Matt Damon compares working with Ben Affleck on Good Will Hunting to writing The Last Duel

Matt Damon has spoken about working on The Last Duel script with his co-star Ben Affleck and screenwriter Nicole Holofcener. 

"It’s a story about perspective," Damon told Entertainment Tonight. "So, there are two knights and then there’s the Lady Marguerite. So Ben and I wrote the male perspectives and Nicole Holofcener wrote the female perspective. That’s kind of the architecture of that movie."

Set in 14th Century France, the movie follows a knight (Damon) who challenges his squire (Adam Driver) to a duel, after his wife (Jodie Comer) accuses the squire of raping her. Ben Affleck also stars as the count under which Damon's knight serves. Directed by Ridley Scott, The Last Duel is set to premiere at Venice Film Festival in September.

Damon and Affleck have worked together on a script before with the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting, directed by Gus Van Sant, in which they also starred. "We didn’t really understand structure [while writing Good Will Hunting] so we wrote thousands of pages,” Damon continued. "We’d be like, 'Well, what if this happened?,' and then we’d just write different scenes. So, we had all these kind of disparate scenes and then we kind of tried to jam them together into something that looked like a movie."

Damon has also co-written scripts for other movies from Van Sant – 2002's Gerry and 2012's Promised Land, both of which he also starred in. The former also starred Affleck's brother Casey, who co-wrote with Damon. 

He added: "Making movies for 30 years, we actually learned something about structure along the way and the process went along a lot faster. And so I think we’ll write a lot more in the future just because it didn’t turn out to be as time consuming as we thought. It was actually a lot of fun."

Damon's other upcoming movies include Stillwater, a crime drama based loosely on the story of Amanda Knox, and Thor: Love and Thunder in a cameo role as an Asgardian actor playing Loki.

The Last Duel will be released in theaters on October 15. While we wait, check out our list of the other upcoming movies to get excited about in 2021 and beyond.