Matt Damon Explains How Writing THE LAST DUEL with Ben Affleck Was a Different Experience Than GOOD WILL HUNTING

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck worked together on the script for Ridley Scott’s medieval revenge thriller The Last Duel. This is the first time the two have written a script together since they worked on Good Will Hunting. That was almost 25 years ago!

In a recent interview with IndieWire, Damon talks about how writing The Last Duel with Affleck was a much different experience than it was all those years ago when they wrote Good Will Hunting. He explained:

“We didn’t really understand structure [while writing ‘Good Will Hunting’] so we wrote thousands of pages. 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.”

“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.”

It’s kind of funny that they knew nothing about story and script structure when they wrote Good Will Hunting because they won an Oscar for Best Screenplay. Usually, people who win that award kinda know what they’re doing. That obviously wasn’t the case here.

Damon also talked about the script for The Last Duel, which was also written with Nicole Holofcener (Can You Ever Forgive Me?). Damon explains that he and Affleck wrote the sequences involving the male characters while Holofcener wrote the parts that involved the female perspectives. The actor explains:

“It’s a story about perspective. 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.”

The story revolves around the alleged rape of the character Marguerite de Carrouges, who is played by Jodie Comer. The filmmakers obviously felt it was important to have a woman representing the female aspect of this story.

The story takes place in 1386 and tells the revenge story of two best friends. One goes to war and returns to discover the other has raped the soldier’s wife. No one believes the woman, and the soldier appeals to the king of France, telling him that he wants to fight in a duel to the death, and if the other guy wins, he is innocent. It becomes the last legally sanctioned duel in France. The brief synopsis for the movie reads:

A tale of betrayal & vengeance set against the brutality of 14th century France. Knight Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon) and his squire Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver) are ordered to engage in a fight to the death after Carrouges accuses Le Gris of raping his wife.

The Last Duel is in theaters on October 15th, 2021.