The Oscar-nominated director Matt Damon hated working with: “Game over for that dude”

As far as movie stars go, Matt Damonseems pretty friendly, even normal. He doesn’t have a reputation for being difficult, and he doesn’t have any known ongoing feuds with co-stars. In the age of social media, when everyone with a smartphone is a potential member of the paparazzi, he’s kept a remarkably bland public profile. 

It can even be easy to remember just how illustrious his career is, given how low-key he is in public life. He won an Oscar when he was 28 years old for co-writing Good Will Hunting, a film which also earned him a nomination for ‘Best Actor.’ He’s nabbed two more Oscar nominations for acting in the years since then and another for ‘Best Picture’ for producing Manchester by the Sea. 

Damon has regularly defied the financial odds, whether it was the minuscule salary he received for Good Will Hunting or the surprise smash hit of the Bourne franchise. In 2007, Forbes ran the numbers and discovered that he was Hollywood’s best investment. His previous three films earned an average of $29 of gross income per every dollar of his salary, a number which almost certainly shrank drastically once his agents caught wind of it. 

It was the Bourne franchise that turned Damon into a leading man in action movies, on par with Tom Cruise in terms of bankability. The first three films – 2002’s The Bourne Identity, 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy, and 2007’s The Bourne Ultimatum – pulled in nearly a billion dollars at the box office and made Damon a movie star of the largest proportions.

Despite the success of the franchise, however, Damon found one collaborator to be frustrating, bordering on contemptible. Tony Gilroy had co-written the first film and would go on to earn two Oscar nominations for directing and writing the 2007 political thriller Michael Clayton. When he was brought on to write the second film, he leveraged the success of the previous movie to take home what was, in Damon’s words, “an exorbitant amount of money” without having to write more than one draft or take any notes. 

In a 2011 interview with GQ, the actor clearly still hadn’t gotten over how terrible the result was. “It’s really the studio’s fault for putting themselves in that position,” he said. “I don’t blame Tony for taking a boatload of money and handing in what he handed in. It’s just that it was unreadable. This is a career-ender. I mean, I could put this thing up on eBay, and it would be game over for that dude. It’s terrible. It’s really embarrassing.”

The result of the terrible script was that they had to scramble to find someone to rewrite it. In the end, it was George Nolfi and Scott Z Burns, who, under aggressively tight deadlines, turned in a new draft that was workable. When Gilroy tried to claim sole credit on the end result, he was slapped down by the Writers Guild, which was a small comfort for Damon. 

His frustration with Gilroy didn’t stop him from making another film with him, though. In 2016, Damon starred in the much-maligned movie The Great Wall, which Gilroy had again co-written. Given their past, however, it seems unlikely that the two would have gone out of their way to discuss the project.