(Matt Damon as Jean de Carrouges in The Last Duel. Photo credit 2021 20th Century Studios)
It’s been almost 25 years since Matt Damon and Ben Affleck penned their Oscar-winning script for Good Will Hunting. The pair, who went from unknowns to Hollywood A-listers with the breakout film, have reunited for the first time as writing partners for The Last Duel – but this time they know exactly what they’re doing.
The long-time friends said they shied away from writing together after their 1997 film because of how inefficient their process was.
“It was so time consuming the first time we did it because we didn’t know what we were doing. It took us literally years and we wrote thousands and thousands of pages that we basically scrunched into a 130-page screenplay, but I think by just doing movies for 25 years just kind of by osmosis we figured out structure,” says Matt Damon during a recent virtual global press conference for The Last Duel.
The film is based on the true story of 14th-century France’s last sanctioned duel between Jean de Carrouges and Jacques Le Gris after Carrouges’ wife Marguerite accuses her husband’s best friend (Le Gris) of rape. It stars Damon as Carrouges, Adam Driver as Le Gris and Jodie Comer as Marguerite. Affleck also plays the role of Count Pierre d’Alençon.
Damon says he first became interested in adapting the story after reading Eric Jager’s 2004 book The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial by Combat in Medieval France.
After getting director Ridley Scott on board, Damon was having dinner with Affleck when he told him about the project. Affleck was intrigued and said to Damon, “Why don’t we write it?”
“It just kind of happened really organically and it happened really quickly,” says Damon.
To ensure they did justice to Marguerite’s story, Damon and Affleck enlisted the help of Nicole Holofcener (Can You Ever Forgive Me, Enough Said) to write the third act (and female perspective) of the movie.
What resulted was a film told from three distinct perspectives – first of the two men (Carrouges and Le Gris) and ending with the truth from Marguerite.
“The construct was that the world of women is totally ignored and overlooked and is invisible for the first two acts of the movie and then it’s revealed in the third act,” says Damon.
“By the time we got to the third act I wanted to say this is actually the truth and she’s actually a human being,” adds Holofcener.
((L-R) Matt Damon, Ridley Scott, Jodie Comer, Ben Affleck and Nicole Holofcener arrive for the photocall of The Last Duel during the 78th Venice International Film Festival on September 10, 2021 in Venice, Italy. Photo by Marc Piasecki/Getty Images for 20th Century Studios)
Affleck also applauds Comer’s incredible perspective for being able to play her character from two other characters’ points of view.
“Because she does that so perfectly ... you don’t get a sense that, ‘Oh it’s an exaggerated version of a person.’ It feels like versions of women we’ve seen in movies before and we wanted to exploit the fact that historically people are in many ways largely accustomed to women being secondary, tertiary characters,” explains Affleck of how Marguerite is portrayed in the film’s first two acts.
“(Comer) was willing to play that and makes the reveal so much powerful and elegant to see the difference between essentially a two-dimensional person and a fully realized three-dimensional human being.”
(Jodie Comer as Marguerite de Carrouges in The Last Duel. Photo credit: Patrick Redmond 2021 20th Century Studios)Comer admits it was challenging to play three versions of a character, something she’d never done before.
“The beautiful thing about the script was it was all there on the page. The intentions were very, very clear as to what was needed in each perspective. What was sometimes jarring was that we shot each version simultaneously, so we were literally jumping from one to the next,” she says.
As well as shooting each version right after another, the actors had to adjust to Scott’s epic filming style. By using multiple cameras in each scene, all the action was being captured at the same time and the actors never knew if they on camera, increasing the energy and intensity.
“He was the perfect guy to do it,” says Damon, who worked with the Oscar-nominated director on The Martian.
“Ridley’s style of filmmaking was so impressive and exciting and energizing and made you feel so alive,” adds Affleck.
The Last Duel is now playing in Cineplex Theatres get tickets here