Bourne in space

Bourne in space

Matt Damon gets tough and tattooed in the action thriller Elysium

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Bourne in space

His head shaved and his body latticed with cheap-looking tattoos, a toughened-up Matt Damon has taken the lead role in writer/director Neill Blomkamp's latest thriller Elysium, which opens tomorrow. It's the year 2154, and only two classes of people exist. While the super rich have gone off to live in a luxurious space station called Elysium, Damon plays Max Da Costa, a former car thief and parolee who, along with other struggling and impoverished people, is left and stranded on a wrecked and overcrowded Earth.

In an exclusive interview with Life, it's quite obvious that it didn't take much persuasion at all for Damon to join the cast when he first heard about the film.

PHOTO: JOHN RUSSO

"The reason I wanted to do it is because I saw District 9 [Blomkamp's previous film]," Damon says. "I was just so blown away by how entertaining the film was but also what a great satire it was, what an interesting metaphor. Thematically, how resonant the film was and relevant to the world that we live in. It's different from a lot of the things being made because it's not a superhero movie, it's not trying to be a franchise. It's completely original material from a completely original director."

District 9 is a 2009 action thriller film by the South African Blomkamp which tells the story of extraterrestrial refugees living in slum-like conditions on Earth. Like Elysium, though the new film falls more readily into the science fiction genre and set in the future, it is very much an allegory that deals strongly with contemporary issues like humanity and social segregation.

Damon was very impressed when he first sat down and talked to Blomkamp about the idea. He realised then that the film was going to be a bigger budget, action-packed follow-up to District 9.

He thought that it was going to be really entertaining on one hand, but also dealing in "metaphor and allegory and actually would be a big-budget movie with a soul".

"The graphic novel that he had done," Damon explains. "It was like a home-made graphic novel with all these incredible images of the space station and what future Earth looked like and all the characters and the vehicles and the weapon systems and all these details that he had gone into.

"He was everything that I thought he would be. He was very fun to work with. I was actually very struck by how relaxed he was, just a guy in his early 30s who is doing his second film. If you walk onto the set, you would never be able to point him out as the person with all the pressure on his shoulders. He was incredibly calm."

Playing against Elysium's Secretary of Defence Jessica Delacourt (Jodie Foster) who's in charge of preventing illegal immigration from Earth (shooting the shuttles down when needed), Max Da Costa lives in a ruined Los Angeles and aspires to one day live on the orbital utopia.

The plot starts to step up when he's exposed to fatal radiation in the robotics factory he works in and the only way to survive is to find his way up to Elysium, where medical technology is so advanced that any type of illness can be cured in a matter of seconds.

''He's an everyman basically,'' Damon says. ''You come to find out that he's the orphan. He's one of the 99% that's stuck on planet Earth and aspiring to get to Elysium. The future that Neill creates is pretty bleak. The Earth has become a third-world planet and there's a scarcity of resources so all these super wealthy people have moved off the Earth and move to his orbital habitat called Elysium.

''When you are dealing with good science fiction, even if you have a movie that's set in the future or set a long time ago in the galaxy far, far away, it's really talking about the world that we live in now. The inequality of the world today is something a lot of people have been agitated about recently. That's probably how Neill came up with this idea and why he wanted to explore this theme.''

Matt Damon in Elysium. PHOTO COURTESY OF SONY PICTURES RELEASING INTERNATIONAL

As opposed to the incognito Bourne-esque look audiences are familiar with, the character he plays in this film is quite different to anything Damon's done before.

''Just physically, what I look like. Neill was very specific, going back to that graphic novel that I was talking about that he made. He had images of the Max character that were very specific, shaved head, tattoos, very muscular guy, all that stuff was very different from many things that I have done before and so that part was fun to kind of physically make myself into the image that Neill had.''

Even though he didn't have any part in the scriptwriting, Damon says that the film was a collaborative process involving many people.

''Like every great director that I have worked with, the one thing that I have noticed that they all have in common is they are all very open to collaboration. They come prepared with their ideas but they're always willing to concede to a better idea. At the end of the day, with most movies, by the time you get to the end of them you can't even remember what things you added because it's a big collaboration. One person has one idea and then another person takes it and runs with it a little bit and someone else takes it.

''Before you know it you completely reshaped a scene and you can't remember who did what and it doesn't matter, the only thing that matters is how good is the scene.''

To give an example, Damon talked about Good Will Hunting, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay along with Ben Affleck. Damon recalled how people would always ask him about which parts were his writing and which were Affleck's.

''We've been over the script, we've revised it a hundred times,'' Damon recounts. ''We can't possibly tell you who wrote what line. At the end of the day, Neill's name is on the screenplay of this movie, as it should be, but there were great contributions made by all the actors and by all the different departments.''

Asked whether he thinks the world will really be like that in 2154, Damon laughs and says: ''I'm actually far more optimistic than Neill Blomkamp is. I'm hoping that technology will bail us out a little bit and overcrowding is not quite the problem that we are afraid that it might be right now, but we'll see. The future's not going to look anything like the past, the exponential curve that we're on with technology I think is going to create a world that none of us can even imagine.''

As for his expectations from the audience, Damon says that he just hopes they are really entertained like they were when watching District 9.

''It's a huge popcorn movie that they really respond to. But also [I hope] that it works on the thematic level, that some people enjoy talking about it afterward.''

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