Matt Damon gained 30 pounds and wore an ugly toupee and mustache for his starring role in Steven Soderbergh’s comedy, The Informant!, which screens as a special presentation at TIFF tonight (Sept. 11). Transforming himself from People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive to a putz who blows the whistle on a price fixing scheme was a calculated move on Damon’s part. “The only reason I did this movie was for an Oscar nomination,” he joked at the movie’s press conference.
His appearance was a let-down for his co-star Melanie Lynskey. “When I got the part, all my friends were like, ‘Oh my God, you’re going to be Matt Damon’s wife in a movie? I can’t believe it!’ I’m just a character actress. Then I got to the hair and make-up tests, and I was like, ‘Oh, I see. Now it makes sense to me.’”
Though he plays a real person -- Mark Whitacre, an executive at the food additive company Archer Daniels Midland -- and all the events in the film are fact-based, Soderbergh wasn’t exactly going for realism. “Once Steven made the decision to take it in a more comic direction tonally, for all of us it became less important to do rigorous character studies of the actual people and it was more about having fun with this terrific script,” said Damon.
To that end, before filming Damon asked Soderbergh what he wanted the character to look like. Soderbergh’s reply: “doughy.” “Those were my marching orders. I didn’t question it -- I just started eating,” laughed Damon. “There’s actually a little prosthetic piece on my nose as well. Steven’s idea was he didn’t want any hard edges to the character. He wanted him undefined, in a way. You can’t quite pin him down. So it was kind of a metaphor for who he is as a character.”
Whitacre’s journey from a guy who thinks of himself as a white-hat crusader to someone who embezzles millions from the company while working undercover for the FBI makes the film more a farce about a bi-polar personality than a drama about corporate malfeasance like Soderbergh’s “Erin Brockovich.” And, as Soderbergh points out, the stakes were certainly different. “In ‘Erin,’ people’s lives were hanging in the balance,” he said. “And the victims in the case of ADM were more abstract. It was everyone who went into a supermarket but the effect was they were paying a couple more dollars than they would normally. To make it into some sort of overheated drama would just be the wrong approach.”
Adding to the sense of absurdity is Soderbergh’s casting of comedians like The Smothers Brothers, Joel McHale and Patton Oswalt in serious supporting roles, which ended up making Damon, Lynskey and Scott Bakula as Whitacre’s FBI handler feel like putzes in comparison. “We’re the three [serious] actors and we by far were the least professional-behaving actors in the movie,” Damon noted. “If takes were ruined because of breaking character, it was always us and it was never the stand-ups.”
Damon did take one important cue from Soderbergh’s earlier film. “I based my entire performance on Julia’s performance in ‘Erin Brockovich.’ You know, looking for the Oscar,” he shrugged.
He still enjoys making his co-stars laugh. In the press conference, Damon gave voiceovers while the others were answering questions, just like his character narrates his bizarre thoughts while something else happens onscreen. As Soderbergh talks about his preference for the word “farce” over “comedy” for this film, Damon mused aloud, “I like the word ‘goat’.”
~Kim Linekin
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informant, matt damon, steven soderbergh, tiff, tiff 2009
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