- Hi, I'm Matt Damon.
- I'm Nicole Holofcener.
- Ben Affleck
- We wrote "The Last Duel"
and today we're going to be looking at part of the script.
- My fate and our child's fate will be written,
not by God's will,
but by which old man will tire first.
- [Nicole] Right here, it says "White Production Draft."
- The locked production draft that you do,
and as you make changes,
rather than print an entire new script
for all 200 crew members,
however many there are,
you just reprint that page
and you change the color.
So the next color, I think is blue
and you get these blue pages,
and you'll kind of stick them in
and replace these other pages.
And so, I've been on some movies that end up,
you know, going through-
- Ochre? You don't want to get to ochre.
- I mean-
- I've gone all the way through all the colors
and back to white and back through again, [all laugh]
- Really? Wow, that's a lot of rewriting.
- And you have a rainbow-looking script,
and that usually doesn't augur well for your picture,
but sometimes it can work.
- [Nicole] The scene takes place,
right when Marguerite finds out
what the consequences are of the duel.
- Towards the end.
You can see the page number is 123.
- [Ben] Generally means too long.
- It means your movie's too long.
You generally want a script to be 120 pages. - [Ben] Total.
- And it's not over. - And this movie's not over,
we still have to fight a duel.
So actually, when we wrote "Goodwill Hunting,"
we could not get the script shorter than 145 pages.
And we totally cheated the margins to get it to be 127
and they never caught us,
but we knew some of the dialogue would go really fast.
- They're on to that trick now. They're on to us.
Turns out the studios that have mandated fonts and margins.
- So we, with the mandated fonts and margins,
we're at 123 at this pivotal scene. [all chuckle]
- [Ben] [mumbles].
- You know, this is a character
who hasn't really been able to assert herself,
starts to really assert herself.
- My fate, and our child's fate,
will be written not by God's will,
but by which old man will tire first!
- And this is a pretty confrontational scene
with her husband, the character that I play,
where she's just being really attacked by all these men,
and my one takeaway is, she found Adam's character handsome.
So rather it-
- [Nicole] That's the crime here.
- So that's just been revealed that she's going to be burned
at the stake if I lose the duel, [Nicole laughs]
but that's not what's important.
- He doesn't care.
- You knew what would happen to me,
should you lose this duel.
You knew, and you didn't tell me.
- [Ben] It's kind of where the, all the themes
sort of intersect, and all of the things that are,
have been buried are revealed among them.
That Carrouges character is actually, only not heroic,
but utterly self-centered, self-absorbed.
- I begged you to find another way and
now I may be burned alive!
- I am risking my life for you!
- The story is told through three perspectives,
two male perspectives, that Ben and I worked on,
and then one female perspective that Nicole did.
And once we did the drafts,
we put them together and we all worked together on it,
but we were very much adapting Eric Yeager's book.
And so in a way, Ben and I, you know,
wrote an adapted screenplay and Nicole wrote an original,
because when she did her pass on Marguerite's character
in the third act, she had to invent a lot of that stuff.
- I've never collaborated on a movie with anybody else.
I've always written them by myself.
So this was a first and it was more fun,
let me tell ya, than sitting in my house, writing alone.
- Initially, I was going to play the part opposite Matt
in the duel.
And then when the practical fact of shooting,
and Ridley's availability,
and the history of people knowing that Matt and I
have known each other for a long time and are friends,
and it might be distracting from the central story
and we got Adam Driver to do it.
And he's spectacular, I couldn't think of a better actor
to play a part.
- Yeah.
- I think the benefit of playing these parts is that,
you know, if we're stuck,
we sit there and we just get up and start to act it out.
And if Nicole goes, that sounds really stupid,
then we try to figure out something else. [all chuckle]
- You know, we probably read through it a few times,
and all put in our two cents after, I guess you reading it.
You might say, well, you know, I want to say this
instead of that.
- We try to adhere pretty closely to the script,
but sometimes there are small changes that
happen on the floor.
This one, I think there was, you love your honor.
I think we might've changed that to it's your-
- Pride.
- We really wanted to underline this idea that
you're blinded by your vanity.
- But ultimately she's trying to expose that by saying,
you're prideful. You know-
- [Nicole] You're doing this for your own reasons.
- [Ben] Your own sake, your own, what we would say,
your ego.
- You are risking my life, so you can fight your enemy
and save your pride!
- [Ben] This is another line here that changed from
God will protect those who tell the truth
to God will, I think,
God will not punish those who tell the truth.
- God will not punish those who tell the truth.
- I don't know why we changed that, that must've been-
- One of those that can just happen, like,
because you think you have it memorized and
you say it one way and that doesn't turn out to be the
exact way it's written and nobody corrects you.
- Sometimes you see it up on its feet with
everything happening and things change in that moment.
- And they may never have been written down.
- You really might have an idea.
- You know, it's, it's obviously a director's medium,
so if the director says, say this instead,
that's, when push comes to shove,
that's what you're going to say.
But I can't remember if, if Rid changed that,
or if we changed it-
- Or if you failed to,
- Or if I failed to memorize my own lines. [chuckles]
- Ultimately you're writing,
you have to write for the director, you know,
because if you're not writing what the director
wants to make, they're not going to shoot it,
they're not going to make it.
It's not like you can bend the script and you know,
so you have to be working-
- We've always said that when we wrote Good Will Hunting.
We said like a screenplay, isn't really anything.
It's like a blueprint for an architect.
You can read it on its own,
but that's not how it's meant to exist.
It's meant to be a stop on the way
to something bigger and better.
And so, the director has to be a part of that
to make it what it's always intended to become.
- I write for my mother.
- Does she read your screen plays?
- Yeah, I need her approval.
- Does she give you feed, good notes?
- Sometimes.
- [Ben] We were just moved by Marguerite's character's
heroism and journey.
And I think we came to appreciate that, you know,
life is better when you work with people you love and
admire.
That's the case with me with both Matt and Nicole,
and so it was like a wonderful opportunity.
And it was, just as like, even more rewarding in a way
than I thought.
And a good reminder of like this,
it's wise to focus your life in areas that are rewarding,
not only in terms of what you do,
but who you spend your time with.