You’d be forgiven for thinking that visiting a David Fincher set is always a privilege, but Matt Damon had a less than joyful experience. Back in 2013, Matt Damon got the chance to visit the Gone Girl set and witness one of the best directors on the planet in action. It sounds like we enjoyed watching one of the best thriller movies a lot more than he did, to be honest.
Damon explained on The Bill Simmons Podcast that he paid a visit to his good buddy Ben Affleck while he made one of his best movies and was able to see Fincher’s notorious perfectionism in the flesh. He said he was sat behind Fincher as he prepared to shoot a scene in which Affleck and co-star Rosamund Pike walked down the aisle of a bookstore before sharing a kiss.
“It’s like a 90-second shot. Fincher’s got this big monitor in front of him where everything is exactly as it’s going to appear in the movie and he’s sitting there. I’m behind him and I’ve got headphones on so I can hear the scene,” said Damon.
He said that a background artist walked across the shot when Fincher called action and the director was so unsatisfied that it derailed the entire scene before it really began.
Damon said: “Ben and Rosamund enter the bookstore and the scene’s about to start, but Fincher is already monologuing. He’s going: ‘Who the fuck walks like that?’ It was the background artist. It just instantly caught his eye, like: ‘What the fuck was that? Who the fuck walks like that? Nobody walks like that’.
“Now Ben and Rosamund are on the other side of this bookstore and they’re doing the scene, but Fincher’s still talking about this and I’m sitting there going: ‘they’re definitely gonna do the scene again, this take is completely shot’. They get through the whole scene and they’re acting their hearts out and it’s great, but it doesn’t matter. The scene ended before it began.”
Damon said that Fincher was right to pick up on the background artist’s less-than-natural walk, but the moment “ruined the whole thing for him” in a way it wouldn’t have done for less of a perfectionist.
We can only imagine how awkward it would be for Damon to watch two of the best actors around working their way through a scene, only to find that their director has already written off the take. Brutal.
For more on the close Affleck-Damon bond, check out our lists of the best Ben Affleck movies and the best Matt Damon movies. You can also find out about how Affleck and Damon hid a blow job in the Good Will Hunting script. For Damon’s latest, you can read our Oppenheimer review.