By Fred Topel
Translator: Yi Ersan
Proofreader: Qin Tian
Source: Gonzo Okanagan (October 12, 2021)
What makes the reunion of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck even more special is that they not only participated in the acting, but also wrote the script together. It was the first time they had co-written a screenplay since winning an Oscar for Mindcatcher and Affleck became a single-handed writer-director. This time, they also invited Nicole Harofense to join the creative team.
Damon plays a medieval French knight, Jean de Carrouge, who launches a life-and-death duel with another squire, Jacques Le Gris (Adam Draper), who raped his wife, Marguerite (Judy Comer).
Affleck played the earl who protected Le Gris. The film is divided into three chapters, showing the three-way perspective of de Caruche, Le Gris and Margaret. The epic film, directed by Ridley Scott, will be released on October 15.
The Final Duel
Q: It's been 25 years since Mindcatcher, have you had any conversations or ideas about working together again? Why this story and why now?
Dumb: I don't know, that's a good question. I think it's probably because we're so inefficient that we're a little afraid of writing. The first time we worked together on a screenplay was too time-consuming because we didn't know what we were doing. We spent years. We wrote thousands of pages and it took a while to compress them into a 130-page script. But I think through 25 years of filmmaking experience, we have subtly understood the structure. And the results turn out to be very effective. At the same time, it would be helpful to invite great screenwriters like Nicole to help us. This undoubtedly simplifies the whole process.
Big Ben: It gave us the confidence to do this together. We can rely on each other.
Q: Stories like this are still happening today. How do you deal with the cognitive differences caused by age?
Big Ben: There are a lot of them. This is a deliberate matter, and part of the fact we would like to point out is the extent to which corrupt and morally depraved institutions create people who reflect these values. So it's not so much an accusation of a bad guy as it is about, "Look." Behind this is the church, science, the courts, and cause and effect. The whole of Western European civilization is our cultural predecessor." At least the American concept is a product of the Enlightenment, its philosophy, and so on, although this is not consistent.
The dominant culture here comes from other cultures, and as a result these values, and this culture may be a complete villain in how to educate people, give back to society, encourage behavior, and so on— perhaps like my role. He was indeed a terrible person, but what was actually even more frightening was when a person came to power and represented these values and said, "These are the values we encourage." You'll be rewarded for following them." It's more about the character Adam plays, how he's taught how to behave, and what rewards he gets, not just about presenting the essence of his character.
In other words, people can be changed and created by these big institutions, and that's the value system we want to accuse. This requires ensuring that at the architectural level, all of these elements are included. Then you have to put it aside and hope that great actors can resonate with these people so that it doesn't feel too pedantic or feel like a sermon or a term paper.
Q: How was it like shooting in Ireland?
Big Ben: I love it. Ireland is beautiful and the people are so nice. It's just that it's during the pandemic, so a lot of times after the shooting, you need to wear a variety of protective clothing and protective gear immediately after the shooting to ensure safety. It's just an extra hurdle, but Ireland itself is a magical and flattering place. Like many Bostonians, I grew up hearing that my ancestors came from Ireland, and that's an incredible place.
The crew is special and everyone is amazing. Ridley's style of filmmaking is impressive, exhilarating, and energized. As a director, it immediately occurred to me that I was stealing from him.
So, when I was shooting an ad, I hired the same director of photography and I thought, "We're going to do it like Ridley." That was an ad shot for a sports betting app, so it didn't exactly achieve the same effect. But Shaquille O'Neill and I gave it a lot of fun.
Q: Do you miss the time you lived there?
Dumb: We did have a great time. On the day we arrived in Ireland, the crew had to stop filming due to the pandemic. We can choose to go back home to the U.S. or stay there, where we never really lived. We had a family vote and finally decided to stay.
This was unexpected. A lot of people rented a beautiful house here for three months, but they gave up and went back to their own homes. So we took over the houses. We converted one of the houses into a school for our children. We were almost free to move around for three months in a beautiful small town in Ireland. The community there accepted us in a wonderful way.
Q: What was the biggest challenge or the most exciting aspect of shooting the same scene from different perspectives?
Dumb: We stated on the shooting schedule whose perspective we were currently in, but we would make it clear again before booting, "This is my perspective" or "This is your perspective." We will remind each other, because we have to calibrate everything on this basis. It's also a pleasure.
You can also express more in other people's stories, because in some way "you" are constructed from different perspectives of theirs. So you have more leeway in some ways, which is really interesting. Of course, this was all planned in advance, and for Judy and Adam's perspective, the dialogue in those key scenes was the same.
Big Ben: The real challenge is that because we don't want to take shortcuts at all — that is, to make the event look like something else happened from someone's point of view. We're trying to create a state where when two people are talking, if you ask them separately, "What's going on?" They will sincerely tell you the difference. They will have different experiences that are rooted in where they came from, what their needs are, what their values are, and so on.
But in this regard, my role is not challenging, as my role is primarily that of Ancillary Adam Dreyffer. My personality influenced two other people, but the characters of Judy and Adam were the most difficult to perform. I think the difficulty of this kind of performance is in a way very introspective because they need to play three different roles.
Not only that, but it's very brave to seize these very subtle, sensitive moments without sacrificing the integrity of your character, and to fight each other between different characters, and to commit to playing a realistic and believable version.
Q: What was the biggest difficulty in writing a story of a medieval language?
Big Ben: What's really interesting is that we want to create a balance. First of all, they speak French. Second, they spoke a French language that contemporary French could not recognize, in other words, the English of the time sounded like Chaucer's poetry. So you can't do that exactly, and you obviously don't want to make it too modern and easy to read, because that would make it feel unreal. So we need to strike some balance, similar to how we approach value systems.
In fact, the value system of the time was in many ways abominable, even much worse than what we present. But if we reproduce exactly what it really is, it will be so repulsive that it will be so difficult for people to accept any reality about it, or have any resemblance to something they can empathize with.
Therefore, we have tried to mitigate this situation without compromising the basic facts. We worked with dialect coach Tim Monich to try to find a way to speak that doesn't sound like it's coming from a contemporary person or somewhere in the contemporary real world, because sometimes people say, "It's a period play, and they speak English." The British accent should sound a little more vicissitudes."
Dumb: But we're playing the French, not the British, who are in the midst of a hundred years' war with the British and who keep talking about the British, otherwise it would be weird. So we worked with Tim to create this way of talking, and all of our actors say that. We accepted this approach because it needed to sound very familiar and not very modern at the same time. We all hope that the accent will disappear one day.