Matt Damon Visits Pleasantly Curiously “Closet Picks”

Matt Damon Shops The Criterion Closet Like A Film-School Reunion

The one-of-one actor extraordinaire Matt Damon has entered thee Criterion Closet—and suddenly the shelves look like a reunion of his cinematic education. Damon pleasantly browses, curiously studies the titles and pulls films connected to collaborators, formative performances and the kind of moviemaking that still gets him talking.

His selections move from Steven Soderbergh and Gus Van Sant to Kenneth Lonergan, Carl Franklin, the Coen brothers and Billy Wilder. This is not a random stack built for the camera. It reads like a map of the directors, actors and storytelling choices Damon has carried through his own career.

Steven Soderbergh Occupies More Than One Shelf

Damon selects both Traffic and sex, lies, and videotape, two very different Steven Soderbergh films that help explain the director’s range. One is a sprawling, interlocking drug-war drama; the other is the intimate 1989 breakthrough that helped reshape American independent cinema.

That double selection makes sense for an actor who has repeatedly worked with Soderbergh across projects including the Ocean’s films, The Informant!, Contagion and Behind the Candelabra. Damon is not merely praising a favorite filmmaker from a distance. He is looking at the work of someone whose methods he has studied from inside the frame.

The Closet becomes less a shopping trip than a director-by-director memory bank. Each title opens another door into how Damon thinks about performance, collaboration and the decisions happening behind the camera.

Gus Van Sant And Kenneth Lonergan Bring It Closer To Home

Damon also reaches for Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy, another selection tied to a filmmaker who played a defining role in his career. Van Sant directed Damon in Good Will Hunting, the film that transformed Damon and Ben Affleck from struggling writers and young actors into Academy Award-winning screenwriters.

He also chooses Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me, the quietly devastating family drama starring Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo. Criterion notes that Damon discusses the film’s impact, and it is easy to understand why the selection belongs in this group: the movie finds enormous emotional stakes without raising its voice.

Damon’s list keeps favoring movies that trust actors, silences and moral uncertainty. Even when the genres change, the performances remain complicated enough to resist being reduced to heroes and villains.

The Stack Moves From Noir To Coen-Brothers Dread

The actor’s haul also includes Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, with Damon recalling a favorite moment from the noir classic. He adds the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, Carl Franklin’s One False Move and Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water.

Those picks bring crime, suspicion and inevitability into the stack. None of the films offers easy moral footing. Characters make one decision, then another, until the trap feels less like a surprise than the natural shape of everything they have chosen.

His Picks Reveal An Actor Who Still Watches Like A Student

Damon rounds out the official collection with René Clément’s Purple Noon, Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men and Barbet Schroeder’s Maîtresse. The full stack travels across decades, countries and genres without losing its central concern: what happens when a filmmaker gives human behavior enough room to become unpredictable?

That may be the pleasantly curious appeal of watching Matty D inside the Closet. He does not approach the shelves like someone arriving to confirm his own taste. He approaches them like an actor still looking for another lesson.

Watch Matt Damon Reveal His Criterion Closet Picks

Matt Damon discusses lessons from Steven Soderbergh and Gus Van Sant, the impact of You Can Count on Me and a favorite moment from Double Indemnity while building his Criterion stack.

Source: The Criterion Collection.