Matt Damon appeared on Netflix’s Skip Intro podcast during the press tour for Netflix’s crime thriller The Rip, which happens to be released during Oscar season. Damon is no stranger to award campaigns, having been nominated for three Oscars and won for Best Original Screenplay for “Good Will Hunting.” He recently starred as a cast member in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which won Best Picture in 2024.
When podcast host Krista Smith asked Damon what he wanted to miss about Hollywood, he didn’t hesitate: “Awards season. 100%.”
“What I hate is the idea of campaigning,” Damon explained. “That seems completely retrograde and weird to me. Maybe it’s a good thing for movies. Just putting everything out there allows the culture to think and talk about movies. I hope that happens…”
Unfortunately for Damon, he’ll likely be back in the campaign as the star of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey during the 2025-2026 Oscar season. The actor told Smith that he was “still unraveling” his experience making Nolan’s Greek epic, but said, “It certainly had a deep impact on me.”
“When I was doing The Odyssey last year, I felt like it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make a David Lean movie, right?” Damon said. “I’m making the last big movie I ever intended to make on film.”
Damon previously said of the film: “If you look objectively at what it took to do that job, I think it came at the right time in my life. I think 20 years ago I would have been miserable trying to do that job. I was uncomfortable every day. But I really enjoyed it, and I really enjoyed every moment of this movie.”
“Intellectually, I understood the concept that you can’t control what happens, but you can control how you feel about it. Easier said than done,” he continued. “But I think the real sense of gratitude was not just the joy of having such a great director, such great people, such a great role in such a great story, but also connected to how I started, how I got into this industry, and the sense of nostalgia that I felt when we were filming ‘School Ties’ and Freddie Francis was the cinematographer. You know, it was like, ‘This is really happening.’
The Odyssey was the first Hollywood feature film to be shot entirely on IMAX film cameras. Damon previously marveled at the technological feat on an episode of his New Heights podcast.
“The IMAX camera is really loud. When the camera gets close, it makes a noise like a blender and a Cuisinart in your face. So we’ve never had this kind of conversation[in IMAX scenes]before,” Damon said. “You couldn’t have this conversation with a regular Imax camera, because you wouldn’t be able to hear us. They built this huge thing around the Imax for the dialogue scenes and put a system of mirrors so your line of sight would be closer to the camera and you could talk to the other actor. How much effort went into figuring out how to do that? He wanted to do it 100 percent in Imax, and he did it.”
A new Imax film case called the “Blimp” was created for “The Odyssey” to significantly reduce the noise produced by Imax cameras.
“The airship system is a game-changer,” Nolan told Empire magazine last year. “You can shoot your feet in the face (whispering) and get a usable sound. What that opens up is an intimate performance moment in the most beautiful format in the world.”
You can watch Damon’s full interview on Netflix’s Skip Intro podcast in the video below.
