Matt Damon on co-writing with Ben Affleck since their Oscar win: We’ll write a lot more in the future

The last time Hollywood heavyweights—Matt Damon and Ben Affleck—wrote a script together; they won the best original screenplay for it. The film was ‘Good Will Hunting’ and the year, 1998. 

Twenty-five years later, the duo—also long-time friends—have come together for their upcoming project ‘The Last Duel’.

Talking about how the pair got together to write the script of this movie, Matt Damon told a talk-show host, “It’s the first movie we’ve written in 25 years or something, and we wrote with another great writer named Nicole Holofcener. We saw it as a story of perspective, and so Ben and I wrote the male perspectives and Nicole wrote the female perspective.”

 “I think we just found that having made… like making movies for 30 years, we actually learned something about structure along the way and the process went along a lot faster,” he said. “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,” said the actor about co-writing more with Affleck. 

In comparison, writing ‘The Duel’ was easier then writing the script of ‘Good Will Hunting’. Damon explained, “I think that writing process for Good Will Hunting was so inefficient. You know, because we didn’t really understand structure so we wrote thousands of pages.” 

“Back in the day, we didn’t have deadlines because nobody cared what we were doing, no one was waiting for the script, we were unemployed, so we literally had nothing else to do,” he joked. 

Directed by Ridley Scott, ‘The Last Duel’ is slated to release on October 15 this year.