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Matt Damon had 'a lot of fun' working with Ben Affleck again: 'I think we'll write a lot more'

Matt Damon had 'a lot of fun' working with Ben Affleck again: 'I think we'll write a lot more'

The official trailer for The Last Duel dropped Tuesday (July 20), and it's not expected to hit theaters until Oct. 15, but we already know what Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are capable of.

Affleck and Damon co-wrote and co-starred in Good Will Hunting (1997), and their debut netted two Oscars—one for them (best writing, screenplay written directly for the screen) and one for Robin Williams (best supporting actor).

Damon spoke with Entertainment Tonight about the differences in his writing process with Affleck, as The Last Duel ends a decades-long gap since they'd last written together:

"I think that writing process for Good Will Hunting was so inefficient. You know, because we didn't really understand structure, so we wrote thousands of pages. ... We'd be like, 'Well, what if this happened?' and then we'd just write different scenes. So, we had all these kind of disparate scenes, and then we kind of tried to jam them together into something that looked like a movie.

"But this time around, you know, it's a story about perspective. So, there are two knights and then there's the Lady Marguerite. So Ben and I wrote the male perspectives, and Nicole Holofcener wrote the female perspective. That's kind of the architecture of that movie. And I think we just found that having made ... like, making movies for 30 years, we actually learned something about structure along the way and the process went along a lot faster. And so I think we'll write a lot more in the future just because it didn't turn out to be as time consuming as we thought. It was actually a lot of fun."

Damon and Affleck, who also play Jean de Carrouges and Count Pierre d'Alencon respectively, co-wrote the Last Duel screenplay with Holofcener, who earned an Oscar nomination for her Can You Ever Forgive Me? adapted screenplay in 2019. Ridley Scott served as director.

The historical drama is based on Eric Jager's 2004 book The Last Duel: A True Story of Trial by Combat in Medieval France. Set in 14th century France, we begin after Marguerite de Carrouges (Jodie Comer) has been raped by Jacques LeGris (Adam Driver). That results in a duel that Jean de Carrouges (Damon) must win in order to save Marguerite's life.

It marked the last legally sanctioned duel in French history (h/t RadioTimes.com).

Watch the trailer below.

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