Mark O'Connor on 'Between the Canals'

Director of Between the Canals, Mark O'Connor talks about the making of his film

The idea to make a film set in the North Inner City had been in my head for a few years. When I wrote the script, the characters seemed to write themselves as most of them were based on people I knew. It was difficult to convince people to take a chance with a first-time feature writer/director. I had made several short films but the Irish Film Board hadn't seen any of them. I was planning to shoot the film whether I had the money or not. Guerilla filmmaking was something I was used to because most of my short films were made for almost nothing.

I wanted the film to portray a realistic image of the North Inner City. After auditioning several people from acting schools I knew the only way to get the real thing was to cast people from the North Inner City. I felt there had been a lot of films dealing with the rough side of Dublin but there had never been a crime drama. The General was a biopic, Intermission a crime comedy caper, The Barrytown Trilogy were comedy dramas and Adam and Paul was a tragedy. We shot the film in 12 days which was a challenge with so many speaking roles and locations.

I knew Damien Dempsey would have the ability to act because he has the stage presence and charisma of a great performer. It was easy to get a emotional performance from Damien because he is a person who feels every word when he sings. He is a true artist and I think he has the ability to be a great actor.

The film is being self distibuted with support from the Irish Film Board. Self distribution takes up a lot of time but it's enjoyable because you learn a lot and you have control over how you market the film. I'm in pre-production on my next film which is set within the travelling community. I want to make good stories with interesting characters depicting Irish culture so that people can look back in 30 years and see how people behaved and the language they spoke. I love watching films from the 1920s and 30s which are based in realism as it gives you an insight into what people were like back then.

Mark O'Connor
Director
Between the Canals

Between the Canals opens on March 18th at the IFI
 

IFI National at Killruddery Film Festival this weekend (March 10-13)

The Killruddery Film Festival opens today at Killruddery House in Co. Wicklow. This is a unique event that looks at lost and forgotten cinema and is one of the most imaginatively programmed film festivals in Ireland. We’ve been collaborating with them over the last number of years bringing an Irish dimension with films selected from the IFI Irish Film Archive.

One hundred years ago the New York-based Kalem Film Company dared step outside the fledgling American film business and shoot ‘on location’ overseas. In June 1910 a small crew set sail for Ireland and shooting in and around Killarney, Co Kerry,  created the first fiction films made by a US company outside the Americas and the first fiction films set and shot in the Emerald Isle. They found such a welcome when they arrived - and such enthusiasm for the films they produced among American audiences back home - that they returned to Killarney four times in all between 1910 and 1914. The few films that survive from this period and which are preserved in the IFI Irish Film Archive  - rebel dramas, folk romances, and tales of exile and emigration - offer a remarkable insight into cinema practices in the transitional period (1910-1915) and the founding images of Ireland in American cinema from which filmmakers would draw on for decades.

This programme, presented by BIFF Films in association with the Irish Film Institute, includes this new documentary and one of the original films - Come Back to Erin, a film which was until recently believed lost but has now been restored by the Museum of Modern Art, New York with support from the IFI Irish Film Archive.

Killruddery is very much a family event and this year’s programme also includes a series of rarely-seen Irish children’s films from the IFI Irish Film Archive. It’s a nostalgic and amusing trip through Ireland’s past featuring films from the 1940s and 50s and should provoke a lot of memories as well as keeping young film enthusiasts entertained. The programme features a leprechaun, a monkey’s tail, pots of gold, and an adaptation of a Frank O’Connor short story that includes footage of Cork city in 1959.

Opening Event – The O’ Kalems in Ireland 

Lost Children’s films from the Irish Film Archive

Saturday 12^th March, 12.30pm, tickets here

Festival Trailer here

For more information visit www.killrudderyfilmfestival.com

Sunniva O'Flynn, IFI Curator

Berlin Film Festival Report (Part Two)

The concluding part of Peter Walsh's report from Berlin.

The only major British film in competition was actor-turned-director Ralph Fiennes’ modern dress adaptation of Shakespeare’s late tragedy Coriolanus. My schedule was tight, with barely enough time to see Coriolanus and catch the next screening. Annoyingly, my plans were thwarted by one of those interminable awards ceremonies staged immediately before the screening. The festival was honouring Young European Talent, which was all very admirable, but this unwelcome distraction droned on for a full hour and didn’t put me in the best mood for seeing just over half of Fiennes’ film. I can’t honestly judge the film on that basis, but I can say that it gets off to a disastrous start. It’s not the modern setting that’s the problem, but Fiennes’ decision to mount the piece as an incredibly aggressive, loud and action-packed war movie set, I presume, in 1990s Belgrade and filmed like a hyped-up Paul Greengrass thriller, with cinematographer Barry Ackroyd’s giddy camerawork attempting to look like raw news reportage. More a disorientating mess than anything else, with Shakespeare’s words barely audible beneath the sound of explosions and special effects, I doubt if the film could ever recover from these early miscalculations. In fairness, though, I should add that the complete Coriolanus was well received by the British press.

Coriolanus

Two British films that did impress me were Richard Ayoade’s Submarine and Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur, both screening in Berlin’s catch-all Panorama section and already boasting great reviews from Sundance. The most surprising and attractive of these two feature directorial debuts is Ayoade’s delightful Submarine. It’s based on Joe Dunthorne’s 2008 novel about a precocious Swansea teenager who’s often described as a cross between Holden Caulfield and Adrian Mole. Obsessed with dictionary definitions and losing his virginity, Oliver (Craig Roberts) chases classmate Jordana (Yasmin Paige) whilst trying to save his parents’ crumbling marriage. The witty, self-depreciating Ayoade, who is best known as a comic actor in TV’s The IT Crowd, clearly identifies with his youthful protagonist and shows quite extraordinary skill in telling his story. He’s clearly aware of the American tradition of youth movies (everything from The Graduate to Rushmore), but his main source of inspiration is the French New Wave of the 1960s. Nouvelle vague tropes abound in Submarine, ranging from Jean-Luc Godard-style titles to some lovely references to the music of François Truffaut’s favourite composer, Georges Delerue. It’s refreshing to see a young British director show such appreciation of other cinematic traditions and Ayoade is clearly a talent to watch.

Submarine

One of Submarine’s incidental pleasures is a very funny turn by Paddy Considine as a new-age motivational speaker and old flame of the hero’s mum. There are few laughs in actor-turned-director Considine’s Tyrannosaur, an expansion to feature length of his 2007 short Dog Altogether. This is a heavy yet surprisingly affecting study of the horrendous consequences of male violence. Peter Mullan plays a tormented soul whose pent-up anger explodes at the slightest provocation. A widower and alcoholic, he prowls around the mean streets of Leeds before taking refuge in a charity shop run by a Christian woman who may offer him some form of redemption. “It’s nice to see Peter Mullan trying something different,” quipped a friend after the screening. One takes the point, but the surprise here is not Mullan’s excellent performance but that of Olivia Colman (mainly known for her comic TV roles), who is astonishing as Mullan’s would-be saviour with a big secret of her own. Tyrannosaur is more than another slice of British miserabilism. Its sense of theatrical contrivance and a shocking plot twist work to its advantage and keep the audience on its toes.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Two of the giants of New German Cinema of the 1970s returned to Berlin this year with documentaries shot in 3D. Many cineastes and critics hate the modern craze for 3D movies, but I was curious to see what such distinctive auteurs as Werner Herzog (Cave of Forgotten Dreams) and Wim Wenders (Pina) would make of the process. Herzog was given privileged access to the Chauvet Caves in Southern France, which house some of the world’s oldest rock drawings. Given a number of severe restrictions in terms of equipment and personnel, the director decided to build his own small 3D cameras in order to capture a more accurate picture of the art works and their environment. The results are always engaging and frequently stunning. Even without the use of 3D, the project was ideally suited to Herzog, whose sense of wonder at the history of the caves and their contents is matched by his sense of amusement at the oddities of human behaviour. Herzog seems to find eccentrics wherever he points his camera, and highlights here include a scientist who reveals that he was once a circus performer and another who provides a very funny demonstration of how prehistoric man used crude spears to kill horses. “Prehistoric man must have been better at this than you are,” muses Herzog, who even goes on to find a nuclear power station and some radioactive albino alligators nestling in close proximity to the precious caves.

Pina

Wim Wenders says that 3D provided the inspiration for him to make Pina, a lovely tribute to the late, great German choreographer Pina Bausch. Wenders had been a fan of Bausch for years but didn’t think he could do justice to her work until he discovered the wonders of digital 3D technology, which “affords audiences a chance to appreciate the geometry of bodies in motion in a very palpable way.” And sure enough, the sense of depth and space generated by 3D proves crucial to the success of Wenders’ film, most of which is devoted to performances of Bausch’s most famous works, including Café Müller, The Rite of Spring, Vollmond and Kontakthof. The dramatic physicality of Bausch’s pieces works very well on screen and the staging, whether in the confines of a theatre or in the great outdoors, is often spectacularly beautiful. Wenders is not as good a documentarist as Herzog, and his film provides too little background information about his subject. Still, with his last fiction film (2008’s truly awful Palermo Shooting) causing Sight & Sound editor Nick James to suggest that Wenders should retire, the warm response to Pina (including a rave review from the same Nick James in The Observer) suggests that he may have a future as a filmmaker after all.

I’ve never had much faith in film festival juries, and Berlin doesn’t have a good record for awarding the best films. Last year’s winner of the Golden Bear was Honey, a minor Turkish art movie that created little impression beyond the festival. Then there is the case of José Padilha’s dubious Brazilian police drama Elite Squad, which was the inexplicable winner in 2008. Pointedly, Padilha’s follow-up, imaginatively titled Elite Squad 2, turned up at Berlin this year, but it was relegated to the Panorama section despite being a better movie than the original. It’s all the more surprising, then, that this year’s Berlin jury, headed by actress and director Isabella Rossellini, actually got it right when handing out the main prizes. I somehow managed to miss the Golden Bear winner, Asghar Farhadi’s Iranian family drama Nader and Simin, A Separation, but it was a favourite with the critics and by all accounts a very worthy winner.

The Turin Horse

The second main prize, a Jury Grand Prix Silver Bear, went to the great Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr for The Turin Horse, which was the one new masterpiece I saw at Berlin. Tarr’s dauntingly rigorous work, with its minimalist settings and incredibly elaborate long takes, is not to everyone’s taste. Yet he is a true visionary and one of the great stylists of post-war European art cinema. His towering masterwork is 1994’s Sátántangó, a seven-and-a-half hour allegory of social disintegration. The Turin Horse is not quite in that league, but it’s still one of Tarr’s finest and at a mere two-and-half hours, a relatively comfortable watch. It begins with an anecdote about the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who was appalled to witness the whipping of a horse whilst visiting Turin. He tried but failed to save the animal, after which the great man was diagnosed with a serious mental illness that made him speechless for the next eleven years of his life.

Tarr’s film is not exactly about Nietzsche or his trauma. It might be seen as a fictional account of the subsequent experiences of that abused horse, which in the film is owned by a farmer and his daughter who live in abject poverty on the Hungarian plains. This is another of Tarr’s allegories in which human existence is pared down to its barest essentials, with man’s battle against nature assuming apocalyptic dimensions. The weather is relentless, with constant wind and rain, and one wonders how Tarr achieved some of his effects without the use of digital technology, which would be anathema to this director. One thinks of Samuel Beckett in terms of the basic dramatic set-up in The Turin Horse, but the film’s real artistry is in its staging, or rather its mise-en-scène. Shot in beautifully austere black and white and in a mere thirty or so shots by regular Tarr collaborator Fred Kelemen, the film is an extraordinary visual experience. It probably has the most elaborate use ever of the moving camera. I thought that much of this was achieved with the use of the Steadicam device, but cinematographer Fred Kelemen has corrected me and said that most of the moving shots were achieved with the use of a dolly.

The Turin Horse is often reminiscent of silent cinema and belongs to a privileged little group of movies — one thinks of Eric von Stroheim’s Greed (1924), of Lev Kuleshov’s Dura Lex (1926), of Victor Sjöström’s The Wind (1928) — which have managed to portray, with absolute credibility and conviction, the gradual erosion of the human soul by a hostile environment.
Peter Walsh
Cinema Manager

Notes
The Future has a UK/Irish distributor and will be released here later this year.
Coriolanus has a UK/Irish distributor but no release date at present.
Submarine opens at the IFI on March 18th.
Tyrannosaur is scheduled for release in October.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams opens at the IFI on March 25th.
Pina opens at the IFI on April 22nd.
Nader and Simin, A Separation has been bought for UK/Irish distribution but has no release date.
The Turin Horse has no UK/Irish distributor at present.

Berlin Film Festival Report (Part One)

Peter Walsh reports on the 61st Berlinale

Although it’s an A-list festival with a serious competitive section as well as a vast array of other strands showing hundreds of films, the Berlin Film Festival, or Berlinale, doesn’t quite have the same glamour or prestige as Cannes or Venice. Like every major festival today, it panders to the expectations of the Hollywood studios and the mass media by hosting glitzy red-carpet premières, but Berlin has always been considered a serious and sometimes highly political event. You won’t find many Hollywood blockbusters at Berlin, especially in competition, since the studios know they are unlikely to win major prizes.

The closest Berlin came to Hollywood glamour this year was with its opening night film, True Grit, for which directors Joel and Ethan Coen dutifully worked the red carpet with stars Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld. This wasn’t even a world première, since the Coens’ rather splendid adaptation of the Charles Portis novel had been released in the U.S. last December. In fact, the film had been due for release in Europe in January, and it says something about the power of big film festivals that True Grit’s European release was put back just to accommodate a few screenings at Berlin. The festival was no doubt happy to secure such a high-profile and critically acclaimed title, but it’s doubtful that the film itself benefited much from its presence at Berlin.

Berlin’s main competition suffers because many of the best filmmakers prefer to show their work at Cannes in May or Venice in August. Pointedly, some of this year’s most eagerly awaited titles, including Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, Paolo Sorrentino’s This Must Be the Place and Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, are all expected to be bound for Cannes. The Berlinale also has a problem with Sundance, where the vast majority of new independent American movies are unveiled in January, a full month before Berlin’s dates. This year Berlin did a deal with Sundance whereby they shared a small number of competition titles; these included Miranda July’s The Future, a partly German-financed follow-up to 2005’s Me and You and Everyone We Know.

Miranda July's The Future

July is first and foremost a performance or multimedia artist who dabbles in cinema. This proves to be both her strength and her weakness. The latter is all too evident in July’s cavalier attitude towards storytelling, which means that her films are essentially composed of a series of gags or set-pieces connected by a central idea or artistic conceit. If Me and You and Everyone We Know was all about people trying to make human connections, then the new film is concerned with the struggle to maintain or renew a relationship that’s reached an impasse. July herself and Hamish Linklater play a somewhat flaky thirty-something Los Angeles couple who are dissatisfied with their relationship and their jobs. They should be thinking about having a child but instead they decide to adopt an injured cat they can’t collect from the local animal shelter until it has fully recovered. They spend the thirty-day waiting period trying to reassess and change their lives.

It is typical of the whimsical nature of July’s strategies that the film is narrated by the injured cat, but The Future is ultimately less quirky and mannered than it first appears. As July’s character embarks on a somewhat seedy sexual affair with an older man, the film itself begins to venture into what its feline narrator describes as “the darkness that it is not appropriate to talk about”. In other words, what starts out as a mildly amusing series of sketches illustrating the absurdities of everyday life gradually morphs into a much darker but surprisingly delicate portrait of the vagaries of the human heart.

Yelling to the Sky

Of the other American films in competition, I missed J.C. Chandor’s Margin Call, a star-studded thriller about the recent financial crisis. That left two very different independent productions, Victoria Mahoney’s Yelling to the Sky and Joshua Marston’s The Forgiveness of Blood. The former is an over-familiar social drama that proved unworthy of the ballyhoo surrounding its world première presentation in Berlin. Zoë Kravitz, the beautiful daughter of Lenny Kravitz and Lisa Bonet, brought plenty of glamour to the red carpet screening, but the film itself hardly justified all the attention. Kravitz plays 17-year-old New Yorker ‘Sweetness’ O’Hara, who’s bullied at school and whose home life is dominated by an abusive, alcoholic white father and a mentally ill black mother. The bright, resourceful Sweetness decides to toughen up her image by joining forces with the neighbourhood’s unbelievably kind drug dealer and is soon in danger of becoming a hardened bruiser before seeing the light and mending her ways. It’s a hackneyed scenario whose similarity to last year’s Precious only goes to demonstrate the superiority of Lee Daniels’ truly excoriating drama.

The Forgiveness of Blood

Joshua Marston’s The Forgiveness of Blood is a much more adventurous and achieved piece of work. Marston is rare amongst American independent filmmakers in that he looks far beyond U.S. borders for his stories. A former journalist and foreign correspondent, he’s best known to cinemagoers for the low-key drug-smuggling drama Maria Full of Grace. It comes as no surprise to learn that he’s a fan of Ken Loach’s work, which like his own avoids melodrama in favour of a heightened naturalism. With Forgiveness, Marston travelled to Albania to tell the extraordinary story of how the country’s centuries-old laws are still in operation today. The film’s chief protagonists are fairly typical modern teenage siblings whose ambitious plans for the future are thwarted when their father is accused of killing a neighbour in a fight over land rights. With the father in hiding, the Kanun or traditional law dictates that none of the family’s male members may leave the house without being legitimate targets for a revenge killing. Marston is excellent at building tension whilst keeping the melodramatic elements firmly in check. He brings an unfussy, accessible style of filmmaking to bear on an exceptional story shot on authentic locations and featuring fine performances from a mainly non-professional cast speaking their own language.

Read part 2 of this report here.

Peter Walsh
Cinemas Manager

Even better than the real thing: 3D at the Berlin Film Festival 2011

On a freezing night in February, I was convinced of the actual wonder of 3D cinema after an eye-burning screening marathon of three new titles. Starting with Les Contes de la Nuit, this latest fantasy from French filmmaker and master animator Michel Ocelot teams his instantly recognisable silhouettes in the style of Lotte Reiniger with up-to-the-minute 3D technology, and the effect is dazzling.  His extraordinary Serengheti-coloured worlds are truly magical - although I had to admit that, at this fresh-eyed point of the night, I wasn’t quite convinced the 3D really added much more than to a couple of scenes.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

But then it was time for Werner Herzog and his Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a documentary/meditation on the drawings inside the Chauvet caves of southern France. To make the film, Herzog got exclusive access but, as he outlines at the start, they weren’t going to get much time inside these highly guarded caverns. Unable to bring in a large crew or number of cameras, they fashioned a smaller hand-held 3D camera and went in first with the scientists and then on their own.

If you are wondering how someone could make the inside of a cave not only watchable but truly gripping, then you need to see this film. Who else but Herzog could bring together the motley collection of curious but wholly dedicated scientists and explorers that include a perfumer, a circus performer and a man who fashions spears which he insists on demonstrating. We’re reminded of Grizzly Man here; Herzog listens to and records each contribution with respect and patience, with his instantly recognisable accented voiceover adding wry comment to proceedings. But it’s inside the caves that the wonder of these ancient creations is revealed, through the most up-to-date technology. The 3D camera follows the drawings around the curves of the walls on which they were painted, slowly giving the viewer time to absorb not only their detail, but also to get a sense of their sheer historicity. Discovered in 1994, and believed to be over 30,000 years old, these drawings, some of eight-legged creatures – early attempts to convey movement – provoke Herzog’s contemplation of the art of film itself as well as bigger existential questions. Opening at IFI March 25th. To book, click here.

Pina

How to follow that? Bringing the 3D night to a splendid close was Germany’s favourite filmmaking son, Wim Wenders, who was on hand to present his new film, Pina, about the artistic director and legendary choreographer of Wuppertal Dance Theatre. Wenders, resplendent in mauve checks, talked briefly about his film and of how much they all missed its subject, Pina Bausch, who died in 2009. He had long promised her to make a film about the company, but he had told her that the technology was not yet available. For how could you convey the movement and artistry of this world-renowed dance theatre group? Then he saw U2’s 3D film in 2007 and informed her that the technology had arrived.

Wim Wenders with Pina Bausch

Following her unexpected death, he thought of abandoning the project but was persuaded by the members of the company to continue. What emerges, instead, is a tribute from each performer to Pina herself, through dance, performance and words. Wenders uses 3D technology to convey the sheer depth and range of their movements and as a viewer, you could hardly be more involved in the spectacle. Forget swans, black or white, other dance films such as Altman’s The Company, or dare I say, Flatley’s leaps which failed to get through the limitations of a 2D frame. This is breathtaking and memorable filmmaking. Wenders brings the dancers out into the open, onto busy traffic islands where the Wuppertal famous ‘Schwebebahn’ train hurtles along overhead and his camera moves around and about them, intercutting with their other verbalised tributes to their much-missed mentor and inspiration. Pina opens at the IFI in early summer. Whet your appetite and watch an early trailer here.

Alicia McGivern
Head of Education

March at the IFI

The IFI’s March programme features the first 3D screenings at the IFI, exciting new Irish director Juanita Wilson’s first feature, and a major IFI collaboration in New York.

This month’s programme really does add a new dimension to the IFI, as Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams will be the first film released here in 3D. This powerful technology has revolutionised and reinvigorated the cinema-going experience for many. What its impact on quality drama and documentary will be in the long term remains a controversial question, but one that lifelong innovators like Herzog will not shy away from exploring in the coming years. The documentary is a rare glimpse of the ancient paintings of the Chauvet Cave and I hope that the grown-up subject may tempt a few members and patrons to come to the IFI for their first 3D experience.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

March sees the start of an exciting year of IFI International activity in the U.S. as part of Imagine Ireland, Culture Ireland’s year of Irish arts in America 2011. We start with Hidden Ireland, a three-month long documentary film series drawn from the IFI Irish Film Archive and presented in collaboration with the New York Library of the Performing Arts at the Lincoln Centre. The series will offer New York audiences fascinating insights into contemporary Irish life and into the past that has shaped it. It explores perceptions of Ireland as moulded by America, comprising films about Ireland; about Irish experience in the U.S.; about a living culture within a diasporic community; about exile and home-coming; and a series of new documentaries made by Irish people as they consider Irish society today.

IFI International

Closer to home, IFI National will be at the excellent Killruddery Film Festival (March 10th-13th) with a fascinating programme of recently restored early silent Kalem films, and a series of rediscovered silent films for children from the IFI Irish Film Archive.

Following the extraordinary success of her Oscar-nominated short film The Door, we are delighted that Irish writer-director Juanita Wilson will be joining us at the IFI to discuss the release of her uncompromising and highly recommended first feature, As If I Am Not There, following a female teacher’s harrowing experience of the horrors of the Yugoslav Wars. Another new Irish release to look out for is Mark O’Connor’s Between the Canals, a pulsating crime drama set in Dublin on St. Patrick’s Day which features a cast drawn from the north inner city and musician Damien Dempsey in his debut acting role!

As If I Am Not There

Few people stake a claim to a life as creatively productive and varied as Jerzy Skolimowski, the veteran Polish filmmaker who has also chalked up considerable achievements as a boxer, poet and latterly a painter. The IFI is delighted to welcome him to Dublin for a preview of his new film Essential Killing and a season of his work; a key event for fans of European cinema.

Jerzy Skolimowski

All this alongside the latest Woody Allen, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, a pair of Truffaut re-releases and the hotly-anticipated Submarine – join us for a busy springtime at the IFI.

Sarah Glennie
Director

Matt Damon - True Grit

Matt Damon likes to joke that it’s taken the Coen Brothers sixteen long years to offer him a job. “Yeah, and then along came True Grit,” he smiles. “So it was worth the wait…”

Joel and Ethan Coen are extraordinary filmmakers, he says, and when they first approached him to ask if he’d be interested in working together there wasn’t a moment’s hesitation – even though, at that point, he hadn’t seen a script. The fact that it was a Coen Brothers movie was enough. “If the Coen Brothers ask you to work with Jeff Bridges on True Grit, that’s easy,” he says. “I was in before I knew what the movie was. And then I looked at it and the script is great and unlike anything I’ve had the chance to do before so it was a really easy decision.”

Damon first met the Coens back in 1994 when, as a young actor still making his name, he was cast alongside Frances McDormand – Joel’s wife – in a Tommy Lee Jones’ directed made-for-TV western called The Good Old Boys. Years later, their paths crossed again. The Coens were directing Billy Bob Thornton in The Man Who Wasn’t There. Damon and Thornton had been friends ever since they made All The Pretty Horses together and Matt would visit his friend on set. “I have a lot of friends who have worked with them – George (Clooney), Brad (Pitt), Billy Bob,” he says. “I was on the set of The Man Who Wasn’t There – I went to visit Billy a few times and you talk to crew members, guys like Roger (Deakins, director of photography), and they all say ‘you really should work with Joel and Ethan, you would love them..’ So it’s something everybody knows and everybody is always trying to get a job (with them). I was dying to work with them and any actor you talk to would say the same thing. If you ask for a short list of directors, they would be right there.”

True Grit is based on Charles Portis’ classic novel set in the rugged, brutal un-tamed American West of the 1870s. Newcomer Hailee Steinfeld plays Mattie Ross, a 14-year-old girl determined to seek vengeance for her father who has been murdered by the 'coward' Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin).

She hires a trigger happy, drunken Marshall, Rooster Cogbugn (Jeff Bridges) to track Chaney down and bring him to justice. Cogburn has the quality she is looking for – as she puts it, he has “true grit.” They then discover that a Texas Ranger, LaBoeuf (played by Damon), is already chasing the killer and is determined to take him back to his home state and collect a handsome reward. For Damon, finally getting the opportunity to work with the Coen Brothers lived up to, and indeed exceeded, his high expectations. “Completely and for a whole host of reasons besides being genuinely nice people. Each phase of the process was a real pleasure,” he says. “For a start it was a wonderful screenplay – it’s a great adaptation of the book. And then they sent us all storyboards where we could literally open this giant book and look at the shot design of the film. It was basically like looking at the movie in cartoon form before you go and make it. So you got all of this information before you even enter into the process of production, and then within production, they have an incredible flexibility in terms of being available to good ideas that happen in the moment. And so it’s just that kind of combination, which really means that they’ve got total mastery of the process of directing.”

Working with Ms Steinfeld, who makes her feature film debut in True Grit, was a pleasure, he says. Indeed, he pays her the compliment of comparing her to a young Jodie Foster. “She’s quite extraordinary,” he says. ”She’s thirteen years old and I wouldn’t believe that a thirteen year old would really be capable of this type of performance. It’s a really tough role but she’s just got an enormous amount of poise. I would go back and forth to Texas when we were shooting and I would go home and say to my wife ‘this girl reminds me of Jodie Foster..’ And I hope for Hailee that she is like Jodie because the business can be brutal and Jodie Foster is an example of somebody who clearly has a great deal of intelligence and talent and has come through it and has got the better of the business rather than the other way round. She’s emerged as a great artist, and by all accounts a great human being, and I’m hoping that’s what Hailee has in store for her. She’s really bright and she’s a really good kid. And this was a wonderful environment for her because there was a crew and a cast full of parents and people who wanted to create a good environment for her. But it’s not always like that and I think we were mindful of that. We all felt a certain sense of responsibility for her.”

Damon had never worked with Jeff Bridges before although, he recalls, he did get the chance to read with him some fifteen years ago.  “I knew Jeff’s work obviously, and was a big, big fan. I reminded him that I’d once auditioned with him. He was reading for potential sidekicks for the movie Wild Bill and I had worked with (director) Walter Hill and so I got to come in and read with Jeff Bridges, which was great. He was very nice to me. He, of course, didn’t remember because he’d probably read with 100 guys but that was my one Jeff Bridges encounter. So it was great to work with Jeff and to see him in action. I feel like a lot of actors approach their work out of a place of darkness, and I think that’s a very effective way to do it and a lot of great performances have been created that way, but I think there are other actors who come predominantly out of a place of joy, and that to me is Jeff. The environment is just joyful when he’s working - we had a lot of fun and I laughed a lot.”

Damon’s character in True Grit, LaBoeuf, likes to tell a story especially if it concerns his own past exploits – much to the annoyance of Cogburn. It’s ironic then, that after a violent encounter with a band of outlaws LaBoeuf nearly bites off is own tongue. But even that doesn’t stop him holding court. The actor reveals that he used one of his daughter’s hair bands to help make the speech impediment sound authentic. “I figured out how to do it a few months before,” he explains. “I took one of my daughter’s hair bands and wrapped it around my tongue to kind of give myself that handicap and then tried to speak normally and it just worked really well. I had dinner with Joel and Fran (McDormand) here in New York a few months before we started shooting and said ‘let me show you..’ And I pulled the hair band out, wrapped it around my tongue and he liked it and so we stuck with that.”

Damon is a big fan of the western genre and, he says, True Grit is a faithful adaptation of Portis’ highly acclaimed novel. “It’s hard to find material that feels like it’s not just a retread of something,” he says. “But this is a western that deserved to be made. I read everything and I hadn’t come across a script that was this good, with directors of this calibre and a role like this. It was a very easy decision for me. I’d say it is a very faithful adaptation of the book, and obviously there are some corners you need to cut to tell a story in two hours but I think this is a pretty faithful rendering of the book.”

Damon, 40, was born in Boston, Massachusetts and first started acting at school. He attended Harvard University to study English and after college returned to acting, winning small roles in Mystic Pizza and School Ties. His performance as a drug-addicted soldier in Courage Under Fire (1996), for which he had lost 40lbs in body weight, earned him strong reviews. In 1997 he won the Oscar for Best Screenplay for Good Will Hunting, along with his childhood friend, Ben Affleck. In recent years, he starred in the hugely successful Bourne trilogy, playing Jason Bourne, a former government secret agent who has lost his memory and is desperately trying to piece his old life back together. His other credits include Saving Private Ryan, The Talented Mr Ripley, All The Pretty Horses, The Legend of Bagger Vance, Ocean’s Eleven, The Good Shepherd and The Informant.

Damon and his wife, Luciana, have four daughters and live in New York City.

Watch the trailer here. True Grit opens on Friday, February 11th.

Article courtesy Paramount.