The Matt Damon-Affleck dream team continues, except not with Ben this time, but Casey. Doug Liman‘s upcoming Apple TV+ action thriller “The Instigators” celebrated its premiere in New York City on Wednesday, July 31 at Jazz at Lincoln Center.
While Matt Damon and Casey Affleck were just in a film together last year with “Oppenheimer,” we see the duo sharing nearly every second of screen time in this alongside each other as they seek to rob a corrupt politician’s ill-gained earnings. Affleck serves as a co-writer for this, his first writing credit since his 2019 post-apocalyptic drama “The Light of My Life.”
“First of all, [co-writer] Chuck MacLean had a great idea, Chuck had a fantastic beginning for the script,” Affleck tells IndieWire. As for if he sought inspiration from any other films, he told us that “‘Midnight Run,’ ‘The Sting,’ and ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ were definitely talked about a lot.”
Coming up on the 25th anniversary of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” later this year, we look back on the film’s effect on current viewings, with Netflix’s Andrew Scott-led “Ripley” and Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn,” which was heavily inspired by the 1999 psychological thriller. Matt Damon starred as the titular Tom Ripley.
“I don’t know,” Damon tells IndieWire about if he would ever return to play that character under the right circumstances. “You know, I associate the one that we did so much with Anthony Minghella, who’s passed away now, that I don’t know. I even had trouble watching the new one, as beautiful as it was and as great as everybody was. It was hard at first for me to sink back into it just because I have so many great memories, but they’re all wrapped up in these personal feelings about the experience.”
IndieWire returns to the same spot where we celebrated Liman’s “Road House” premiere back in March, where Liman’s streaming career was in hot water over a deal where Amazon MGM offered him a $60 million budget for a theatrical release or an $85 million budget if the film went straight to streaming. Speaking with IndieWire this past month, while he stated that he has “no issue with streaming,” he revealed that he was upset over Amazon’s treatment of the film.
“My issue on ‘Road House’ is that we made the movie for MGM to be in theaters, everyone was paid as if it was going to be in theaters, and then Amazon switched it on us and nobody got compensated,” Liman continuted in a recent interview. “Forget about the effect on the industry — 50 million people saw ‘Road House’ — I didn’t get a cent, Jake Gyllenhaal didn’t get a cent, [producer] Joel Silver didn’t get a cent. That’s wrong.”
Now working with Apple, Liman feels much happier with how this streamer treated him. “‘The Instigators’ was made as a streaming movie,” he tells IndieWire. “There was a streaming buy out for the key players. I feel like we all were more than fairly compensated.”
“The Bourne Identity” and “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” filmmaker also recently spoke with us about his 36-day shoot. “I know people watch ‘Instigators’ and it looks like we’re having a lot of fun making the movie, but the reality is, it’s a lot of work,” Liman said. “Getting up so early. We were in the dead of winter. Very complicated sequences, especially action sequences are very hard to pull off, and we’re trying to do a big action comedy. You gotta have everything, the comedy and the action, but I couldn’t have had better people around me.”
“The Instigators” premieres August 9 on Apple TV+. Check out the trailer here.
