Matt Damon’s Unforgiven Film Fiasco: The Margaret Saga
Matt Damon opens up about the chaotic journey behind Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret, revealing years of legal wrangling and studio drama that nearly derailed the film.
When even the combined efforts of Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker can’t pull a film out of trouble, you’d reckon it’s a lost cause. But Matt Damon wasn’t having a bar of it. He stuck by his mate Kenneth Lonergan through a drawn-out mess of production headaches, legal stoushes, and endless studio wrangling, all in the name of friendship. Damon’s always been the sort to back his mates, whether it’s teaming up with Ben Affleck for Good Will Hunting, singing Casey Affleck’s praises, or popping up in anything Steven Soderbergh asks him to.
Lonergan, who became close with Damon in the early 2000s, called on him for a small role in his second feature, Margaret. The psychological drama wrapped filming in 2005, but punters wouldn’t get a look at it until 2011. In the years between, things went pear-shaped. Arguments over the film’s length and final cut got so heated that Scorsese and Schoonmaker were brought in to try and sort it out, but even their version was knocked back by producer Gary Gilbert.
Studio Showdowns and Legal Tangles
Fox Searchlight ended up taking Gilbert and Camelot Pictures to court, claiming he hadn’t coughed up his share of the production costs. Not to be outdone, Gilbert’s mob fired back with their own lawsuit, accusing Searchlight and Lonergan of sabotaging the project and delivering what they called
“a clearly inferior and unmarketable film.”
The whole thing turned into a legal circus, with everyone pointing fingers and no one getting any closer to a finished product.
Meanwhile, word got around that Lonergan had borrowed a million bucks from Matthew Broderick just to try and finish his cut. Damon, for his part, was dragged into the mess and ended up being deposed. He watched the chaos unfold from the sidelines, feeling for his mate.
“I knew it was in trouble, and I was talking to him a lot through all of that,”
he told Bright Wall/Dark Room.
“And I was definitely involved in the whole thing. I mean, it was a real mess. I just remember back in 2008 spending hours and hours on the phone with Fox Searchlight and a lot of email exchanges back and forth and all that. And then the whole regime at Searchlight changed, and a whole new regime came on, and this all went on for years.”
Backroom Deals and Last Resorts
Trying to cut through the red tape, Damon even reached out directly to Tom Rothman, the company’s founder and
“an old friend of mine,”
but got nowhere.
“The whole thing was completely nuts,”
he said, summing up the experience. Even Rothman ended up being deposed, and the whole saga spiralled into what Damon called
“a big ugly lawsuit.”
In the end, Margaret did make it to cinemas, but not quite as Lonergan had hoped. The final cut ran 156 minutes—about half an hour shorter than the director wanted. Since then, Damon’s been involved in nearly 40 films and documentaries, but none with Fox Searchlight or Searchlight Pictures. That probably says it all.