The Last Duel, Damon plays a knight named Jean de Carrouges, while Affleck, 48, plays Count Pierre d’Alençon. When the knight’s wife, played by Jodie Comer, accuses his close friend (a squire played by Adam Driver) of rape, the matter must be settled with a duel to the death.
Damon and Affleck wrote the male perspective for the film, while screenwriter Nicole Holofcener took on the female perspective.
“I think we just found that having made … like, making movies for 30 years, we actually learned something about structure along the way and the process went along a lot faster,” Damon added.
The Jason Bourne actor also noted that fatherhood made him and his friend more productive workers. Damon shares four daughters — Alexia, 22, Isabella, 15, Gia, 12, and Stella, 10 — with his wife, Luciana Barroso. Affleck, for his part, shares Violet, 15, and Seraphina, 12, and Samuel, 9, with his ex-wife, Jennifer Garner.
“Back in the day, we didn’t have deadlines because nobody cared what we were doing, no one was waiting for the script, we were unemployed, so we literally had nothing else to do,” he recalled. “And now we can build the time, it’s a little more structured, right? Like, alright, let’s write from 10 to 2, you know, because we can drop the kids off and then we can pick the kids up. We actually have lives now which is nice, finally.”