In Matt Damon, Clint Eastwood has found a kindred spirit — someone who shares his no-nonsense style and is a worthy student in the art of getting things done your way.

by Walter Kirn

Clint Eastwood, tall and silvery and calm, with thinning hair that’s grown flyaway, is dressed in a pair of securely belted dark slacks and an immaculate white golf shirt. He crosses the lobby of a Toronto hotel, headed toward a table near the bar. At 80 and past concealing that fact, he looks like the wise old blue-eyed patriarch of an alternative-history America that has never lost a war or run a deficit. He comes off like a man with few worries and few regrets who lives by the Spartan motto “Get on with it” and has learned to dismiss his animal needs. When a nervous waiter sidles up to ask him what he’d like to drink, he answers gently, “Nothing, thank you.” Is there something he’d like to eat, perhaps? There isn’t.

Across the table from Eastwood, drinking coffee, sits his friend Matt Damon. He’s half Eastwood’s age and perhaps two-thirds his height, but he shares some of the old master’s famed tenacity. He’s also, as Eastwood used to be, an action hero with a brain who harbors long-term plans to use it by making movies of substance and integrity. In a show of affection rare in nature between alpha males, the two men greet each other with broad, sweet grins that even trained actors would have trouble faking.

They’re cute together. I ask them how they met.

“We met in a bar. A gay bar,” Damon jokes, since grown men can withstand only so much sincerity before they need to poke fun at homosexuals. “I saw something in him through the eye slits of the Hannibal Lecter mask that he was wearing.”

What brings the two joshing tough guys to Toronto is tonight’s film-festival premiere of Eastwood’s Hereafter, the 31st movie in his 40-year directing career. Damon plays a reluctant psychic, a man who can see into the great beyond but longs to live in the moment with the rest of us. Suffused with a brooding, quiet melancholy, it’s an uncharacteristic role for him — no stunts, no heists, no athleticism, no sex — and a different sort of film for Eastwood, who hasn’t gone in for mysticism, traditionally, or meditations on religion. Perhaps he’s grown interested in the other side because he can feel it pressing nearer.

Hereafter is the second film in two years Eastwood and Damon have done together (the first was 2009’s Invictus), making Damon a sort of favorite son to Hollywood’s most imposing father figure. The relationship is no surprise; it rests on a close temperamental kinship. They’re two men who get the job done, the record shows, and two men for whom the job is almost everything — and anything that’s not the job is private. They have personal lives, but they rarely discuss them, certainly not with strangers holding notebooks. Damon may be married to a former bartender he met in the Miami after-dark scene, and Eastwood may be married to a woman who could be (it’s chronologically possible) his daughter’s daughter, but a reporter who asks about these matters may find himself interviewing two blocks of granite. No, what links him to Damon, Eastwood says — paying himself and his apprentice perhaps the highest compliment he knows — is that they’re “the most efficient guys in the world.”

Eastwood is referring in his own case to his no-nonsense directing style. He’s legendary among his colleagues for capturing in a single take scenes and moments that fussier directors often try (and fail) to catch in 20. It’s an approach inspired by his heroes, especially John Ford and Howard Hawks, who worked in the golden age of motion pictures that Eastwood says he’s sorry he missed out on but managed to glimpse as it passed by. As for Damon, who missed those days entirely, Eastwood’s rough-and-ready method is a source of gratitude. It allows him to show his best stuff right away and not “fuck it up by thinking too much.” And it shortens his workdays so he can make it home on time. He’s a family man, Damon, according to Morgan Freeman, who co-starred with him in Invictus, and his life off the set is what sustains him.

“You get a feeling about somebody,” Eastwood says of his young buddy, whose face begins to open like a sunflower when he senses praise is on the way, “that they’re the kind of person who just likes to stand and deliver. And he is.” For Eastwood, Damon resembles Cagney, a can-do performer who cut the “intellectualizing” and “planted his feet and told the truth” instead.

“Cagney had great influence on me. On Dirty Harry. He had tremendous nerve. All those guys did. They weren’t afraid. They weren’t trying to be glamour guys.” With a nod he implies that he considers Damon a member of this lineage.

A storm of mutual admiration ensues. Damon reveals a desire to direct and emulate Eastwood’s “model career,” which “Affleck” and “Clooney” also hold in awe, he says, because it represents “the mountaintop.” Eastwood responds by predicting success for Damon. “He knows. He instinctively knows. When he directs he’s going to be great at it. Because he understands actors, and all you have to do is have some compassion for the process.” Instinct, the two seem to feel, is all-important — in moviemaking but also in life — because it keeps a person from “dwelling,” as Eastwood puts it. This brings the conversation around to Hamlet, a figure who was destroyed by dwelling. Damon imagines Eastwood directing the play and mimics him dressing down the dithering Dane: “Make up your fucking mind!”

The old guy laughs to hear himself caricatured. The persona he’s spent his time on Earth constructing has a life of its own; it is passing from his hands, and someday it won’t belong to him at all.

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