Putting a Face on Book Heroes

It seems hard to believe in this era of comic-book film heroes and video-game spinoffs, but back in the 1930s and ‘40s Hollywood would cast its biggest stars in adaptations of classic and popular novels. In fact, Hollywood and the literary world were so intertwined that writers would even create characters in their novels based on popular actors.

“I remember reading that Margaret Mitchell actually wrote the character of Rhett Butler in ‘Gone With the Wind’ with Clark Gable in mind,” said Rick Jewell, associate dean of USC’s School of Cinema-Television. Likewise, Ernest Hemingway was a good friend of Gary Cooper, who starred in the adaptation of Papa’s novels “A Farewell to Arms” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

“Was Hemingway actually writing characters based on the rugged all-American qualities of Gary Cooper?” Jewell wonders. “I don’t know, but without a question there were certain actors back then that people thought of or wanted whenever there was kind of a hero type from the novels that were being adapted.”

Though he was born a decade after Gable and Cooper died, Matt Damon is a throwback to an earlier era of Hollywood perhaps because he shares some of the on-screen qualities of those screen legends--charisma, intelligence, integrity-- that make him desirable as a screen incarnation of a literary hero.

In the past five years, he’s starred in adaptations of such popular mainstream novels as John Grisham’s “The Rainmaker” as well as more literary works--Patricia Highsmith’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” Steven Pressfield’s “The Legend of Bagger Vance” and Cormac McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses.” His latest foray into the book world is an adaptation of another popular bestseller in the Grisham vein, the Robert Ludlum spy thriller “The Bourne Identity,” which opened to strong reviews on Friday.

“There is something kind of ageless and timeless about him,” “Bourne Identity” casting director Joseph Middleton said of Damon. “So he fits into a lot of periods. There is something very smart about Matt in the way he carries himself. I don’t know Matt’s thought process about his choices, but his choices are very much of an older theatrical actor.”

Damon, who won an Oscar for his 1997 screenplay of “Good Will Hunting” with good buddy Ben Affleck, said he’s discovered that “in script form the characters from novels are more clearly drawn and the level of variety seems to be higher in general. There is so much source material to draw on in the novel.”

Despite, or rather, because of his choirboy good looks and accessible demeanor, Damon is determined to avoid being typecast as a boy-next-door type. And so far, he’s never been pigeonholed. The actor has played everything from an idealistic young Southern lawyer in “The Rainmaker” to a disillusioned down-and-out golfer who gets a chance at redemption in “Bagger Vance” to a manipulative, charming psychotic killer in “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” In “The Bourne Identity,” Damon plays Jason Bourne, an amnesiac who discovers he’s actually a trained killer working for the U.S. government.

“It would be really boring to do the same thing over and over again,” Damon said in a recent interview in Los Angeles, as he calmly puffed on his ever-present cigarettes. “I love doing different things and different genres, too. With this one [“The Bourne Identity”], I had never done an ‘action’ movie before.”

Perhaps even more than a Gable or a Cooper, Damon recalls the early career path of Montgomery Clift, the handsome, youthful actor who came to fame in the late ‘40s and refused to be typecast in heroic parts.

It’s easy to see Damon in several of the less sympathetic roles Clift made famous, such as the fortune hunter in “The Heiress,” based on Henry James’ “Washington Square” or the ambitious young man who murders his pregnant girlfriend in “A Place in the Sun,” the Oscar-winning adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy.” Similarly, in films like “Ripley,” Damon showed that he wasn’t afraid to explore the darker side.

“Montgomery Clift seems to have more demons than Matt has,” says Middleton. But like Clift, “he’s not afraid of showing all sides of the coin. He is not backing away from anything that appears unacceptable or unlikable. In fact, it seems he relishes that.”

Hollywood has had mixed results with its recent ventures into the literary world. For every success like the adaptations of John Irving’s “The Cider House Rules” and Stephen King’s “The Green Mile,” there have been such commercial and critical flops such as Annie Proulx’s “The Shipping News,” Frank McCourt’s “Angela’s Ashes,” Stephen King’s “Hearts in Atlantis” and McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses.” Some of these adaptations, such as “Shipping News” and “Angela’s Ashes,” failed at the box office, even though they had the blessings of their authors. In the case of “All the Pretty Horses,” Damon says that the film didn’t succeed because it was cut by more than an hour before its release.

“We made a three-hour-and-15-minute movie and it was still I think the best thing I had ever done,” said Damon, who played a young Texas cowboy who comes of age in the drama. “I thought it was just beautiful. But the movie we made never saw the light of day. I was tremendously disappointed.”

Of course, Damon acknowledged that fans of certain novels have set ideas of what the film version should be like. “The better the book the more pressure there is,” to satisfy those readers, notes Damon.

Damon discovered when he met Grisham and McCarthy while making the movie versions of their novels that they weren’t really worried about film-book comparisons.

“Cormac said, ‘I’m a novelist and this is the book I wrote,’ ” recalled Damon. “ ‘Nothing is going to change that book. I am fine with the movie being made, but I am not concerned about putting my thumbprint on it because the book is what I did.’ Grisham’s reaction was similar to Cormac’s.”

Frank Marshall, the executive producer of “The Bourne Identity,” discovered during production just how serious Damon is about his craft. “One of the great things about work on the movie was the collaboration between director Doug Liman and Matt. They sort of set a benchmark for this character, and Matt was the keeper of the character.”

Damon does extensive preparation for every role. For example, Grisham’s novel gave Damon insight into the background of his character in “The Rainmaker,” attorney Rudy Baylor. “The character grew up in Knoxville and moved to Memphis and we did our shooting in Memphis,” he said.

“But Knoxville was on the other side of the state from Memphis. So I drove down to Knoxville by myself and lived in and bartended in Knoxville to get the accent. I wanted the accent to be a blend. Memphis is a much more cosmopolitan accent, and in Knoxville you are right by the mountains next to North Carolina and it’s got a twang to it. I was very conscious with the scenes with my family to have a little bit more of Knoxville come out, and when I was in court to try to be more Memphis.”

On “The Bourne Identity,” screenwriter Tony Gilroy never read the Ludlum bestseller on which the film is based. “The character is the same as the book, but the story is very different from the Ludlum story, which is all about Carlos the Jackal,” said Damon. “Tony took it in a whole other direction.” Gilroy, who previously adapted Stephen King’s “Dolores Claiborne” with mixed results, even made Bourne a decade younger than he is in the novel.

Damon read the book in 1990 and then again when he got the role “to see if there was anything in there to help. But I had found that Tony had taken it so far afield [that] everything I needed was in the script, so I didn’t reference the book much after that.” Damon did, though, spend six months preparing for the part of Bourne by boxing, learning martial arts and being trained to use handguns.

“Bourne Identity” isn’t the first time he played a character on screen that deviated sharply from the one in the novel. In the case of “Ripley,” writer-director Anthony Minghella’s adaptation was vastly different in tone from Highsmith’s novel. “The book has this fun spirit,” says Damon. “It is fun to kill these people. Highsmith didn’t like these rich people and wanted Ripley to kill them. Anthony wanted it to be about his descent into purgatory. So it is no mistake that on the boat when I am sailing I am reading Dante’s ‘Inferno.’ ”

The actor still has writing aspirations of his own. He and Casey Affleck, the younger brother of Ben, co-wrote and star in the upcoming comedy “Gerry,” which reunites them with “Good Will Hunting” director Gus Van Sant.

Damon would like to try adapting a novel, but he knows how difficult the experience is. “Anthony Minghella is good at adapting, but I know from talking to him it is such a terrific responsibility,” said Damon. “He feels enormous pressure he really doesn’t want.”