Matt Damon was at the recent Cannes International Film Festival 2021 for the premiere of his latest film Stillwater. Directed by Tom McCarthy, the movie tells the story of an American oil-rig roughneck who travels to Marseille, France to visit his estranged daughter, who is in prison for a murder she claims she didn’t commit. Confronted with language barriers, cultural differences, and a complicated legal system, he soon builds a new life for himself as he makes it his personal mission to exonerate her.
In the South of France, Matt sat down to talk about his latest movie and some of his most memorable roles to date. Here, he reveals that his pal and collaborator Ben Affleck was sleeping on his couch in a cramped apartment when the pair found out they had sold their Oscar-winning screenplay for Good Will Hunting.
He also gives an insight into the media circus that surrounds his pal Brad Pitt by recounting an incident that the pair experienced while they were making ‘Ocean’s Twelve’ plus how he turned down ten percent of Avatar…
Beverly Hills Magazine: So Matt, you looked really moved to be here in Cannes at the premiere of your new film Stillwater – tell us about that?
Matt Damon: Yeah, it was, I think, as all of us have had this really difficult year in this time with Covid, I think I’ve done this festival four or five times but it felt like the first festival I’d ever done in my life. It was such a relief to be in a room with 1000 people and 1000 strangers who are part of the same community because we all love the same thing. And I’d never felt that so strongly having been denied that for a year, 18 months, or whatever it’s been. So I was really overwhelmed by the feeling of kind of all of us being able to gather together again.
Beverly Hills Magazine: You’ve always had such a passion for film – how do you keep that passion alive over such a long career?
Matt Damon: I just really love doing this. I just love it. And I always have and my application for college, in the essay, the first line said, ‘For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to be an actor.’ And it just never changed. If I lost that enthusiasm I would stop, I’d go do something else.
But I just find it endlessly fascinating and really fun and I’ve been doing it for, I don’t know, over 30 years now, 35, professionally and I’ve always thought of film making as a really practical thing and there’s no point in talking theory, I just started wanting to make movies because I knew that I was how I was going to learn. It’s a very tough business and can be pretty brutal and can also be fantastic.
Beverly Hills Magazine: Let’s talk about where it all started. Good Will Hunting – you started it as an assignment for a college paper and then a few years later you got an Oscar with this guy Ben Affleck? Did you realize at the time that it was going to be a turning point in your life?
Matt Damon: I think by then, by the time we got that award yeah [laughs]. But no, just getting it made. The only rule that Ben and I had was that we had to like it. So every decision we made, we made for the absolute right creative reason, because we wanted to love it. And there was never any strategy like, ‘What if we do this so that could happen?’
I do watch actors do that sometimes or writers do that sometimes and they try to fulfill a formula, they try and make what people want to see, rather than making what they want to see and trusting that other people would want to see that too.
So yeah, our lives changed drastically in 1994, we sold that screenplay in November of 1994, and our lives were never the same. It was more money than we’d ever…. and we each instantly went out and bought matching Jeep Cherokees. We were so broke that we wanted to move out of our sh—ty apartment. It was me and another guy that we went to high school with and Ben wasn’t living with us because he was going to marry this girl and then that fell apart and so he was on the couch in this tiny place.
And Ben is six foot four and his legs dangled off the end. Every morning I’d walk in and be like, ‘God, this is just ridiculous.’ And it was in that situation which we sold the screenplay and so in order to move out and get a better place we went and started to look at somewhere with three bedrooms in a nicer neighborhood. We had no credit score, we had nothing, so people were like, ‘We can’t rent to you.’ But what we had was the article in Daily Variety and we were on the cover of Variety, it said like, you know, ‘These two idiots sell a screenplay.’ So we carried around Variety with us and we were like, ‘We’re these guys! Look, we have money now, you can rent to us, we’re going to pay you.’ And somebody did rent us their place.
Beverly Hills Magazine: At the beginning of your career, you were branded with a nice guy image? Were you worried that might stick?
Matt Damon: I don’t know, if it got attached to me, certainly there were a lot of directors who wanted to subvert it right? It’s fine with me. I can play into it or play against it, either way I’m doing something fun and it’s just kind of up to the director to use me however they want.
Beverly Hills Magazine: Talking of directors, you made Saving Private Ryan in 1998 with Steven Spielberg which started you on a path to work with the biggest directors in Hollywood – Scorsese, Coppola, the Coen brothers. Is the expectation of an actor different when the director is that big?
Matt Damon: Yeah and they all do it differently. I remember on Saving Private Ryan, Steven was shooting with like ten cameras at once. And the choreography of the action and of the camera moves was at such an insanely high level. And I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know enough yet to appreciate what I’m watching, I know it’s very special but I’m just going to ask him as many questions as I can. And even if I don’t totally understand the answer, I’m going to remember and catalog exactly what he said, because it will make sense to me later because he’s just at this incredible level. But he was also demanding in the sense that he expected, you know, he’s a professional director and he expects professional actors.
You’ve got to bring it on take one because he sure is and the cameras are going to work and he doesn’t want to wait around because he wants to get to the next great shot. So I felt pressure on that in the sense that I really wanted to do a great job because it felt like the highest level that you could kind of work at in the film.
Beverly Hills Magazine: Which director’s style of working do you prefer?
Matt Damon: For me, I take every job based on the director and if they’re a master director I don’t care what their style is, I’m in and I’ll adjust to it. But it’s a good lesson to be technically prepared because you don’t know exactly what you’re going to get from a director or what demands they’re going to ask of you.
And it’s a director’s medium, so they are the boss and you have to conform to what they want. I mean Clint [Eastwood] will give you one take and no more. The very first day I worked with him [on Invictus], I’d been working on this South African accent for six months, eight hours a day and it is a very, very hard accent to do in the English language. And I did the first take and he said [does Clint Eastwood voice] ‘Cut, print and move on.’ And I said, ‘Sorry boss, can I do one more?’ And he says, ‘Why? You wanna waste everybody’s time?’
And I was like, ‘Nope, guess we’re moving on, OK.’ But, you know, sometimes there are directors that will do, I mean, De Niro, it’s been reported a lot, he directed me in a movie called The Good Shepherd about 15 years ago and he acted in the movie with me. And he’s got this style of repetition that has kind of been reported on before. And it was fascinating to watch up close. He wanted to do a pick-up shot of a close-up of his. So the camera was here and he was sitting at a small distance and I had my head right against the lens for his eyeline.
And back in those days when we shot film, the magazines were eleven minutes and now it’s digital it’s all different. But every eleven minutes you have to change the magazine. And Bob was trying to redo a chunk that was maybe a third of a page, not a very big monologue. I sat there and watched him do it, go through four magazines. So for 44 minutes, he said the same seven lines, over and over and over.
And I was sitting there, I wasn’t saying anything, I was just there for his eyeline. It didn’t even sound like English to me. I didn’t even understand. But he had the discipline to do that and then go back and search through it to get the exact moments that he wanted. So that’s a very different style. And he would allow all of his actors to do that repetition.
Maybe you take three or four lines and you keep recycling them over and over again. So sometimes you get directors who really will indulge a process like that. And all of those things work right? All of those people have made great movies. Just stylistically they can be totally different.
Beverly Hills Magazine: And they must like you as they keep calling you back – you have made six or seven movies with Steven Soderbergh?
Matt Damon: I think it’s nine.
Beverly Hills Magazine: And three or four with George Clooney. How is it to work with a director over a number of films?
Matt Damon: Well, if you become friends with somebody and you love their work then you have a shorthand, it’s just very easy. It’s all problem solving right? Every day you go to work and you’ve got a scene to do, you’re trying to figure out, ‘How should we stage it? How is this going to go? Where is the camera going to go?’ So one after the next, you’re just solving problems together. And if you like the people you’re working with, why not work with them again? We all feel lucky to be doing this job, so the only thing better than doing this job is doing it with your friends.
Beverly Hills Magazine: How did it feel working with Soderbergh to make the first sci-fi movie that became like a documentary – Contagion?
Matt Damon: Yeah [laughs]. Yeah, what’s incredible is how… and I mean Scott Burns our writer just went and talked to experts. So when people were saying, ‘We could never have predicted this?’ It’s like look at this movie [laughs]. It just asked questions. It was very how similar it was though.
Beverly Hills Magazine: Tell us about making the movie Gerry with Gus Van Sant? An independent movie in every sense of the word?
Matt Damon: It was amazing because Gus took a mortgage out on his house to pay for the movie. It started out over a conversation that we were having about Gus’ first movie Mala Noche, he said, ‘We had a crew of three. It was me, a sound guy and there was a kid who would go get us sandwiches if we were hungry or water if we were thirsty and that was it.’
And he was talking about stripping down his crew after making some bigger films. So we had a discussion about how small a movie could we make and I had read this article in the LA Times about two guys who had got lost in the desert and they were best friends and Gus said, ‘That’s enough, we can go from there.’
And then we started to just discuss a basic skeleton for the movie and what it would look like and then we improvised the whole thing. He did Elephant after Gerry and you can see he wouldn’t have gotten to Elephant without doing Gerry. A lot of those long shots, all-natural light, the late great Harris Savides was the cinematographer. And we didn’t have any lights on the truck.
There was one night scene where we are at a campfire and Harris said to me, ‘You’re the cinematographer tonight’, he’s like, ‘These logs, you have to keep putting them on so I can see Casey’s face while he’s talking.’ But it was really fun to strip everything down, Casey and I had just done ‘Ocean’s Eleven’ which was a big movie with Steven Soderbergh.
So to leave a production of that size and go to something so small. We started shooting in Argentina and we had these little cabins that were just in a little semi-circle and then there was one big cabin which had two bedrooms and the director lived in that house because, you know, all hail the director. So the rest of us were just in these little cabins but all together, two actors and then six or seven crew and Gus.
Beverly Hills Magazine: After the freedom of that experience, was it difficult to go back to more traditional movie making?
Matt Damon: No, I really just look at who is directing it. I enjoy filmmaking at every kind of level, at every size. Soderbergh’s a lot like that. I have done $100million movies with him, I’ve done tiny movies. And it’s fun to jump around like that. The problems are all similar that you still have to solve but the canvas just gets bigger and bigger the budget.
Beverly Hills Magazine: It sounds like you love being surrounded by a family of actors, obviously there is your friendship with ben but are most of your friends, other actors?
Matt Damon: Yeah, I mean I’ve been stuck on Mars by myself [laughs] but, you know, I’d much rather be around a group of other people. And a lot of those ensemble movies are really fun when you get a great group.
That Ocean’s group we just lucked out, like it was just a really great group of people to spend time with and we had a lot of fun. And the work is divided up. When you’re leading a movie it’s an up at five am grind all week, every week for like 16 weeks. But when you’re doing it with a big group it’s like, ‘Maybe I have two days off this week’. Steven Soderbergh has a hard job on those ones.
Beverly Hills Magazine: You’ve been involved in massive movie franchises like the bourne films and worked with so many great people, yet you never take yourself too seriously and have remained down-to-earth. How do you do that?
Matt Damon: I have teams of people to keep me grounded! [laughs] Yeah, I think I decided like image-wise a long time ago that there was no point trying to curate an image, you know, just don’t worry about it too much and be yourself – and don’t take yourself too seriously.
I was 27 when my life really changed and I became famous, so I did get to live quite a bit of my life as an anonymous person. And I really didn’t want the fame to infect my primary relationships, because I had observed other people’s.. you know what I mean? I just didn’t want it to corrupt my most important relationships so I never really bought into it, as much as I could.
Beverly Hills Magazine: On the subject of Bourne, did you realize when you making the first one that you had a box office hit on your hands?
Matt Damon: Well, when the Bourne movie came out I had done The Legend of Bagger Vance and All the Pretty Horses, both of which had bombed at the box office and Bourne was delayed a year, a full year. And so the word on the street was that it was going to be a disaster. And the phone really stopped ringing for me. And for anybody who wants to be a filmmaker, it was a good lesson for me to not take things personally.
It really is a business and if your stuff isn’t being watched, your phone just really does not ring. So I was like, ‘Well maybe this is it.’ But I always had in the back of my mind, because I’m a writer, I’d written my way into a job out of total obscurity so now people at least knew who I was so I could write another movie and do that if people completely stopped offering me jobs. But then The Bourne Identity came out and did really well and that changed everything.
Beverly Hills Magazine: You created a production company with Ben Affleck, pearl street films, which made the incredible Manchester by the sea – why did you want to go into production?
Matt Damon: Just it gives us an opportunity to look for books and look for material. We just wrote another movie that’s coming out this year called The Last Duel, the Ridley Scott movie. Drew Vinton, our development, found this book and he had been trying to… he showed me an email he sent me in 2011 trying to get me to read this book. And I called him and said, ‘What’s the deal with this book?’ And he said, ‘Well, Martin Scorsese has it right now but it’s really good.’
And I said, ‘Well, if Marty has it, Leo’s [DiCaprio] going to do so call me if he ever gives up the rights.’ And sure enough, he gave up the rights a few years back and that’s when Drew handed me the book. And I read it and loved it and then we got Ridley and Ben and Nicole Holofcener and the three of us wrote it. Having a production company allows you to do that kind of thing, which is to generate your own stuff.
Beverly Hills Magazine: You have never directed though – why is that?
Matt Damon: It’s really funny. I’ve almost directed so many times now. Promised Land, the one that I wrote with John Krasinski, I was supposed to direct it and then I went along on another movie and my kids were so young and I couldn’t leave again. And Gus Van Sant came and directed that.
And Manchester by the sea was an idea that John Krasinski and I pitched to Kenny [Lonergan] because John was going to star and I was going to direct. And then Kenny wrote it, John fell out because he was doing something else, I read the script and said, ‘Kenny you have to direct this movie, this is you, this has become your movie.’ And I said, ‘I’ll star in it.’ Then I did The Martian and because of that conflict and because of my schedule I didn’t have an opening for two years. And Kenny said, ‘Well I’m ready to go now.’
And I said, ‘The only person I would ever give this role to ever is Casey’ because Casey [Affleck] and I and Kenny knew each other because Casey and I had done one of Kenny’s plays in London, so we had this 20-year relationship with Kenny. And I knew Casey understood Kenny’s work because I’d done the play, I’d seen him perform Kenny’s words before and he’s phenomenal. So then he said, ‘Well you’ll never get the funding for this.’
So I said, ‘Let’s try’ and so we went around Hollywood and got doors slammed in our faces because Casey wasn’t bankable enough. And then a young producer named Kimberly Steward, we literally walked into her office and she gave us all the financing for the movie. It was an incredibly brave thing to do, because that’s not a commercial movie. But she basically risked her brand-new company on us. Movies get made in different ways but that was how that one got made and it was a pretty unique way.
Beverly Hills Magazine: How do you feel about streaming, which is funding a lot of movies these days?
Matt Damon: Look, if they’re getting made it’s a good thing. And the economics of trying to make a kind of mid-range drama now are just so terrible. Like if you have a $25million movie, you have to put that much into print and advertising, so that’s $50million.
You split your money between the distributor and the exhibitor, so the people who own the movie theaters get half of the money. So that means if your cost is now at $50million, you need to make $100million just to break even. So when you have a story about two people sitting there talking or a relationship that’s falling apart, that’s why Behind the Candelabra, we did it at HBO because we couldn’t get funding from any studio.
And that’s what they told us, they said, ‘We love you guys, we believe in you, we think the movie is going to be great but would I bet that this is going to make $100million and would I gamble $50million on that assumption, it’s just too much.’ That’s because the DVD market has gone. Technology just erased the DVD and that was a huge revenue stream for all of us because you could afford for your movie to come out in the theatre and not make everything back, it could make it partially back and you’d know the DVD was coming along to kind of help fill the gap. And so once that went away, all of those movies went away from theaters. So at least they are on platforms, at least they are getting made somewhere.
When we wrote Good Will Hunting, Ben and I were really interested in the story of these guys from this neighborhood. The reason there is this part for the therapist, and we didn’t just write, because we only wanted to write parts for ourselves [laughs] but the reason there was the therapist is because Reservoir Dogs had come out a few years earlier and we read that Harvey Keitel’s participation in Reservoir Dogs got Quentin [Tarantino] $500,000 or whatever he got, because of Harvey’s name was what made that movie, that’s how it got made.
And so we used to talk about Robin’s role as our Harvey Keitel part. We said, ‘We have to write a part for an actor that’s so good that we get a big movie star and then we’ll get the money and we can play the other parts.’ So you can get creative. There are always ways to find the money.
Beverly Hills Magazine: Let’s talk about Stillwater? How did you develop your character?
Matt Damon: Well, it’s a great script and a great director. So those two things always help. But it’s a very specific part of America – Stillwater, Oklahoma. And so going down there and doing the research, meeting these roughnecks, you know, these guys, they work on oil rigs in Oklahoma and Texas and it’s a back-breaking job and so all of the performance was really informed by spending time with these guys. The clothes that I wear – it’s these blue jeans, not those because these ones have flame retardant on them and they’re like cardboard which affects the way you walk.
They all have a certain body type, they’re all strong, strong guys but not like six-pack superhero guys – they lift heavy sh-t all day long. And they’re prone to kind of, you know, they get their jobs out of high school, they go right to the oil fields, they get a lot of cash in their pockets so that can lead them down the path of drug and alcohol abuse. The guys we were palling around with were really great and really had their lives together.
They were family men and one guy took us to his house for a barbecue and his daughter pulled out a guitar and started playing church songs. We had a great barbecue and drank some beer and then went and shot shotguns [laughs]. It’s a very particular culture, you know, and very different from how I grew up but really welcoming, and that time down there really informed how Tom [McCarthy] and I developed the character.
Beverly Hills Magazine: Can you talk about the choices you’ve made in your career? Maybe a choice that was very important or something that you might have got wrong?
Matt Damon: Well, I can think right off the bat would be, I got offered Planet of the Apes that Tim Burton was directing. And I had already verbally committed to The Bourne Identity with Doug Liman but it was like, ‘Yeah I think I want to do this’ but also, ‘Oh my god, I’ve been offered a Tim Burton movie, it’s massive, it’s ‘Planet of the Apes’’, I looked at the artwork and thought, ‘This is going to be amazing.’
So I was offered the Tim Burton movie and then Steven Spielberg offered me a small part in Minority Report, which is another great script and great movie. It wasn’t the Tom Cruise part, but it was another part. And Soderbergh offered me Ocean’s Eleven. And so, for moral reasons I said to Doug Liman, ‘No I’ve already committed to you’ and in my mind I thought, ‘Well, ‘Planet of the Apes’ is going to be a big hit but what are you going to do?’ And so, I did The Bourne Identity and Ocean’s Eleven – and that changed my career, definitely.
Another time I made a moral decision was when I was offered a little movie called Avatar [laughs]. I turned down and I will go down in history as the person, because Jim Cameron called me, he offered me ten percent of Avatar [laughs]. You will never meet an actor who turned down more money than me.
But I was in the middle of shooting Bourne Ultimatum and he wanted to shoot during our post production and we always needed more work in our post production and I needed to be around, I needed to be available to do more work on the post production. And he said to me, he was really lovely, he said, ‘You know, this movie doesn’t need you, it doesn’t need a movie star at all, the movie is the star, the idea is the star and it’s going to work, so if you don’t do it, I’m going to discover some new guy and put him in – but if you do, I’ll give you ten per cent of the movie.’
And for moral reasons again, I told him I couldn’t walk away from this thing that I’d spent all these years doing and he was really great about it. He really celebrated that decision – so at least I got a pat on the back from Jim Cameron. At the end of the day, I would have loved to work with him.
I told John Krasinski this story, we were writing Promised Land and we were in my kitchen and we were on a break and I told him the Avatar story and he just launched out of his seat going, ‘OK, OK, OK, you know, nothing in your life would be different if you had done Avatar except you and me would be having this conversation in space.’ [laughs]
So with these billionaires blasting off into space it’s probably kind of true, I probably would have bought a rocket ship, I don’t know. But ultimately, it didn’t matter, I missed out, really mostly it’s going to sound like because it was so much money, but I missed out on the chance to work with him and I hope that comes around because I would do that for free.
Beverly Hills Magazine: What is more fulfilling for you – the big blockbusters or the smaller movies?
Matt Damon: They’re both really fulfilling, to tell you the truth. Each project, you love each project, it’s almost like a child, it’s like you put so much time and blood and sweat and tears in with your kind of teammates making this thing. But I would say the most deeply enriching would be the ones that we’d written.
They’d start out as just an idea in your head and you kind of go through every stage with it. That’s kind of a deeper level of involvement, you know, because sometimes as an actor you’re hired labour, you’re not running the show, you’re there to do a specific thing. And so you can go from production to production and I did for many, many years, I just had a duffel bag, I didn’t live anywhere, I just went from job to job because I just loved doing it.
But you definitely feel less of a connection because you’re kind of just there for production, you’re not there for pre-production or post production. So definitely you’re involved a lot longer and maybe a little deeper way when you’re writing.
Beverly Hills Magazine: What collaborations have impacted you the most?
Matt Damon: Well, the biggest one obviously is Ben Affleck because we’ve been very close friends for 40 years now. So we’ve done a lot of stuff together and so that would be the biggest one. But I’ve been so lucky. Once I could choose which movies I wanted to do, once I got out of that first stage of just trying to get a job, once I could kind of pick and choose a little more, choosing by director, I think, was a really good way to think about it because it is a director’s medium and the better director you can work with, the better the movie is going to be usually and the more you are going to learn and the more good habits you’re going to learn.
You know, you keep growing and developing as an artist. No-one expects you to have it figured out at 20 and the fun is that you can never do it perfectly so there’s always more to learn and always more to do. But I would say, try to collaborate with the best directors you can.
Beverly Hills Magazine: How has your view of acting changed over the years?
Matt Damon: Great question. Yeah, I think I always looked at it as a trade, like carpentry or something and I think that was a really healthy way to look at it. And my theory was, the more I could do it the better, so just take any job that I could get.
In terms of developing over the last 30 or whatever years, your process gets a lot more economical. Like when I was young, I did a lot of things that just didn’t really help but took up time because I kind of did everything to try to prepare.
And I remember when I was like 25, that’s like 25 years ago, oh my God, and hearing Anthony Hopkins talk about his process getting more economical as he got older and I remember thinking, ‘I can’t wait until that happens to me, I really want that to happen.’ It’s not that you work less hard, it’s that you just work smarter. And that’s just from doing it as much as you can, because you start to really understand what works for you.
There are all different ways and all different processes for people to do this job and I’ve worked with some great actors and they all do it differently but the great ones have all found a strategy or a process that works for them and once you find that process you refine it and it takes less time because you’re doing everything that you have to do and nothing more.
Beverly Hills Magazine: Do the characters you play leave a lasting impression on you and vice versa?
Matt Damon: Yeah, that’s a great question because you’re always bringing yourself into the character you’re playing because you’re using real emotion. And so the character in Stillwater, for instance, that guy looks differently than me, you know, it’s almost like you build him, you build him in pre-production. And I put on weight, I’m not sure how much, but I just wanted that body type – beefy.
I walk differently, I talk very differently, I look different, there’s a whole physical side to that kind of transformation. So it comes out as seeming like a different person but the emotion is very real, it’s not somebody else’s emotion, it’s mine.
And that is another thing that has gotten a lot easier the older I get, having children is a big part of that, like I found that my emotions were much more available to me. I didn’t have to work as hard to get somewhere, whether that was joy or pain or anything I needed to do at work. It felt like it was just there and I needed to relax and it could come. And I think that was, for me, a product of having children, it makes you much more fragile, in a way. So yeah.
Beverly Hills Magazine: How do you balance your professional life and your personal life, especially when there is so much focus on actor’s personal lives with social media etc.?
Matt Damon: Yeah, good question. I think the media kind of gave up on me because I was so boring [laughs]. Usually what sells those magazines are like se-x and scandal and everybody knows kind of, ‘Well, he’s married and a dad’ and I’ve been relatively free of scandal too so it’s not really worth their money to sit outside my house.
They also know I’ll wait them out. I’ll sit in the house forever. But I have friends, look, a lot of my friends can’t get out of the way of it, and it’s not because… I remember thinking that about Brad [Pitt] and watching the insanity around him, not because of him though, he’s like a dude from Missouri, he couldn’t be more normal. And he lives in a world where everyone goes crazy.
For Ocean’s Twelve’ we had to do this thing at the Formula One in Monaco, where we had to show up, George and Brad and me. We had to show up and walk to one of the garages and take photographs, that was what we had to do. And for that they were going to put Ocean’s Twelve’ on the side of the cars, which was like a billboard, a good ad space for us, I guess.
So we got off this boat and we had to walk about a half a mile to this garage where we were going to take this picture and I literally have never seen anything like it. I was with my wife, it was before we were married, but I held onto her, it was absolute madness, all these people and everyone with cameras and everybody going crazy and in a circle around Brad, to the point where I got arm-barred four times by security and I’m like, ‘No, no, I’m with Brad!’ But my wife and I were holding on to each other for dear life and it’s still one of the most messed up things I’ve ever seen.
And I looked at Brad at one point and he pulled out this little Leica, he likes to take pictures, he had this beautiful little Leica. And he was walking and like his pulse didn’t go above 50. He was just walking and holding his camera up and taking pictures calmly of all the lunatics around him [laughs] and he was just like he was going to the grocery store.
And I just remember thinking, ‘Man, I could not, I couldn’t do it. I’m just not built to do it.’ But he doesn’t bring it on himself, you know, he doesn’t court that. He wants to be as private as he can be but they just don’t allow him to do it. So I feel very lucky because I feel like I got the best part of it where I get to do the work, which is all I really want, and I can leave that other sh-t out.