Matt Damon appeared on Netflix’s “Skip Intro” podcast during his press tour for the streamer’s crime thriller “The Rip,” which happens to be releasing in the thick of Oscar season. Damon is no stranger to the awards campaigning with three acting Oscar noms under his belt and a screenplay win for “Good Will Hunting.” He recently hit the trail hard as a cast member in Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” which won best picture in 2024.
When podcast host Krista Smith asked Damon what he likes missing out on when it comes to Hollywood, the actor didn’t hesitate with an answer: “Awards season. 100%.”
“What I don’t like is this idea of campaigning,” Damon explained. “It seems completely backwards to me and odd. Maybe it’s good for movies, just having it all out there and gets the culture thinking and talking about movies. I hope that’s the case…”
Unfortunately for Damon, he is likely to be campaigning once again during the 2025-2026 Oscar season as the star of Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey.” The actor told Smith that he is “still kind of unpacking” the experience of making Nolan’s Greek epic but noted: “It did have a profound effect on me.”
“Doing ‘The Odyssey’ this last year, it felt like my one chance in my life to make a David Lean movie, you know?” Damon said. “That I was making the last big movie on film that I was ever going to get to make.”
Damon had previously said of the film: “If I look objectively at what was required to do that job, I think it came at just the right time in my life. I think I would have been miserable 20 years ago, trying to do that job. You were uncomfortable every day. But I really enjoyed, like, deeply enjoyed every minute of it,”
“Intellectually, I understood that concept of you’re not in control of what happens, but you are in control of how you feel about it — it’s easier said than done,” he continued. “But to really feel gratitude — and I think because it was tied into not only the joy of being able to have a role that great with a director that great with a group of people that great and a story that great, but in that sense of nostalgia I had for how I started, how I came into the business, the feeling I had when I was shooting ‘School Ties’ and Freddie Francis was the cinematographer and I, you know, and I was like, ‘This is really happening.’”
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“The Odyssey” is the first Hollywood feature film to be entirely shot with Imax film cameras. Damon previously marveled over the technical feat on an episode of the “New Heights” podcast.
“Imax cameras are really loud. It sounds like a blender, like a Cuisinart in your face when the camera’s close to you. So there’s never been these dialogue [scenes in Imax],” Damon said. “We couldn’t have this conversation with a normal Imax camera because you wouldn’t be able to hear us. They built this giant thing around the Imax for those dialogue scenes and a system of mirrors so your eye line would be close to the camera and you could talk to the other actor. The amount of work that went into figuring out how to do [that], because he wanted to do 100 percent Imax and he did it!”
A new Imax film casing called a “blimp” was created for “The Odyssey” to significantly reduce the noise Imax cameras produce.
“The blimp system is a game-changer,” Nolan told Empire magazine last year. “You can be shooting a foot from [an actor’s] face while they’re whispering and get usable sound. What that opens up are intimate moments of performance on the world’s most beautiful format.”
Watch Damon’s full interview on Netflix’s “Skip Intro” podcast in the video below.
From Variety US