Matt Damon on rugby, race and espionage

Matt Damon in The Informant. Photo / Supplied

As he approaches the milestone age of 40 next year, Matt Damon is grateful. He is grateful that his career is going from strength to strength and he is probably grateful that he was not born a woman. Though the always-well-mannered gent doesn't quite put it that way.

"It's very unfair, this thing about the movie business, where as a man you move into another gear when you get to 35, whereas for women the roles start to evaporate," he says. "All these terrific roles keep coming. Already I've had a great career."

Interestingly, many of the films Damon has made lately are set in male-dominated worlds. Melanie Lynskey, his co-star and on-screen wife in his latest film, The Informant!, has nothing more than a handbag role. Nor can one imagine a woman making much of an impact in his upcoming Oscar contender, Clint Eastwood's Invictus, given the film is set in the blokey world of South African rugby and politics.

As usual, Eastwood is keeping Invictus from prying critical eyes until the last moment, as he did with Million Dollar Baby and Changeling, which both featured strongly at the Oscars.

It's likely, then, that Damon - who plays Springboks captain Francois Pienaar - may well figure in the Oscars next year. Pienaar banded together with Nelson Mandela during the 1995 Rugby World Cup in an attempt to unite the South African people after the fall of apartheid.

Of course most New Zealanders will remember that particular World Cup for the All Blacks steaming into the final, with Jonah Lomu (played in the movie by former Samoan international Zak Feaunati) at his peak, only to be beaten by the Boks 15-12 (although allegations of deliberate food poisoning in the All Blacks' camp surfaced following the final).

Though the game was bad news for New Zealand, it helped unify South Africa.

Damon, an actor who uses his celebrity to further humanitarian causes, took his wife Luciana and their three daughters to meet Mandela during the filming. "Our kids were captivated by him," he says. "They understood immediately what an important man he is."

Still, Damon did not make the film out of any political consciousness or in a bid to meet Mandela. Like many actors in Hollywood, he wanted to work with Eastwood. It's no surprise, given Damon's affability and star status, that they are planning a second movie, the supernatural thriller Hereafter, based on a screenplay by Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon). "Talking to Clint last week, he now says he learns something new on every movie he makes. At 78 that's incredible. He never stops learning."

Damon admits that is something he also aspires to, and the reason he associates himself with the best.

Like his old friend Ben Affleck, he has aspirations to direct movies and is taking in all he can from the masters he works with.

He singles out Soderbergh and Eastwood particularly for praise. "Those two guys are incredible, because they edit in the camera as they're working and they're totally fluid," he says. "They don't storyboard and they don't come with preconceived ideas. They know the style of the film but they're not rigid. They're so fluent in the language of cinema that they can come in and watch what's happening and listen to suggestions and collaborate and get the best out of the people working with them. They then make a decision and shoot it.

"Still, nobody has pushed the envelope like Steven. He's totally fascinated by form. He's always working on something and hasn't stopped since Sex, Lies and Videotape. He'll go from The Girlfriend Experience, which he shot in 15 days, to a bigger film and then back to a smaller one. He's never been over-budget or over-schedule and does something different every time."

The Informant - originally a book by journalist Kurt Eichenwald - is based on true events. Damon plays Mark Whitacre, the vice-president of a large agricultural company, who turns government informant when the company is suspected of price-fixing.

"We had the screenplay for seven years," Damon explains. "Steven actually offered me the movie in 2001 when I was doing my fourth round of re-shoots on the first Bourne movie. I was in a hotel room in Paris, Oceans Eleven hadn't come out yet and my two previous movies [All The Pretty Horses and The Legend of Bagger Vance] had tanked.

"The Bourne movie had all the signals of being a disaster as well. We'd re-shot so many scenes and it had been delayed a year. I literally hadn't had a phone call in nine months about a job. By any degree in Hollywood I was as cold as ice. Steven, on the other hand, was coming off his Oscar for Traffic, he'd been nominated for Erin Brockovich in the same year, so he was as hot as you can get in Hollywood."

It was in that climate that Soderbergh called the downtrodden Damon, and told him excitedly, "I've found something for us to do together. It's called The Informant! and I've just faxed you the first 80 pages. I've read it. It's great."

Damon was dumbfounded by how good the story was - especially the character of Whitacre.

"It was one of those great roles, so complex, with everything you dream of. The thing I love about the character is he's like a lot of guys I met in college. These people might be smart and have PhDs but they did things that were so stupid - they had no common sense. Some of the things Whitacre does are so stupid and reckless, yet he's also a scientist. He was fun to play. Everyone around him speculated why he did what he did and ultimately he was the

only one who knew. The pressure that was put on him exacerbated his medical condition - he was diagnosed as bipolar. It was incredible because these trained FBI agents would go in and they'd crack, so when they sent this guy in on his own and he was there for 2 years, what did they expect?"

Damon - who put on weight, has a moustache, and wears a wig and glasses for the role - never met the real Whitacre but drew on what he read in the screenplay and book. "There are some mannerisms that they talk about, that he reaches up for his glasses a lot, for instance, that I copied. But once Steven said he wanted to do this as a comedy I didn't have to do a rigorous character study of the guy, because it didn't really apply."

Damon admits that his upcoming US$100 million [$136 million] Iraq War movie, Green Zone, which reunites him with Greengrass (The Bourne Ultimatum, The Bourne Supremacy) is something of a gamble, as movies about the Iraq War have not been huge box office performers. The film, which he calls "a simple thriller", follows a team assigned with the task of looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and of course they find there aren't any there.

"The entire thing is based on deception. It's another film about lies. Though much bigger lies," he chuckles.

As for another adventure for Jason Bourne, he says Paul Greengrass is keen. "We don't have a story yet and it's really about finding a story that's good. It's tricky, because up till now the films have been about the character development of this guy who loses his memory and he slowly gets it back. You know, he's got his memory back now so it's like, now what?"

Of course the Bourne franchise has been a huge money-spinner and the film could easily go ahead. It's Damon's smaller films that are struggling to be made, and he is a little dismayed.

"It's really hard to get money for movies right now. The credit crunch affects everyone. Steven and I are hoping to do this movie about Liberace, where I play his ex-lover who wrote a tell-all book called Behind The Candelabra after Liberace died. But it's obviously not a subject people want to throw money at. Richard LaGravanese wrote the screenplay and it's really, really, really great, but we need about $30 million to get it right, to set it in the period and shoot in Las Vegas. I think we'll get it - Michael Douglas is playing Liberace - but there's another movie with David Fincher we just couldn't raise the money for."

Damon's legions of female fans will be pleased to know that before getting together with Douglas, he is making the futuristic romantic thriller, The Adjustment Bureau, with Emily Blunt. Currently filming in New York, it's based on a Philip K. Dick story, and is being directed by first-timer George Nolfi, the screenwriter of Oceans Twelve and The Bourne Ultimatum.

Yes, Damon is keeping it in the family, once again.

Lowdown

Who: Matt Damon, actor
What: The Informant!, opens December 3; Invictus, opens January 28
Past roles: Good Will Hunting (1997); The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999); Oceans Eleven (2001); The Bourne Identity (2002); The Departed (2006); The Good Shepherd (2006)