Name: Matt Damon Wasn’t Exempt From Clint Eastwood’s One-Take Policy | Conan O'Brien Needs A Friend
Uploaded: 2026-01-14T17:09:02.000Z
Duration: 6 min 38 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Past continuous

I was thinking about the list of people who you've.

Directors that you've worked with, and it's an insane.

There's Eastwood, Eastwood, Spielberg, Chris Nolan.

And, you know, the one I'm most interested in kind of is.

I mean, they're all iconic directors and amazing.

But I don't have a sense of what Eastwood would be like as a director.

I've always heard it was like one take or he's quick.

So the first time I worked with him twice, and the first time was Invictus.

So I was playing a South African rugby player.

There's this great dialect coach named Tim Monic, very famous in our world, and

he's wonderful, and I've known him for a very long time.

he would come and I had a little office over the garage and.

And he would come in from 9 to 5, Monday through Friday.

We would work on this accent because South Africans speak English.

It's like their tongue does the exact opposite thing that ours.

If you say it and you think about what your tongue's doing, they say, obidot baek.

And you go, what the fuck just happened in my mouth?

But we took like, you know, it was a long.

It's like my chance to work with one of my heroes.

And meanwhile, I've done this so many thousands of times.

I have a number of different ways that I'm thinking of maybe doing the scene.

And I go, hang on, hang on, hang on, boss, I want to do another one.

And he goes, why you want to waste everybody's time?

And what was really interesting is the second movie I did with him, there was this kind of.

It builds to a head with this scene with me and this nine year old kid.

And the nine year old kid was a non actor.

And we had done one take for everybody all through Invictus.

Morgan Freeman, you know, everybody gets one take.

We must have done 40 takes with this little boy because we were trying to get this kind of huge moment in the film and we were trying to get this stuff out of him.

And Clint was right next to me, you know, like we were right next to the camera together, just working with this boy.

And so it was like his whole mentality was, your crew will go to the ends of the earth for you as long as you're not taxing them on every shot.

When we need to get in there, we get in there.

Professional actors are gonna show up with something good and we keep the momentum.

I had a chat with Clint Eastwood once, briefly, and

I told him how much Unforgiven meant to me.

And I said, it's one of the most European.

It's an American movie that was a huge hit, box office hit, and it's a very European film.

And he just sort of asked me, what do you mean?

Everyone's trying to do the right thing and making it worse, which is very much life.

And that is not a kind of classic American movie formula.

No, he said, I want to hear a good Unforgiven story that you can cut out if it's too boring for people.

There was a scene in Invictus, I think I had to give a speech or something to the guys in the locker room or something like that.

And we were shooting it the following Tuesday or whatever, and

I said to him, hey, boss, that scene on Tuesday, do you mind if I tinker with the dialogue?

I think I can figure out kind of a better way to say it.

And so I came back and on Tuesday we shot the scene and we did one take and he printed it and moved on.

he came up to me and said, I thought you were gonna change it and fix it.

I go, I wrote it and I rewrote it all weekend.

And I looked back and it was exactly the same as how originally was.

And he laughed and he goes, yeah, he goes, you know, that happened to me once and.

He goes, I had a script and I loved it and I had it.

And he goes, I worked for five years on this thing.

And he goes, it wasn't getting better and I couldn't figure it out.

And then I went back and to the original script that I had.

I pulled it out of the drawer and I read it.

And I called the writer that day and said, I'm making your script exactly as you wrote it.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Matt Damon Wasn’t Exempt From Clint Eastwood’s One-Take Policy | Conan O'Brien Needs A Friend

tough

figure

accent

aspect