Matt Damon famously paved the way for his own success. When Damon and his best friend Ben Affleck were young, struggling actors and they weren’t landing any major roles, they wrote themselves a movie to star in. Good Will Hunting earned them an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and catapulted both actors to the top of the A-list.
In the years since, Damon has starred in all kinds of movies. From Saving Private Ryan to The Departed, Damon has amassed a prolific filmography working with such revered filmmakers as Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Ridley Scott.
Damon’s star-making turn from his own script in Good Will Hunting was directed by Gus Van Sant, one of the most renowned auteurs in Hollywood and one of the founding pioneers of the New Queer Cinema movement.
In addition to Good Will Hunting, Van Sant has helmed such critically acclaimed socially conscious dramas as Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, Elephant, and Milk.
Doug Liman directed Damon’s debut in the role of amnesiac spy Jason Bourne in The Bourne Identity, but he’s not the filmmaker who defined the unmistakable style of the franchise. That distinction goes to Liman’s successor, Paul Greengrass.
He filled the second, third, and fifth Bourne movies with shaky camerawork, choppy cross-cutting, and gritty realism. Greengrass has since become one of Hollywood’s go-to thriller directors. He reunited with Damon for the underrated war movie Green Zone.
After wowing audiences with the masterful cross-cutting, thought-provoking storytelling, and mind-blowing IMAX action sequences of Inception, Dunkirk, and The Dark Knight trilogy, Christopher Nolan has become one of the most celebrated directors in Hollywood.
Damon first worked with Nolan when he made a surprise cameo appearance as a stranded astronaut in his sci-fi epic Interstellar, but the actor is set to play a larger role in Nolan’s upcoming WWII-era biopic Oppenheimer.
With roles like “Dirty” Harry Callahan and the Man with No Name, Clint Eastwood became one of the biggest movie stars in the world. The actor was renowned for his tough-as-nails screen persona and grizzled charms. After working with such renowned filmmakers as Sergio Leone and Don Siegel, Eastwood stepped behind the camera and became a renowned filmmaker in his own right.
Eastwood cast Damon as rugby captain Francois Pienaar opposite regular collaborator Morgan Freeman’s turn as South African President Nelson Mandela in the biopic Invictus.
With his groundbreaking debut feature Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Steven Soderbergh made a legendary name for himself as a pioneer of modern indie cinema.
Damon is one of Soderbergh’s frequent collaborators. He played a major role alongside George Clooney and Brad Pitt in the Ocean’s trilogy and gave a memorable turn as Liberace’s partner Scott Thorson in Behind the Candelabra.
In the 1970s, Francis Ford Coppola helmed four universally praised masterpieces that are regularly included on lists of the greatest films of all time: The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now.
In 1997, Coppola cast Damon to play the lead role in his John Grisham-based legal drama The Rainmaker. This is arguably the best of the many Grisham movie adaptations.
One of the most prolific directors in Hollywood, Steven Spielberg has managed to break the record for the highest-grossing movie ever made a grand total of three times (Jaws, E.T., and Jurassic Park).
Ironically, when Spielberg cast Damon as the title character in Saving Private Ryan, he wanted an unknown actor that the audience could view as an everyman. By the time the movie hit theaters, Good Will Hunting had made Damon one of the biggest movie stars in the world.
From Alien to Blade Runner to Thelma & Louise to Gladiator, Ridley Scott has helmed some of the greatest movies ever made. He first worked with Damon on The Martian, a sci-fi survival story about an astronaut stranded on Mars. The Martian subverted the genre’s expectations as Damon’s last-man-on-Mars maintains his optimism and sense of humor in the face of insurmountable odds.
Scott and Damon recently reunited for The Last Duel, a historical epic whose Rashomon-style story structure (from a script co-written by Damon himself) covers a devastating tragedy from three different perspectives.
Across their decades-long career, the Coen brothers have made all kinds of movies – from slapstick comedy Raising Arizona to stoner noir The Big Lebowski to breathtaking neo-western thriller No Country for Old Men – but their quirky, idiosyncratic style is recognizable across the board.
Damon played a supporting role in the Coens’ remake of True Grit. Starring Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn, this True Grit is much more faithful to the source novel. While the ‘60s original focused on Cogburn so it could be a John Wayne starring vehicle, the remake focused on his plucky 14-year-old companion, Mattie, played spectacularly by an Oscar-nominated Hailee Steinfeld.
Arguably the greatest living filmmaker, Martin Scorsese has captivated audiences with masterfully crafted movies that favor character over plot, like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas.
Damon starred as a police mole alongside Leonardo DiCaprio’s undercover cop and Jack Nicholson’s mob boss in one of Scorsese’s only plot-driven films: cat-and-mouse thriller The Departed.
