Stillwater’s Matt Damon Explains Why He Cried at Cannes Premiere

Matt Damon’s tears made headline information earlier this month when the actor was overcome with emotion at the Cannes premiere of his new drama “Stillwater.”

Damon tells me that his response “actually snuck up on” him, and attributed his response to “the sensation of being in a movie show once more and the way a lot I missed that, and why we try this.

“It was a fantastic reminder that we have to go as a group of strangers and switch the lights off and have this expertise all on the identical time collectively,” Damon stated. “There’s one thing lovely and invaluable about that. I simply type of acquired overwhelmed within the second as a result of I simply hadn’t carried out that in nearly two years. It was nice. I used to be completely happy. I used to be simply very moved by it.”

Within the Tom McCarthy-directed movie, Damon performs Invoice, an out-of-work oil rig employee from Oklahoma who relocates to France, the place his daughter (Abigail Breslin) has been despatched to jail after being discovered responsible of murdering her girlfriend.

Whereas Damon insists “Stillwater” isn’t a political film, he spent plenty of time in Oklahoma to organize for the position with real-life so-called “tough necks.” “Oklahoma might be the reddest state within the union, and these guys work within the oil fields, proper? They’re gonna vote pink down the ticket each time and so they’re completely unapologetic about it. To the blokes I talked to, it’s like a binary proposition. It’s like, ‘That is my job, and this supplies for my household and my youngsters, and that is what I’m going to do.’ I completely get that.”

It took a while for Damon to earn their belief. “They had been justifiably cautious of us after we got here in there,” he stated. “It was like, ‘You’re making a film a couple of roughneck, like what are your intentions right here?’ As a result of they know that that is the type of man that Hollywood or a minimum of possibly they are saying the cultural or coastal elite would are likely to look down their nostril out just a little bit and type of stereotype it. However I feel as soon as they realized what we had been doing, and that this film has plenty of compassion and empathy for this man, and that we had been attempting to get it proper, then they then they had been simply extremely useful.”

Damon says he took some “ribbing” for his liberal leanings. He recollects being launched to somebody named “Large John.” “He shakes my hand and he goes, ‘I hope I like [“Stillwater”] greater than that final film you made concerning the oil enterprise,’ as a result of he was speaking about ‘Promised Land’ that John Krasinski and I wrote about pure gasoline and fracking. I simply began laughing I used to be like, ‘I feel you’ll like this yet another than that one. I may see most likely you didn’t love that one. I used to be fairly happy with it, but it surely won’t have been your favourite.’ So yeah, there was plenty of good-natured joking round.”

You may watch the total interview with Damon within the video above. Discover out what he did to pack on weight for his position.