When Matt and Ben Met Nicole: How They Came to Write ‘The Last Duel’


It’s been nearly 25 years since Matt Damon and Ben Affleck wrote and starred. “Good Will Hunt” and reinforced a type of Hollywood partnership in which one name is rarely spoken without the other.

But for their first written meeting since then, “The Last Duel” The guys didn’t want another version of the Matt and Ben Show. What they wanted for this historical drama about a raped woman and men who refuse to believe her was a female collaborator. And so they sought out writer-director Nicole Holofcener, who is known for her nuanced observations of spiky contemporary women in movies. “Enough Said” and “mercenary friends

Directed by Ridley Scott, adapted from Eric Jager’s 2004 book and released October 15, “The Last Duel” depicts France’s last officially sanctioned battle trial: In 1386, Jean de Carrouges, a knight, and his friend, now had become his rival. When Carrouges’ wife, Marguerite, accuses Le Gris of raping him, and Carrouges denies this, squire Jacques Le Gris is ordered to fight to the death. Whoever survives will be declared the winner as a sign of divine providence. If Carrouges loses, Marguerite will be burned at the stake for perjury.

Set amid the brutality of the Hundred Years’ War, the film is divided into three parts: the “truth” (Damon), according to Carrouges, Le Gris (Adam Driver) and finally Marguerite (Jodie Comer). Damon and Affleck wrote the male perspectives, while Holofcener wrote Marguerite’s.

“The heaviest load on the architecture of this script was the third act, because the world of women had to be almost entirely invented and imagined,” Damon said. “The men were very meticulous about taking notes on what they were doing at the time. But nobody was really talking about what happened to women, because they didn’t even have personalities.”

“This is an adaptation of a book we read,” he added, “but Nicole’s role is somewhat of an original script.”

In a live video call in late August — Damon in Brooklyn, Affleck and Holofcener in Los Angeles — the three discussed the intricacies of their collaboration and portraying sexual assault at a violent time when women were little more than a commodity. These are edited excerpts from the speech.

Let’s start from the beginning. Matt, it’s December 2018 and you just read Jager’s book. What happened then?

MATTE DAMON Ridley and I had been looking for something to do together since “The Martian” and we had a few near misses. So I sent it to Ridley and he loved it. In March 2019, Ben came to dinner and bought the book that night and called me at 7 am the next morning and said, “Let’s do this.” And so we started writing. But very quickly, through a series of different conversations with a group of people, we decided that finding the best female writer who could write the female point of view would serve the story best.

NICOLE HOLOFCENER [Dryly] Plus, Ridley and I have been looking for something to do together for years.

DAMON [Laughs] Oh now I’m a [expletive]. Oh my God.

HOLOFCENER Number – number. am i kidding you? I did not mean it. I was thinking about how different my sensitivity was from Ridley’s. This much.

DAMON Yeah yeah. Nicole was our dream writer and was our first choice. And thank God she said yes. And he said yes, mostly because Ben sent him about 10 or 15 pages behind my back that we didn’t show anyone. And I was so embarrassed, professionally embarrassed, he sent them to Nicole Holofcener.

HOLOFCENER They weren’t good, but they were good enough to say to me, “I want to work with these guys.”

DAMON I think they were bad enough, “Oh, these guys need help.”

HOLOFCENER It was bad enough that I wasn’t afraid to be able to write for the medieval language, at least in English. But they are very talented and I was immediately proud. My only hesitation is, “Can I get out of my own little world and write about something like this?” it happened. And as soon as I started and had their support, I saw that I could do it.

So why three episodes?

BEN AFFLECK Very quickly, we realized that the movie had a clear perspective on who was telling the truth. And this incredible heroic character, Marguerite de Carrouges, had a story that deserved to be told. It was clear that it would be an exploration of the dynamics of power, the roots of misogyny, and survival in medieval France. It had all the elements that make telling a story truly great – the idea of ​​an unreliable narrator, the idea of ​​a second unreliable narrator, and then some sort of explanation of what’s going on through the eyes of a character who is both hero and humanity. rejected and ignored.

HOLOFCENER But you also understand the fact that it wasn’t black and white for men, and it was. That’s why black and white about what happened to the woman. So, the male point of view presents this male illusion perspective.

Nicole was not as friendly as Marguerite in the book. How did you start creating his world?

HOLOFCENER I researched what women were like back then and what they had to endure. I gave him a friend to talk to. I knew he had to take over the property while he was fighting away. So, “Well, what did they do?” I read that. He took care of animals, horses and the harvest. And I really tried to imagine how terrible it was for him and how he dealt with this horror. Her life was pretty bad as she was married to Jean de Carrouges and so she had nothing to lose when she was raped, really. I mean, it would hurt. He had the potential to suffer and die a lot, but at that point he was fed up with not having a voice.

How do three writers keep things straight?

AFLECK When the script was nearing a completed stage, it was circulated and emailed. In fact, one of the biggest challenges was the insane technological aspects of keeping up with the various versions—they included everyone else’s changes.

HOLOFCENER We kept working on the wrong drafts. It’s like: “Wait a minute. I pulled that line two months ago. Why is it still there?” We’re not the most technically savvy.

DAMON We had one of those moments where I thought we did half a day on one of these things and we had one of those moments where we realized, “Oh no, that’s the wrong sketch,” and then you have to go through and try to figure it out. What did you do.

HOLOFCENER Matt doesn’t even have a laptop. So don’t get me started.

How did you make sure you accurately portrayed Marguerite’s rape without exploiting it?

AFLECK Consulting or not, we were particularly sensitive and careful about really listening and doing research. RAIN [an organization that helps victims of rape, abuse and incest], survivors of the attack, history experts, women’s groups, and all other experiences try to let the story inform and make it as realistic as possible.

HOLOFCENER I think these organizations really wanted to make sure we made it clear what the truth was – it wasn’t “he said, he said”. This is not ambivalent.

AFLECK We had questions like: “Are we justified if we don’t show the emotional cost and seriousness of this? How much is it too much? And where do you feel the limits of pleasure are?”

HOLOFCENER A lot of it was about how often we see rape and how long it lasts. How long will we suffer from this? It was a topic of conversation. And so we took your notes seriously and made a lot of corrections. We had to show some scenes twice but it was necessary. We had to watch the rape twice, just as disturbing as watching it.

What choices did you make to stick with or leave the book?

DAMON The biggest exit is the rape scene. What Marguerite de Carrouges said repeatedly at court and to an ever-expanding group of people, and ultimately all of France, was that Jacques Le Gris had entered the house with another man, Adam Louvel. He comes in the movie Louvel but then Le Gris tells him to go. According to Marguerite’s true statement, the rape was much more brutal. He was tied up and gagged. He nearly drowned to death. And Louvel was in the room.

HOLOFCENER [Le Gris] she said she loved him.

AFLECK What was fascinating was how extensive and pervasive this behavior and attitude towards women was, and the vestigial aspects that are still with us today. This is really powerful. What we hope is that people will look at it and say, “Have I always understood how my actions are perceived by others? Have I always recognized other people’s reality, truth, point of view during my actions? And maybe think about it.

I realized that he was actually going to play Le Gris. And then you decide to play the flirtatious Count Pierre d’Alençon instead of facing Matt onscreen. Why?

HOLOFCENER He came to himself.

AFLECK What’s really going on is –

DAMON We heard Adam Driver is interested. [Everyone laughs.]



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