Matt Damon Talks ‘The Odyssey", Bourne & Oceans Sequels & More with Rich

Matt Damon has now made three movies with Christopher Nolan. The newest one nearly wrecked everybody involved, and that is precisely why he cannot stop talking about it.

"It was the best experience of my life," Damon told Rich about The Odyssey, "because it was the hardest, and it was the hardest for everybody. I have never experienced a movie like that."

The reason it was hard is the reason it should look like nothing else. Nolan shot the film in camera, on IMAX, with no digital shortcuts. "If you see a ship in the background, there's a ship out there," Damon said. "There is no CGI, there's none of that. It's done the way it would have been done 80 years ago."

Then there is the Cyclops. Damon swore he was not embellishing. The sequence was shot in Zeus's Cave in Greece, the landmark where the god is said to have been born, and the crew rigged it out until it felt like a Hollywood sound stage. Inside that cave sat a 60-foot puppet. Bill Irwin played the Cyclops from a miniature cave built for him while the rest of the cast performed opposite the giant.

"The movie kind of felt more like an expedition than a movie," Damon said, and the travel log backs him up. Boats. Mountaintops. Night shoots in Iceland on black sand plains for the Hades material. Scotland. Morocco. Six months of a full lifestyle change before a frame was shot, because Nolan wanted Odysseus lean and, as Damon put it, "battle hardened but wouldn't pass up a meal."

The line that stuck with him came from the first assistant director, a veteran who has seen everything and is surprised by nothing. Watching the grips build a platform off the side of a cliff, he sidled up to Damon and said, "You know it's funny when you realize that every single person here could be working on an easier movie for more money."

Rich compared it to a championship sports team. Damon did not push back. "I have never been more proud to be a part of a team," he said, and admitted the memory still gets him emotional.

Nolan's grip on him is not new. Damon told his wife he was going to slow down from acting unless Nolan called. That was before Oppenheimer. Guess who called. The secrecy is real too. When Nolan wanted him for Interstellar, Damon was shooting The Monuments Men with George Clooney in rural Germany, so a production assistant hand carried the script overseas rather than mail it, then had to sit on it overnight because Damon had a 5 a.m. call time. The kid had never left the country before. He got a full day in rural Germany out of it.

On the sports front, Damon is deep in the World Cup, a habit he picked up in 2006 when his daughter Isabella was born on June 11 and he watched what felt like every match with a newborn in his arms.

He is also fully bought in on New England. "They were phenomenal," he said of last season, noting nobody picked them to get there, praising Mike Vrabel and Drake Maye and the arrival of A.J. Brown.

The Bourne question got a yes. Damon is talking with director Edward Berger about how to crack a story worthy of the first three. As for another Ocean's, he allowed only this: "There might be another Ocean's movie in the mix."