These photos are of Matt Damon at the Palm Springs International Film Festival this weekend, where he took home the chairman’s award. Damon used his acceptance speech to advocate for director Ridley Scott to finally earn an Academy Award for best director. Scott has been nominated three times (Thelma & Louise, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down) but has yet to take home an Oscar. Damon said he hoped this was Scott’s year and that the year that Martin Scorsese won for The Departed they talked him up to the press at the time and that “it panned out.”

There’s a new profile and interview with Damon in the NY Times. His directors, Ridley Scott and Paul Greengrass (Bourne Supremacy, Bourne Ultimatum), speak highly of him and his professionalism. Damon talks a good game as usual. The journalist, Robert Ito, was able to get Damon to address the two controversial issues that came up during his last press tour – he seemed to suggest that gay actors should stay in the closet and we also saw footage from his reality show, Project Greenlight, in which he told an African American producer that diversity behind the camera was not as important as diversity in casting. Damon doesn’t do a great job of explaining himself to the Times, but he tries.

His comments drew a tsunami of criticism from critics and bloggers, who accused him of talking down to her, simultaneously whitesplaining and mansplaining.

“Um, there are a few parts to it,” Mr. Damon said. “So I’ll unpack it for you.”

What viewers didn’t see, he said, were the weeks — if not years — of frustration that led up to that exchange. “Ben and I had taken a lot of stick for this 10 years ago, that our committee of mostly white men had selected three white men, in succession, as winners,” he said. This time, the producers actively pursued a more diverse cross-section of applicants, partnering with Facebook and actively recruiting at film schools. Even so, when Mr. Damon and the other judges, which included Mr. Affleck and Ms. Brown, were given the final cut of candidates, 17 of the 20 were, yes, white men.

“By the time we arrived to do our judging, we knew we had blown it, so Ben and I were already frustrated and upset about that,” he said. “So when Effie brought it up, it was like, yes, O.K., we got it.”

The other concern, Mr. Damon said, was the reality series itself. “The dark secret of ‘Project Greenlight’ is that the TV show is bigger than the movie,” Mr. Damon said. “It costs more than the movie.”

That simple fact leads to a constant struggle between the needs of the film and the needs of the show — with the show often winning out. Muddying the waters even more is that the “behind the camera” winner chosen to direct the film becomes, of course, the de facto star of the TV series.

“The idea that I would say that there didn’t need to be diversity behind the camera, it’s not only complete anathema to what I believe in my heart and always have,” Mr. Damon said, “but it’s not something that I think anybody would ever say with a camera on.”

He added: “And so when Effie was advocating for the woman and the Vietnamese-American guy, what I actually said was, ‘Are we judging a contest or are we casting a reality show?’” he continued. “And that’s when she said, ‘Wow.’ And I went, no, Effie, I’m completely serious, what is our responsibility at this point? Because we had already blown it on the competition.”

“We were fine that day,” Mr. Damon insisted. “It wasn’t like I left and said, ‘Boy, I got in an argument with Effie Brown,’ and I don’t think she would have left thinking that she had had an argument with me. But the truth is, Effie did an awesome job for us. She’s an awesome producer…”

Soon after, Mr. Damon was taking heat once again, this time, for an interview in The Guardian that seemed to suggest that actors should stay in the closet. At one moment, he’s talking about the brilliance of Rupert Everett and the price the actor paid for coming out in Hollywood; the next, he’s discussing why actors should try to keep some “mystery” in their private lives. “I actually just conflated two stories that I’ve told a thousand times at junkets, and did it in a really clumsy way,” he said.

[From The NY Times]

Effie Brown might disagree with Damon, although we don’t know her thoughts about this particular interview because she declined comment to the NY Times. The last time we covered Brown, she hinted that there were deeper issues with Damon during her time on the show and said that the footage which was aired was “a more polite version of that exchange.” She added that “Word on the street is I’m not his favorite person.” If that’s the case Damon isn’t going to acknowledge that he has any issues with her despite the way she was treated on the show.

As for Damon’s comments about actors staying in the closet – I believe that he didn’t mean it that way. I know I’m a Damon apologist, but I’ve seen and read so many of his interviews that I recognized his talking points when I first covered that interview and didn’t even realize that what he was saying was problematic. He’s said so many times that actors should guard their private lives and that’s the way I took it at first. He’s so stuck in his own point of view that he didn’t realize the wider implications of what he was saying, and that seems to be a real issue for him.

There’s also a moving anecdote in the article about how Scott elicited a genuine emotional reaction from Damon during a pivotal moment filming The Martian. I won’t spoil it for you. Damon told that story during a press conference with Ridley too.

photo credit: WENN.com, Fame and Getty