Matt Damon reunited with his childhood pal and fellow Good Will Hunting Oscar winner Ben Affleck to write, produce and star in the upcoming medieval drama The Last Duel. He says the experience of working together was much different this time around.
“I think that writing process for Good Will Hunting was so inefficient,” he shared. “You know, because we didn’t really understand structure so we wrote thousands of pages,” Damon, 50, tells Entertainment Tonight. “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.”
“We just found that… making movies for 30 years, we actually learned something about structure along the way and the process went along a lot faster,” Damon continues, referring to present day. “And so 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. It was actually a lot of fun.”
Set in the 14th century, The Last Duel centers on two best friends who turn against each other after one accuses the other of assaulting his wife. They’re ordered to fight a duel to the death, with serious consequences for the wife as well as the loser.
Jodie Comer and Adam Driver also star in The Last Duel, from director Ridley Scott. It’s due out October 15.
Damon will next be seen in the drama Stillwater, opening July 30.
Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.