Matt Damon, showing a bit of what Matt Stone and Trey Parker were getting at in Team America, has declared that he refuses to accept roles in movies with gratuitous violence:
But Damon has rejected a number of scripts which include gratuitous fighting – because he’s worried it may affect people’s real-life actions.
He says, “I always look at the violence (in a script). I don’t want it to be gratuitous because I do believe that has an effect on people’s behavior. I really do believe that and I have turned down movies because of that.”
But I’m pretty sure that was Matt Damon bragging that he “got all this expensive firearms training” for the Bourne Identity movies. And (spoiler!) his character gets shot in the face in The Departed. And while the argument can be made that it was not gratuitous, most history scholars agree that Saving Private Ryan’s opening scene is one of the most realistic portrayals of Omaha Beach ever depicted.
So … what was that about movie violence having an effect on people’s behavior?
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Matt Damon without violence is like Mark Wahlberg without Boogie Nights.
Unremarkable and $4M a picture poorer.
This is like Mel Gibson and Danny Glover being anti gun when almost every movie they have ever made that made them famous involved guns and much violence.
What a fool Damon is, I guess next he is going to be pulled over drunk and ramble on with insults to the Jewish People of the world.
Holly, I think you mis-read his gratuitous quote
“…I really do believe that and I have turned down movies because of that.”
You see he isn’t gratuitously saying he hasn’t turned down gratuitous roles for gratuitous violence, its that he gratuitously BELIEVES he has. See the gratuitous difference, gratuitously?
Am I the only one totally alright with this? Action movies should have a restraining order against Damon, considering all the damage he’s done to perfectly good ones in the past.
Hey, I was part of the military intelligence community, and this whiny douche would have fit in for about as long as I lasted trying to get through the Bourne Identity.
Hollywood, if you want someone convincing, stick to Thomas Jane (when sober) and Christian Bale (when not trying to strangle lighting techs). See, REAL men have character faults… and temper problems.
I want so badly to like Damon. I truly, truly do. It’s not a lie or an exaggeration when I say that he looks like a sample-sized version of my husband, so I’m biased toward liking Damon. And then he opens his mouth, and I can’t find anything to hit him with because fortunately for both of us, we’re not actually in the same room. He is one of the very ones I referred to in another thread, talking about poor people being “forced” to go to war, when any idiot can pick up a Newsweek and tell you from flipping through it that we have a VOLUNTEER military, and that there is not currently a draft and hasn’t been one for some time. See, Matt, you can bloviate about the eeeeeevils of violence, OR you can star in multigajillion-dollar movies ABOUT violence, but not both. So SHUT IT, little man.
Took the words right out of my mouth, Beige. I, too, so want to like him, but then he starts talking and he ruins it for me. A shame really.
MATT DA-MUN! (sorry, someone had to do it.)
Apparently he doesn’t have an issue with gratuitius f-bombs.
Matt Damon Refuses to Act in Violent Movies?
Rocko Refuses to See Matt Damon in Movies.
Most of Matt Damon’s hits were full of violence. His box office bombs had no violence in them. And I agree, I would like to love Damon and his sidekick Affleck but then they open their mouths and ruin it for me. Same with Dave Matthews Band, Bruce Springsteen and George Clooney. I wish they would just shut up and do the job they were hired to do, and make money off of peons like us – entertain us.
Aw, I liked the Bourne Identity. I’m still pissed about Franka Potente getting killed off in the second one, though.
I guess this is what happens when you drop out of Harvard. You’re capable of making some decent movies, but incapable of seeing your own hubris. Should have left sooner, he could have made sense off-script. Another one ruined by the Ivy League.
@Jimmy: You noticed that too, huh? Do you think that maybe they neglected to teach him the definition of “gratuitous” at Harvard?
OH MY GOSH, Beige is female?? Shows how perceptive I am.
The 5-minute face smashing/groin kicking bathroom scene in the last bourne movie in which damon kills his pursuer was surely a realistic portrayal of how 2 government sponsored hitmen fight and was integral to the plot.
Also remember how damon dissed the james bond character as being a murderer, in contrast to his bourne character.
@sal m: Yeah, and Damon remarked on some commentary I saw that he loved how the Bourne movies “took a Republican series of books and turned them into Democrat movies”. Whatever the #@$% THAT means.
Beige – I never knew he said that. How does one make it more “Democrat?” By starring Matt Damon instead of Kelsey Grammer?
“Damon refuses to act in violent movies”
This is news? Wasn’t much ‘acting’ involved in any of his movies in my opinion.
Wow, what a tool. I mean, even more of a tool that I already thought he was.
It’s funny (funny-weird, not funny-haha) how a decade or so ago, Hollywood was all about denying that violence in movies caused kids to choreograph events like Columbine and other violent-image-inspired shootings. Now maybe they are seeing what concerned people have known all along. Except of course, it’s all lip-service as stated in this article.
Remember Jannah, in Hollywood it’s all about the talk rather than the walk.
Perhaps because most can’t do both at the same time.
It’s too bad Matt Damon (and Hollywood) are such hypocrites about violence, but aren’t we all?
I mean, look at Congress and everyone loudly decrying violence in Hollywood movies, but what was the top-grossing film of the year? Transformers.
Why can’t we all just admit that violence in entertainment is, well, entertaining? I loved the Bourne movies, especially the second one, even though my doppelganger homegirl Franke bought it right at the beginning.
@AAW: Yeah, and this was the same commentary (I think it was for “The Bourne Supremacy”, the second in the trilogy) in which he raved about how happy and smiling the people in Goa, India were when he was filming there. Because they’re so happy to be poor, you see. And to be graced by the presence of movie stars who might throw them some money. GAAAHHH.
Yeah, MC Mom, that’s a good point. I don’t steer clear of movies just b/c they’re violent. Violence is, unfortunately, a part of the world we live in. What’s hypocritical is talking about how bad it is while staging a bunch more of it and getting paid great flipping wodges of cash to do so.
If Damon refuses to act in violent movies, that kind of limits his roles to chick flicks and Christmas movies, I guess. I was hoping to see Jason Bourne again, in a movie where he goes up against those three bounty hunters I saw on TV. Those bounty hunters were so big they had to duck and turn sideways to go through a door. I would love to have seen Bourne try to kung fu them.