Clint Eastwood Spent 5 Years Trying To Fix One Of His Western Movies

Matt Damon only has four official screenwriting credits, but he won an Oscar for one of them, so he's earned the right to make suggestions if he feels like a scene or a narrative is hitting him wrong. This might sound disrespectful to the person who wrote the script that was evidently good enough to get a film into production, but making movies is a collaborative process, and if the guy responsible (as a co-writer) for "Good Will Hunting," "Gerry," and "The Last Duel" senses something isn't working, you should hear him out.

This is precisely what Clint Eastwood did when he was directing Damon in "Invictus." Damon was playing Francois Pienaar, the captain of the South African Springboks rugby team, who was urged on by Nelson Mandela to overcome seemingly impossible odds to win the 1995 Rugby World Cup, which might help unite the divided nation. The film reunited Eastwood with his "Unforgiven" co-star Morgan Freeman, and was viewed as a major 2009 Oscar contender. Budgeted at $60 million, there was a good deal riding on the success of "Invictus." So when Damon asked Eastwood if he could tinker with a big locker room speech, the director was placing a lot of faith in his star.

During a recent appearance on "Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend," Damon told the story of getting the okay from Eastwood (whom he endearingly calls "Boss") to work his Oscar-winning magic on the scene. He had one week to figure it out, and he wound up learning a screenwriting lesson that Eastwood needed five years to figure out while working on "Unforgiven."

When it came time to shoot the locker room scene (in one take, as is the Clint Eastwood way), the director was surprised. When the take was over, he approached Matt Damon and said, "I thought you were going to change it." Damon replied, '"Yeah, it's a funny story. I wrote it, and I rewrote it all week. I wrote probably 27 drafts, and then I got it perfect. Then I looked back, and it was exactly the same as it was.' He laughed, and he goes, 'You know that happened to me once.'"

Eastwood then went on to discuss how he worked for five years on improving David Webb Peoples' screenplay for "Unforgiven." "It wasn't getting better," Eastwood told Damon, "And I couldn't figure it out. Then I went back to the original script that I had. I pulled it out of the drawer and read it. I called [Peoples] that day, and said, 'I'm making your script exactly as you wrote it.'"

Eastwood's instincts were obviously spot-on, as "Unforgiven" is easily the best Western he's ever made and, as far as I'm concerned, one of the greatest movies of all time. As for "Invictus," it's a solid movie that earned Damon and Freeman Academy Award nominations. I don't have a vivid memory of the locker room speech, but it's no "Win one for the Gipper" moment, that's for sure.