Here’s the Interesting Way Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Nicole Holofcener Divided ‘The Last Duel’ Script

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck return to working together as screenwriters for Ridley Scott’s upcoming 14th-century drama The Last Duel. Unlike their collaboration for Good Will Hunting, which won them the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, Nicole Holofcener joined the duo, and wrote in the woman’s point of view, while Damon and Affleck wrote for the male characters. Holofcener is an Oscar nominee for co-writing Can You Ever Forgive Me? and the writer-director of Walking and Talking, Friends with Money, and Enough Said.

The Last Duel uses a similar style to Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, in that it tells the same event from three different perspectives. The story centers around a duel between Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon) and Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver), after the former accuses the latter of raping his wife, Marguerite de Carrouges (Jodie Comer). The narrative is told from the viewpoints of each character.

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Damon spoke to Entertainment Tonight on how this story structure shaped the writing process:

“It’s a story about perspective,” Damon said. “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.” Damon also told ET: “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.”

The Last Duel was originally scheduled to receive a limited theatrical release on December 25, 2020. However, as a result of the pandemic, the release date was delayed to October 15, 2021. It will have its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September 2021.

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