Matt Damon and Director Tom McCarthy Break Down a Scene from 'Stillwater'

I'll add something else.

All this graffiti you're seeing here, and here.

That's the graffiti we made. I'm gonna draw a little too.

So this graffiti and this graffiti, Tom?

Yeah.

And also the way right there and right there.

Fantastic.

And we should definitely play tic-tac-toe.

[Matt] Well, you gotta go corner.

Hi, I'm Tom McCarthy.

And I am Matt Damon.

And this is Notes On A Scene.

Bill, we're not gonna send an innocent boy to jail.

My daughter is innocent.

I can't believe this conversation.

Well then, you live in some fancy ass world honey.

Cause I work with guys like that all the time.

No, but it doesn't matter, okay.

It's not right.

Not to give him a big head.

But, he was the main attraction for me.

I've been trying to work with him for a while.

And, I just love his movies.

So I read the script.

I thought it was remarkable.

And, like his movies about real people, flawed human beings,

doing the best they can.

And in this particular scene, Virginie,

who we meet here.

Is helping Bill Baker sort of cobble together

a kind of investigation into some facts surrounding

his daughter's incarceration in the crime

she may or may not have committed.

[in foreign language] .

[in foreign language] .

[in foreign language]

A lot of what this movie is about,

from Bill's perspective.

Bill doesn't have the skills necessary

to do what he wants to do.

Which is to exonerate his daughter.

He doesn't speak the language.

He doesn't understand the culture,

that he's kind of parachuted into.

He doesn't understand the conversation.

Even though it's happening in front of him.

His singular focus is his daughter.

And, this guy is the one link.

[in foreign language] .

Lets go.

What did he say?

Nothing, he's useless.

[in foreign language].

[in foreign language] .

When we were moving, planning on shooting this in France.

I was bringing my keys.

But we're primarily using a French crew.

I bought five or six, my main keys.

My cinematographer, Masanobu Takayanagi.

He filmed a scene, and my production designer.

Karen Serreau Muller was a costume designer.

Karen was from Paris.

And we realized, we had to kind of stay small

to move through Marseille.

We shot every location live.

We do have Matt on set.

So we needed to be nimble to capture that.

There were still moments.

And you'll see it in the scene.

Where people are just suddenly clocking what's happening.

And so we were always trying to get these scenes in

before we drew too much of a crowd.

So everything we're playing in the background here,

this is all playing live.

We're not connecting this.

Most of these people aren't aware of us.

Cause we're so small.

Masa is doing handheld.

We wanted this, to feel the energy,

the vibration of this city.

And we really wanted to be with Bill intimately

on this journey.

Bill gets up to follow her.

This is a cut in the scene right here. Yeah.

So everything we're playing back here is live.

We don't control any of this.

And there are people passing by, and kind of watching.

And then moving on.

We tried to lock it down as much as possible.

But if you lock it down, you start to feel that as a viewer.

So, we just took our chances.

You also start to feel it as a performer.

You're like, you feel like, shush.

Do your thing.

You know what I mean?

And that really changes the vibe.

Whereas if you're just in it and you're picking it up.

Then there's a flow to it.

And the crew feels it, and the actors feel it.

And you see it in the movie.

I will say one other thing.

Matt was so lost in this character.

With his beard, and his hat and his glasses

and his walk and his gait.

He just became somebody else.

[Bill] Hey, what happened?

I'm sorry.

I just, I can't talk to that guy anymore.

He was just saying some horrible things.

Like what?

Like he just wants to put an Arab kid in jail.

He doesn't care which one.

That's it.

That's it. What do you mean, that's it?

He's a racist.

Everything I got, the physicality of this guy

all came from the roughnecks that we met.

So when I read the script, I loved it.

I thought the dynamic between the characters,

the dynamics were beautiful.

And I believed them.

But I didn't understand the specificity of the

roughneck thing.

The guys from Oklahoma.

I spent a lot of time in my twenties working in Texas,

all over Texas.

Just that's where I just ended up.

Just a lot of movies shot there.

When, in the nineties.

And that was kind of, as far as I had thought.

It was like, Oh Oklahoma, okay.

When Tom is just, he's like get down to,

you have to get down here to Oklahoma.

And so we went on a trip.

And that's when I was really introduced to this roughneck.

And the specificity of that sub-culture

was a real eye-opener for me.

And that changed everything.

That changed how I walked.

That changed the weight I am in this movie.

The body type I am in this movie.

The jeans with fire retardant on them.

Everything is specific.

Our wardrobe supervisor was in direct contact

with the roughnecks.

Everything I'm wearing in there,

those are red wing boots.

Like you don't wear a different kind of boots.

You wear red wing boots.

Like everything is specific.

And all of that kind of external kind of

the physicality of it, 100% came from the guys that.

Yeah, I'll add to that. Like initially in the script,

Bill was just a blue collar worker.

I think he was in construction, had a construction company.

My first trip to Oklahoma, I got there.

And immediately I realized what a fixture,

what an iconic fixture roughnecks are

on the Oklahoma landscape.

Like they're everywhere.

They're very identifiable.

These are guys who pretty much built the state

in a lot of ways.

I started doing a deep dive into that culture.

And that provided so much material for the character,

the background.

All the stuff Matt was just referring to.

Okay, he's a racist.

We still gotta talk to him.

No, I don't talk to him, no.

He might know something.

No, he doesn't know something.

Bill, we're not gonna send an innocent boy to jail.

First of all, this face,

like this is the first real fracture

in their coming together.

She's an actress from Paris.

Transplanted in Marseille.

He's a roughneck from Oklahoma.

They've been kind of getting along until this moment.

Also, see this long street here, and all of the graffiti.

And you'll see it more as we get,

this is a little soft.

Because of the lens we're using here.

But all this graffiti,

we chose this particular street in Marseille.

Because of the bend in it and the wine in it.

We also chose it, cause it was just from

ground to top of building covered in graffiti.

And we just loved the dynamic.

The day before we shot the scene.

The city came in and spray painted every bit of graffiti.

And it was a beige-

I forgot about that.

It was a beige street.

And I got a call from my production designers.

Like, Boss, you got to get over here.

We got an issue.

And I walked in like, What the hell happened?

And we had 24 hours to make it right,

without telling the city.

They thought they were cleaning it up for us.

And we're like, No this is why we came to Marseille.

And, so we had to hire these graffiti artists from the city.

These guys, we gave them a box of spray paint.

Said, Do your thing.

And these guys, it was like, we just fed them.

And they worked through the night.

And we showed up the next morning.

And Voila, Marseille graffiti all over again.

Philip Messina, my production designer supervised it.

Cause then there had to be patina and aging,

and distressing throughout.

Yeah, it couldn't look like brand new spray paint, right?

It had to look like-

Kind of one those moments.

Like you can see all this right here.

This has all been, everything you're seeing graffiti wise.

And it goes all the way down in the previous scene.

They walk up the street, it goes all the way down.

We had to recreate all of that.

Which was sort of like, one of the many fires you encounter.

I was like, Oh, I'm actually having a restful Sunday.

And then the phone rang.

My daughter is innocent.

I can't believe this conversation.

Well then, you live in some fancy ass world honey.

Cause I work with guys like that all the time.

No, but it doesn't matter, okay.

It's not right.

We were trying to like find that middle ground for Bill.

And realize like, that's all about trying

to find dimensionality of a character.

I think what this movie does in large part.

Is always subvert audience's expectations

of who is this roughneck from Oklahoma?

And what is his worldview?

And as writers, and as filmmakers.

And ultimately I think the work that Matt does here,

really does that, right?

Like there's logic to what Bill's saying.

It's flawed.

And by the way, I think there's flaw

in what version he's saying too.

Which is like, there can be no more discussion.

Well, where does that leave her?

I'll point out when we did the shot, the scene.

We did a first take.

And Matt said, Whoa, that got hotter than I thought.

I got angry or she's angry.

And I'm like, Yeah.

And I realized he wasn't driving it, she was.

Her rage, her moral indignation.

At just sitting with this racist.

And having to listen to him constantly say these things.

It just exploded.

You could feel her trembling

when she walks across the street.

Matt had to meet that rage to get through to her.

And that's where he was feeling.

She took him on that journey.

He just was being present.

And it's interesting you say that.

Cause we'd spent the whole morning doing this

scene with this actor.

Who was saying this incendiary shit to her.

And I didn't understand it.

Cause I don't speak French.

She had listened to this shit for three, four hours.

And so she was hot by the time we got to the scene.

And so I am surprised by that.

But I'm also, he's really on the front foot this guy.

Cause he doesn't have any of the skills he needs.

But he has this incredible impulse to help his daughter.

He'll meet fire with fire, right?

Someone screamed at him, he's gonna scream back.

Cause he's got an agenda.

I'm not saying it's wrong.

I'm trying to get my little girl out of jail.

That's all I give a fuck about.

And you sound very American right now.

Good, I am.

That's a line I love.

When she says, You're very American.

I said, Good, I am.

I talked to Kenny, one of the roughneck

who was really our main point of contact.

And he thanked me for saying that these guys

don't apologize for who they are.

They are who they are.

And they're very comfortable with who they are.

Build on in that moment, understand that there would be

kind of a pejorative slant to that statement,

You sound very American.

That's the biggest compliment you can pay that guy.

So it's just a weird thing for her to say.

Yeah. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

From his perspective.

Yeah, he agrees readily.

I think also, this is like part of the reason

why I wanna make this movie now.

Like there was a time and a place in America

where that statement would be followed by

Bill kicking ass and getting it done.

It's not the world we live in. It is far more complex.

And I think what elevates this movie beyond

the typical thriller.

Is we start dealing in consequences.

So, Bill considers this.

I'm gonna get my daughter out of jail.

It's all I give a damn about. To be his moral imperative.

That matters more than anything.

Family, that's it.

This movie questions that.

Is that true?

What are the moral, emotional human consequences

of such a myopic point of view in the world.

You're also a stranger here.

You don't understand shit.

One thing we really struggle with Masa,

and my editor, Tom and me with Matt.

Matt wears his hat.

These guys never take on their hat.

As a filmmaker, that's tricky.

Because of these eyes.

So a lot of time you can see the shadow,

and like the eyes are, that's cinema.

That's where this guy lives in his performance.

Cause he's such a stoic character.

And we spent a lot of time trying to dig it out.

But Matt in pure roughneck form,

and I would never correct him.

He's like, I never wanted to be conscious.

He was always like pulling it down.

And like getting his thing.

Just like where he lived.

Occasionally he would feel it.

And be like, Oh, I'm gonna give a little light.

And like, boy through the whole movie you could see here.

We basically just have one eye.

Which is this eye.

We kinda lose that eye in the cinema.

Every movie I've ever done where I wear a hat.

Everybody's, Hey, can you give me a little,

can you lift it up?

And it's not how you wear a hat.

And you feel it when it's on your head.

And I am, it's funny that you bring that up.

Cause I was never asked to lift up my hat in this movie.

And sometimes you don't see his eyes.

And that's okay.

[in foreign language] .

He doesn't understand any of that.

So yeah.

And then the scene ends.

And he's just sitting on the street corner,

he's completely lost.

Like where does that guy go from there?

Like he has nowhere to go from that.

Yeah, and I think that's just vulnerability

as something we're playing with.

Matt, most of his characters in the movies that he plays.

He knows where he's going next.

He knows what he's doing.

Bill Baker in this world today, not so much.