Matt Damon and John Krasinski may play men on opposite sides of an issue in Promised Land, but when it comes to their writing styles, they are very much on the same page.
The two actors, who met through Krasinski’s wife Emily Blunt when she starred with Damon in The Adjustment Bureau, co-wrote the drama about a natural gas salesman (Damon) who goes to a small town and runs into resistance from the locals about drilling rights, including one very vocal environmentalist (Krasinski).
The Hollywood Reporter sat down with both Damon and Krasinski to ask them about their writing process and see what they had to say about each other when the other wasn’t in the room.
Damon, who wrote 1997’s Good Will Hunting with Ben Affleck, tells THR that working with Krasinski reminded him of his co-writing days with the Argo director.
“We have really similar sensibilities and senses of humor and we don’t have to argue about what’s good and what’s not,” he says. “If you’re having to argue for things that you already believe are good then the process is going to be pretty inefficient.”
As for Office star Krasinski, he says he was a bit starstruck when it came to working with Damon.
“I had to get it through my brain that I was actually writing with the dude who wrote Good Will Hunting,” he says. “And being from Boston, that’s pretty much as important a movie as you can get.”
Krasinski, who claims to have watched Good Will Hunting “175 times,” says that after he calmed down he was able to write with Damon “really, really well.”
“We wrote really quickly,” says Krasinski. “We had similar sensibilities and similar senses of humor. We really always knew where we were going with this and what we were trying to do. It happened in a really organic way.”
Watch THR’s interview with Krasinski and Damon above to find out more about how they wrote together at Damon’s home.
Promised Land opens in theaters on Dec. 28.
Email: Rebecca.Ford@thr.com; Twitter: @Beccamford
