Matt Damon is among those pulling double duty on the Lido this year. Just like Javier Bardem, who will be seen in both mother! and Loving Pablo – and, in the character role department, Udo Kier (Downsizing and Brawl in Cell Block 99), Damon is starring in two films: George Clooney’s Suburbicon and Alexander Payne’s Downsizing. That is no small feat – or responsibility. We caught up with him and asked him about the latter role which opened the festival and in which the starring part is that of a 5-inch man. He told us he was thrilled to accept the role of a man who goes small in a world that becomes more and more demanding for humans and for the environment. He just never thought it would get made.

When the director Alexander Payne contacted him with a script for Downsizing, he loved it immediately but never thought it would get made. “I knew before I even cracked it that I was going to do it,” says Damon. “When he first told me the idea, I didn’t know if he was testing me like it was a joke. Then I realized he was serious.”

Damon knows exactly how meticulous Payne is and how long he had spent with his longtime writing partner Jim Taylor on the project. They obviously have a great track record together “so I knew I was going to do it, but I couldn’t believe that anyone would make that movie.”

“Because once you go with the idea that we can shrink down to five inches, the rest of the movie follows along and it makes total sense. But I knew that this would be expensive, with a lot of special effects. So this is a big movie – like an 80 million dollar movie as I was reading it and trying to do the math,” said the actor, who had experienced a ‘situation’ with Behind the Candelabra (2013), where they had to struggle to get funding. Even though Steven Soderbergh and Michael Douglas were already signed on they could not even raise the required $23 million to make the movie.

“People are so risk-averse right now,” says Damon about the initial odd chances of Alexander Payne getting the movie made. “He described it to me. He said I want to have these incredible effects but I want them to be totally tossed off, like a Hal Ashby movie. And that is what we made, he made exactly what he wanted to make and I just can’t believe Paramount paid for it. It’s awesome that they did, it’s amazing that they did. So hopefully it works out.”

Matt Damon and Alexander Payne on the set of Downsizing.

paramount pictures

Small Environmentalist

Matt Damon plays the role of the Omaha Steaks occupational therapist Paul Safranek, who struggles to live up to the American dream with his wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig). As a new environmental scientific experiment called ‘downsizing’ – created by Norwegian scientist Dr. Jørgen Asbjørnson (Swedish actor Rolf Lassgård) – is catching on all over the world, and the couple starts debating whether this could be a good solution for them too. “That whole sequence where we’re house hunting and she’s kind of looking hopefully at me and I’m looking at this house like we could never afford and the way that they get kind of beaten down by their circumstances to the point that they’re willing to do something like that.”

The Safraneks decide to go through with the ‘downsizing’ – to become only 5 inches tall and live in a planned community called Leisureland Estates –, not for the same environmental reasons that the Norwegian scientists had in mind, but mainly for financial reasons: As a small man, his assets of $152,000 correspond to $12 million, with which he can now afford their “American dream”. But it turns out not to be exactly what they dreamed of.

“We downsize and in so doing all our problems come with us,” explains Matt Damon about Paul Safranek’s life in the new community. “I mean, we’re still human beings and there’s still inequality and class conflict.” In Leisureland, Paul Safranek meets a political refugee from Vietnam and through her, he learns new aspects of humanity. Even though Downsizing deals with serious issues such as the environment, racism, social inequality among others, the film is full of humor. “I think in Alexander’s work and especially his work with Jim, there’s always this kind of humanistic side to it and it’s the thrust of everything that they do and it’s about what it means to be a human being.”