Of all the ways one might expect to meet two A-list Hollywood powerhouses, the one you likely don’t have in your mind’s eye as you picture post-Oscar bashes and restaurants high in the Hollywood Hills is the three of you being awkwardly origamied in the back of a trailer on the Fox lot in LA, so close that it takes forward planning just to find a spot for your legs. A few inches to GQ’s right sprawls Christian Bale, laconic and gym-gear casual, while a few inches from our left sits Matt Damon, bright-eyed and poker-player alert. Post-GQ cover shoot, we’re not so much toe-to-toe as knee-to-knee with Batman and Bourne.

But, of course, they’re both much more than that. In an era of Marvel’s superhero CGI puppet shows, even their Imax moments are ones of grit and depth. And as for their non-Imax ones, taken together they’re surely a fair chunk of any film magazine’s top-100 list: take your pick from American Psycho, The Prestige, The Machinist, The Fighter, American Hustle, The Big Short and Vice for Bale and Good Will Hunting, Saving Private Ryan, The Talented Mr Ripley, The Departed, Behind The Candelabra, Elysium and The Martian for Damon. They’re the A-listers all other A-listers want to be.

© Sam Jones

The reason we’re here is that after years of bumping into each other and trading tales at various events (“We’d always chit-chat a little,” says Damon. “I actually met Christian’s wife before I met him, 20 years ago”) they’re finally in a film together.

Le Mans ’66 tells the true tale of the grudge match between Ford and Ferrari in the Sixties and how the battleground became the 1966 Le Mans 24 Hours race, where an upstart Ford team led by Texan Carroll Shelby (Damon) and driven by the British-born professional pain-in-the-ass-genius Ken Miles (Bale) took on the might of Italian motor racing.

It is, variously, a high-octane, old-school racing movie, a knockabout buddy comedy, a heart-wrenching drama and an Oscar-bait biopic all rolled into one. It’s also, it almost goes without saying, rather brilliant and easily one of the year’s must-see films.

If Damon is exactly the guy you’d expect – the everyman’s everyman, funny, chummy, an anecdote tombola and absolutely the guy you’d love to have a beer or ten with – Bale is not at all what you’d imagine from his brooding roles, legendary dedication and propensity to gorge or starve until the character’s waistline fits. He’s wide-eyed, a little goofy, a little silly and, unlike other transatlantic Brits whose accents have settled somewhere mid-trip, Bale has, if anything, become even more British – and, dare we say it, a bit cockney – with the time spent away, as if British Bale is a part he’s still perfecting and hasn’t nailed quite yet. We start with how they met, but then most of the questions never seemed to matter anyway, as it turns out each was on starters’ orders, and then: we’re off.

© Sam Jones

So first off, when did you guys first meet? Did you know each other before this film?

Matt Damon: What’s funny is that there is a restraining order for all of the shoot. We’re not actually allowed to be in the same room. Right now, we’re in violation... I mean, we’ve kind of seen each other over the years, but until this we didn’t really spend that much time together, no?

Christian Bale: No. I think I’ve got a few projects that Matt passed on.

MD: I can’t even talk about those ones...

CB: After he would pass [on a role] I remember saying to people, “Why would Matt not want to do this? What am I missing?”

Can you say what roles?

MD: Well, I can definitely say that the most famous one...

CB: I wasn’t going to say any of them!

MD: I was just going to say this one, because you’re so good in it. The Fighter. I read the script because I thought it was fascinating, but the script was not very good. And we had a different director at the time. And Mark [Wahlberg] really wanted to do it and was so excited about it, but we all knew the script wasn’t there. Then David [O Russell] came in, rewrote the script, got Christian, and it was awesome.

So, Matt, if you’d have taken that earlier, not-so-good version of The Fighter, the better version wouldn’t have been made and Christian wouldn’t have won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor...

MD: [Laughs.] So, listen, what year was that, 09? I’d say for everything since then...

CB: There’s a percentage that I owe you?

MD: Correct.

Glad we got that sorted. What did you learn about each other during filming?

CB: That he needs to direct. I definitely learnt that. I would hear Matt and Jim [Mangold, the director] having conversations that went right over my head.

MD: See, I read that as you saying, “He definitely shouldn’t act.”

CB: [Laughs.] No, I came to you really early on and said, “You’ve got to direct, man.” And he’s got much better perception than I do.

So, Matt, does that make you want to direct?

MD: Yeah, well, now if it means I can get him for my movie!

CB: I don’t think I said that...

MD: No, that’s pretty much what you said. I mean, this is being recorded. No, I do. And I have wanted to for a long time, but it’s just about finding the right thing. And it’s just very time intensive. You can’t do it halfway. I mean, Jim didn’t see his kids until the weekends and then he was still scouting and still on the phone with his editors in the editing room.

Your turn, Matt. What did you learn about Christian?

MD: Well, I’d had spies telling me about Christian for years. Casey Affleck worked with him [on 2013’s Out Of The Furnace] and he came over for dinner after their first day of shooting with all the blood drained from his face. I said, “What’s wrong, man?” And he just said, “I got my doors blown off today. I was sitting there pulling these faces and everything Christian was doing was completely real and lived-in and I realised that I’m being too picky. I need to work more, cos I’ll be better if I can just work more.”

CB: But Casey’s MO is beating himself up. He just will not accept that he’s got any talent whatsoever.

MD: Christian’s approach is the approach that young actors wish they had when they’re talking shit: a monk-like discipline in service of your work. That’s one of the rarest things, because it comes at a price. It is inspiring.

CB: Well, thank you, mate. Did you ever train? See, I never trained. And I’ve come to the realisation recently... One of [my] first jobs ever was with Rowan Atkinson and I think I look at him as the template. He was playing... The Nerd, it was called, by Larry Shue. He would come out, we’d say hello, but he didn’t really socialise. None of us knew him – it was before he did Mr Bean. And he would just become this character, but before he went on stage. And I would just watch him; I would see him becoming a character. I was mesmerised. And then he just stayed in character for the whole night. And it wasn’t until the whole thing was finished that he invited me to say hello and that I actually spoke to him for the first time. It dawned on me that was my learning phase. I went, “Oh, that’s how it’s done then, is it? OK, great.”

So how did you both prepare for this film, considering both your characters have now passed away?

MD: There’s a lot of documentaries that have been made about this and a lot of footage that exists just on YouTube. And I always found it interesting that every time I stumbled upon a clip on YouTube of Carroll Shelby talking about Ken Miles, he would get choked up a little bit, even as an old man. It would just catch his throat and he’d say something like, “Ken Miles is a hell of an engineer.” It was quite a loss for all those guys.

CB: I would hear that from friends. He never got over it. That’s the real regret, you know? What was unsaid. I think that’s why, for me, this film is really fantastic. Because I’ve often thought about wanting to do a racing film. But it’s so tricky to get people inside that car and inside that racers’ mind instead of it just being like a Scalextric – zoooo! zoooo! zoooo! – it’s meaningless. And I think that with this pairing, with Shelby and Miles, Miles was definitely not your average stoic racer, you know. He didn’t have a filter and would shoot himself in the foot all the time. [He] was constantly getting passed over for more marketable guys, younger guys, better-looking guys. Guys who were in his rearview mirror in the races but would always get the good gigs.

Christian, someone who knows you told me that your character, Miles, is the closest to you of any role you’ve played...

CB: That’s what Mangold said to me too! Like, someone who’s been called an arsehole throughout the whole film! I don’t know how to take that. He sent me the script. And you’re the last person to recognise any relationship to yourself. And after a while – I’ve known Jim for over a decade, we worked together back in 2006 [on Western 3:10 To Yuma] – he was like, “Christian, the character’s just you. Don’t you get that? It’s you, you difficult wanker!” That’s how he said it to me. “You know it already!”

© Sam Jones

Matt, any character you feel most similar to?

MD: Gosh, I don’t know. There are parts of Good Will Hunting where you go, “Yes. Some of that stuff [is] all me and Ben [Affleck].” Ben was just telling me the other day that he needed help to help his daughter with her math homework. Neither of us can do math! It’s not like, “That’s us!”

CB: I speak for myself here, but you actually brought it up one time on set... I was trying to still pretend that I knew anything about cars and how to fix them. But you try to get either of us to fix anything?

MD: Forget about it!

CB: I’ve tried taking apart motorcycles a few times in my life and I thought I did really well, but I always had, like, three bits left over at the end of it. Like, “No idea where that’s meant to go.” And I still rode them! [I thought,] “I’m going to find out soon if that was essential.”

MD: You’re making it more efficient.

CB: Actually, I remember... You mention Good Will Hunting. I remember however many years back, it was... how many years?

MD: Over 20.

CB: Right. But I’d seen you in a film. And I want to say it was... School Ties?

MD: Yeah.

CB: And I remember I wasn’t really getting hired at the time at all. But I remember watching that and I was going, “I don’t know if this is going to pan out.” Because I remember thinking, “That bloke in School Ties? He was great and look at him: he’s gone nowhere, has he?” And I remember sitting there going, “That’s Sod’s Law. The best people don’t always get to keep working at all.” It was literally three days after that I saw you guys in Good Will Hunting. I was like, “Oh, no, forget that. He figured it out...”

MD: Yeah. But you’re right. We weren’t getting work. Ben had been in School Ties as well. We weren’t getting any. It was hard to get steady work in those years.

What’s your favourite part played by the other person?

MD: I always laugh about Dicky Eklund [The Fighter] because I thought a lot about playing him. And I always do say the right actor gets the part. That’s happened to me a few times, where, for some reason, I can’t do something. And then I watch the movie and I go, “That was great. That worked out.” So that one jumps to mind, just because I thought more about it than any other.

CB: The one that comes to mind immediately for me is The Good Shepherd.

MD: Wow, no one saw that.

CB: I loved it. And I remember afterwards saying, “What he [Matt] was doing in it, that was some good shit he was up to in there.” And a lot of people were looking at me and going, “Really?” And I was like, “You don’t see that? You can’t see what is going on there?” So beautifully subtle and quietly done. I’d say that to people and I got a lot of blank stares.

MD: Me too. You know which other one I should say too is The Prestige. Just because it was one of those where my wife and I went and saw it and we loved it so much that we watched it again. I mean, we probably have seen that movie five times together over the years. But when you realise what’s happening, and what the movie really is, then you see the level of performance. And you can tell, once you know [the twist]. And when you don’t know, you can’t. That’s pretty great. That’s a high bar to clear.

Christian, as Matt mentioned, you’re known for throwing yourself into roles with this “monk-like” dedication. I’m thinking particularly of Vice, where you play Dick Cheney, which, if I didn’t know it was you...

MD: Ah, I didn’t even say that! If you see an interview with Dick Cheney afterwards, you think he’s playing Christian Bale. It’s that good.

You gained a lot of weight for it and you’ve lost a lot of weight for roles too, notably The Machinist, where you were almost skeletal. Can you keep doing that to your body as you get older?

CB: It’s a matter of just...

MD: Living!

CB: Yes. To see another day. It really is.

MD: One day I was standing next to him [Christian] and the cell phone goes, or, well, somebody takes it to him and goes, “You need to take this,” and he looks at the number and goes, “Oh, that’s my cardiologist.”

CB: “I ain’t taking the fall for this one!” We shall see. I’ve got to figure that one out. You start hitting a certain age when your aches and pains aren’t going away any more. You start realising you’re not bouncing back the way you used to.

MD: De Niro said to me when we were making The Good Shepherd – we were talking about weight loss and weight gain – [how] he did Raging Bull when he was 35. He said, “I was very specific about that being the age. I would not do it beyond that. Because it’s too much on your body after that.” And also, you kind of keep it with you forever if you do it after that.

Matt, what was it like for you doing that latest Bourne film, compared to the three before?

MD: I turned 45 on the day I shot a scene where we’re two bare-chested guys fighting in a warehouse. I was really in shape and middle-aged guys like me would come up and say, “What does it take?” And I’m just like, “Don’t do it. It’s not worth it at all.” For that movie, I was training hours and hours a day. But the fatigue just takes so much out of you. You’re constantly making micro tears in your muscles.

CB: When you’re younger and you get those micro tears you feel like, “Man, I’m really getting some control in my mind here.” And then at 45 you go, “What am I still doing this shit for?” One time I was doing a scene with a stuntman in his sixties and he kept on having to fall off his horse and land on his head. I looked at him and just went, “I wonder if he ever imagined this was what he was going to be doing when he was in his sixties?” He landed on his head like nobody else. He jumped back up! But stuntmen never like to show that they’ve got hurt. If they’ve broken their arm they’ll try to tell you they haven’t. With all due respect to the man, I don’t want to be doing that sort of thing when I’m in my sixties. I used to love going on my dirt bike and I loved falling off it. Loved crashing. It was so much fun, coming back with blood pouring off your arm. Now, I’m like, “God, please. I can’t come off here now, because I know I might never get back up again.” [Laughs.] We’re sitting here like Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. We’re grumpy old men! We can’t do it no more!

Is it true that on the last Batman film, Christian, you were doing a scene with Tom Hardy and he didn’t hear “Cut” and you got a herniated disc as a result?

CB: Yes. I’m still sitting right now with some pain. If I don’t exercise – which, being English, is not in my blood to want to do that – I kind of go, “Do I have to?” But everybody gets that, don’t they? We’re going to start talking about our ailments. “Did I ever tell you about my surgery?” No fault of Tom’s, by the way – he couldn’t hear in that mask.

© Sam Jones

Have either of you felt in genuine danger on set? Christian, for you I’m thinking of a moment in a New Yorker piece about the making of Rescue Dawn, when you’re in the jungle with director Werner Herzog...

CB: There’s another one you passed on!

MD: And which is great.

There’s a point where you shout, “I’m not going to die for you, Werner!”

CB: Yeah. I remember that day. We were in the helicopter... I love Werner, but with Werner you’re either just hugging and dancing together or you just want to kill each other. And we’re in the jungle on top of that. It was flown by these pilots that were crazy and they would take off in these crazy manoeuvres and you’d take out half a tree as you went. And I was standing, you know, on the rail, just hanging on from it. It was something else. I can’t remember what he suggested, but obviously in that moment I didn’t agree.

Is that the time more than any other when you’ve been on a set and thought, “Actually, I might be in trouble here”? Or have you always felt fundamentally safe?

CB: You can lull yourself into a false sense of safety. I feel like sometimes the more you do it...

MD: The more you do it the more you realise there’s nothing, no fairy dust protecting you. You can watch Burden Of Dreams, the great documentary about making [Herzog’s] Fitzcarraldo, and the boat’s careening down the river. [German accent] “We have all gone crazy in the jungle.”

CB: He [Herzog] loves doing whatever he’s asked you to do, even if it’s unnecessary and even if he gets into the shot. So, like, if we were tumbling down these rapids, there’d be Werner there and then Peter the cameraman would go, “Werner, you were in the shot.” But Werner wanted just to be there alongside us. He loves to be really present and right there and not ask people to do something that he wouldn’t do himself.

MD: I remember I had a meeting with him. He said, [German accent] “I want to know if you’re the kind of person who’d eat a snake.” And then he said, “I would eat one too.”

CB: One of the best memories I have of being in the jungle is looking at [fellow actors] Steve Zahn and Jeremy Davies’ faces as I’m tucking into a bowl of live maggots and pig offal. And I’m just jamming it in my mouth and seeing them look, knowing that the camera’s coming round on them next and they’re going, “Does that mean we’ve got to do it?” It was great. I couldn’t stop laughing. The shot actually ended up getting ruined because I was busting up.

MD: You can laugh eating maggots and offal...

CB: The thing that I’m actually very, very aware of is anything involving guns. As soon as any guns come out, I’m always checking and double-checking the barrel, checking the chambers. Because that happens.

Are you the same, Matt?

MD: Definitely. In fact, a lot of the armourers that I’ve met over the years appreciate it. I was actually talked to early on in my career by an armourer who said to make a habit of understanding what you’re holding and how it works. Check it for yourself. You know how to handle it. You put the time in. Because that’s a completely senseless way to go.

CB: I did one thing one time... I was at the top of this 80-foot well and I had to sort of jump in and then you kind of control it with the rope. I’m about to do it, [but] I say to the stunt guy, “You do it first.” I always do that. “You do it first,” so I can see that they would do it. “OK, great, you did it. Good. All right.” So we’re about to go, everyone ready? When there’s something like that going on, they get the set doubly quiet. I’m standing next to the stunt coordinator. Then, in all seriousness, he looks down and he goes, “All right, mate. Just do it right, because I had a friend who he did this and he broke almost every fucking bone in his body. And he’s a trained stuntman. But all right, cheers!” He patted me on the back and walked off. Then they went, “Action!”

MD: We had one on The Talented Mr Ripley. There was a shot that got cut, where I’m supposed to have just killed Jude Law in this boat and I’m supposed to heave him over the side, wrapped in a chain with an anchor on it so that he sinks down. Anthony [Minghella] had written something where we go over the boat together and I let him go. But I struggle and barely make it back up into this little rowboat. They brought a stunt guy in, dressed him like Jude, wrapped him in a real chain and an anchor. You tend to have bigger problems on lower-budget things, because the bigger-budget movies take extra precautions, and one of the precautions these guys took was we had two safety divers in case anything went wrong, because you were in probably 50 feet of water. This whole thing was equipped with this catch: this little lever that this guy could pull and the whole thing would fall off him and he’d swim to the top. And that malfunctioned. So I went over the boat with this guy and dropped him and then came back up. And then we were sitting in the boat. Minutes started to go by and this guy hadn’t come up and it was like, “Holy shit.” Luckily, he was a trained diver – he was actually a martial artist – and he’s landed on the bottom of the Mediterranean on his feet.

CB: Like a cat...

MD: Like a cat. And apparently he just beckoned to the safety divers. And, you know, they all have the extra regulator on there and so they started [him] breathing, then they started to try to work on this thing and they couldn’t get it off. So they ended up swimming him up, carrying him and the anchor. But that’s one where you go like, “No, it’s got a lever. You just pull it. It’s going to be fine...”

© Sam Jones

I think one of the things that define both of you is that you’ve done mega-budget action franchises and small indie films, but you couldn’t look at any film and say, “He’s done that just for the paycheque.” Have you ever been tempted, though, to take a big-money film that you know is probably going to be bad?

CB: I’m human.

But a film you knew would be bad?

CB: Absolutely. Because you’ve seen how much money affects life. There’s been times when you’ve watched your parents struggling like crazy and you can’t help in those moments but go, “Is it sinful that I’m not going to do this? Have I lost myself? Or am I losing myself by doing this?” You’re making a great living regardless, without taking those gigs, right? Even with doing the smaller stuff, by comparison, out-of-this-world, dream fortune. So there’s always that for me: this duality. I feel a great guilt over not taking parts like that, because I think about my parents and I go, “Oh, my God,” you know? “If my dad was still around what would he tell me?” Now, even though my instinct is “No way. I don’t want to go near that,” there’s a greed to it. I don’t want to lose myself in that. But I hate to be at all judgmental of anybody who makes these choices. It’s something I wrestle with a great deal myself, so absolutely, absolutely.

What’s the closest you’ve come? Have you said yes to something then said no?

CB: I’ve pleaded to get fired! I’ve asked for that and they wouldn’t. I had somebody ask me that the other day. He said, “How many people have you ever had fired?” I said, “No one. I’m not in a position to fire anybody.” I don’t know if I could anyway. I’d just feel so bad. No, producers do that. But I said, “I’ve asked.” I’ve asked the producers, “Please, God, let me off this!”

What would that be on?

CB: I’m not going to tell you!

Worth a try. Matt, is it similar for you?

MD: Yeah, I guess. Your question is something you knew was going to be bad...

OK, let’s change that to something you knew there’s a fair chance would be...

MD: No, I always tell people we don’t get to see the movie before we make it. I’ve certainly been in movies that I’m not happy with creatively when I look back at them. But I never would have put myself in that situation. It would be like taking a job if you did that – and I don’t ever want to do that. I also felt that in the long run you’re better off... If you take a movie that you know is bad, you’re just taking money up front that you could get working over a course of years, for less, on things that you really like.

That’s a great way to look at it.

MD: And if I fail, if the phone stops ringing, which it does for everybody, I just want to look back and go, “You know, there wasn’t a moment when I said, ‘Now I’m just going to blow it all up.’” But in a related story... Jim Cameron offered me Avatar. And when he offered it to me, he goes, “Now, listen. I don’t need anybody. I don’t need a name for this, a named actor. If you don’t take this, I’m going to find an unknown actor and give it to him, because the movie doesn’t really need you. But if you take the part, I’ll give you ten per cent of...” So, on the subject of money...

[At this point Bale makes the cartoon sound of someone shaking their head with their lips warbling, like Wile E Coyote trying to shake off an anvil to the head.]

He offered you ten per cent of the Avatar profits?

CB: It would be “Matt Damon saves the world” had you said yes there. [GQ has since done the sums on this: Damon could have been a quarter of a billion dollars up.]

MD: I told John Krasinski this story when we were writing Promised Land. We’re writing this movie about fracking. We’re writing in the kitchen and we’re on a break and I tell him the story and he goes, “What?” And he stands up and he starts pacing in the kitchen. He goes, “OK. OK. OK. OK. OK.” He goes, “If you had done that movie, nothing in your life would be different. Nothing in your life would be different at all. Except that, right now, we would be having this conversation in space.” So, yeah. I’ve left more money on the table than any actor actually. I mean, the bigger thing still to this day, my bigger regret is – it would have caused a problem for Paul Greengrass and for all my friends on The Bourne Ultimatum, so I couldn’t do it – but Cameron said to me in the course of that conversation, “Well, you know, I’ve only made six movies.” I didn’t realise that. He works so infrequently, but his movies, you know all of them. So it feels like he’s made more than he has. I realised in having to say no that I was probably passing on the chance to ever work with him. So that sucked and that’s still brutal. But my kids are all eating. I’m doing OK.

Christian, I have to ask you about working with Michael Caine on The Dark Knight trilogy. I’ve heard he was quite prescriptive about what Batman should and shouldn’t do, including one time your character had been knocked unconscious and you decided Batman would have dribble coming from his mouth...

CB: I did that. I had some saliva coming out of my mouth. And Chris [Nolan] went, “Maybe not.” And I was talking through the point, like, “Come on. It really would be good to have this.” Then Michael overheard it and he went, [Michael Caine voice] “Dribble? Dribble? You can’t bloody dribble, you’re Batman, ain’t you?” It was like, “Alrighty. Wipe up the dribble.”

MD: Didn’t he have a theory about acting that you don’t blink? Wasn’t that Michael?

CB: I know he’s all about “You look into one eye, the one closer to camera, and don’t blink”. I’m going to try that next time.

On that subject, what’s the most memorable piece of advice you’ve ever received on set from an older grandee actor? I guess maybe that from Michael would be one for you, Christian...

CB: Michael has got a lot of great advice. His famous one is “Never complain. Never explain”. That’s one he likes to say... regarding everything.

MD: I’m just trying to think of which actor, which venerated... I mean, De Niro, because he directed me in that movie [The Good Shepherd] we had so many. You know how he does the repetition? It was so interesting to me, because I would have thought he’d start the scene at the beginning and do it all the way through and then go back. But he just takes each moment and if it’s one line he’ll repeat it. He’ll do it 50 times. Once, because he acted in the movie as well, he wanted to redo a little monologue of his. It was maybe eight lines. And I was doing off-camera, so my face was right up against the camera and we were this close [three feet away]. He did this for 44 minutes. He said the same eight lines over and over and over and over again until I didn’t understand it as English. I literally didn’t. I couldn’t understand what was happening. I was so fascinated by it. So one time I said, “Bob, when was the last time you did a play?” And he instantly knew what I was asking. “But, look,” he goes, “this medium allows for this. Why wouldn’t you exploit that?” It’s like when you see Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire and it’s so completely lived-in, perfect and relaxed. There’s one point where that little feather floats down and he’s just talking and he just takes it out [of the air]. And it’s because he did it for two straight years on Broadway, right? It’s completely in him. But you can achieve that when filming by doing repetition to the point where you’re not on your own shoulder at all. It made me feel like going back and looking at some of this stuff Bob did as a young actor; it’s just incredible to realise his approach. It was unlike anybody else’s I’d ever seen.

© Sam Jones

On the subject of perseverance... Christian, did you really call up other actors and tell them not to take the American Psycho part?

MD: You were up for the part and you didn’t want someone else to take it?

CB: Yeah. [Everyone laughs.]

MD: That’s great. That’s amazing.

CB: There’s a little more [to it] than that. Mary Harron [the director] and me, we’d done staged readings in New York to get the financing for it. Willem Dafoe was with us. And it was our thing. Then we got financiers and then the financiers kicked us off it. We were like, “Wait, this wasn’t how it was meant to be, was it?” I’d just been obsessing on doing this – months and months of nothing but thinking about that – and then it was going to a few other actors. So I would drop them a call and just sort of say, “Grrr.”

MD: No, but that’s a different... If you get that backstory...

CB: Oh, yeah. I’d just explain to them. But I actually think that it was always voicemail. So whether they got them or not...

Matt, dare I ask if you’ve ever done something similar?

MD: No. But I certainly would. Projects do have a life of their own, where you realise somebody’s got a big investment in it. And the business has kind of conspired to cheat them a little. That takes on a different hue. So, yeah, if I got that voicemail, I would have walked away from that part. Because you just go, “That’s bad karma” at that point.

You both won Oscars. The day after, what was the reality of it? And where do you put it?

MD: I remember specifically going home that night. My girlfriend at the time was asleep and I was awake. And it was there. I just remember having this crystal-clear feeling of “Thank God I didn’t fuck anybody over for that.” It was very clear. I suddenly had this image of this alternative life where I was 83 years old and getting the same thing, but having really chased it and going like, “Holy fuck, what have I done?”

CB: I stopped at In-N-Out Burger and then got home and my daughter goes, “I’ll have that!” and disappears off with it. I love that. I knew that I’d be walking in the door and she’d be coming up going, “I’ll take that, then.”

MD: That’s great. I remember somebody – I think it was Eric Roth [writer of The Good Shepherd] – asked Bob and I if we knew where our Oscars were. De Niro, I think, has two of them and he had no idea. I said, “Yeah, it’s in my apartment in New York.” Bob looked at me and was like, “You know where your Oscar is?” I go, “I only have the one apartment! I have nowhere else to put it!”

What’s changed the most, in both of your views, in the past, say, ten years, in the industry?

MD: It’s an entirely unrecognisable industry. When you asked the question about money, I’ve laughed with my wife recently about the things I turned down 15 years ago. The amount of money that was available. Because DVDs are gone, that’s why the $20 to $70 million drama is gone; it’s not coming back. All the movies that I made, basically, movies about people who talked about stuff. If you go above that, you get some of the production value that something like this [Le Mans ‘66] has, with those attendant bells and whistles, then you can make a drama. Or you have to go way below. When I produced Manchester By The Sea, we really struggled. We eventually had a really brave financier who put up almost $9m, but that’s a movie that in the Nineties someone would have given us $20m to make. It was about the size of Good Will Hunting on half the budget of Good Will Hunting. On the flip side, there’s this international market that rose up that’s every bit as big as the DVD market was – bigger, even – and so the ideal movie is a giant movie that doesn’t have a lot of language, doesn’t create any cultural confusion. Superhero movies, right? You’ve got a good guy and a bad guy. They’re going to fight three times. Good guy’s going to win twice. Everybody buys popcorn. But it’s a very different business than [the one] I came into, in the Nineties. In those old Miramax days it felt like independent film was really exciting. We were all raised watching De Niro and Pacino and all these guys. I mean, Dog Day Afternoon is a movie about a guy who robs a bank to pay for his boyfriend’s sex-change operation. It’s this heroic character and it’s like... it’s just a very, very different business. It’s really clear to me, having not worked a lot in the past few years, how much things have changed and how they’re just not coming back.

CB: It’s going to come back. I think we’re going to work our way back to it. We’re in this phase right now where it’s not happening... And then maybe, as people start to miss that communal experience as well... What you do see is some amazing directors – incredible reputations, made some of the best films ever – struggling to get a film made.

MD: Yeah. And to go back to, say, a movie like Manchester. I’m very proud of it, but there was a different ending: they were all out on this boat that was kind of the centrepiece of the movie. It’s a flashback to before Casey’s family’s died and they’re whale watching. These whales are breaching all around this family. You see them in this moment of just pure joy and the whole family’s together. They’re looking at this miracle take place around them and the camera just lifts up – we wouldn’t even have needed a helicopter; we could have done it with a drone – and as it keeps rising up into the sky you’re suddenly aware that they’re just one boat amid all these other boats that are out there. It’s this one story amid all these [others] and it’s an epic ending to a small movie. And, you know, we ran out of money.

Le Mans '66 is out 15 November

Download now to read the November issue and the full interview with Matt Damon and Christian Bale.

© Sam Jones

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