Interview completed on May 19^th, 2013, at the Cannes Film Festival

The first time that Michael Douglas and Matt Damon emerged from costume and make up wearing their full regalia as flamboyant entertainer Liberace and his young lover Scott Thorson both actors collapsed in a fit of giggles.

“We just started laughing,” recalls Damon. “I had my full Scott look on and Michael was also Liberace to the max. He was wearing one of those spectacular outfits with the cape and he had all the make up on.

“He had a prosthetic nose and chin and a black wig and he’d dyed his own hair. Usually, he’s got beautiful grey hair which he dyed the most horrible fake black. His real hair went under the wig that Liberace wore and when he came out with this whole look the pair of us just started laughing. And it was partly relief because we knew it was going to work.”

Directed by Steven Soderbergh, Behind The Candelabra is based on Thorson’s memoir and tells the story of the great showman’s stormy five-year love affair with the younger man.

Douglas has praised his co-star for taking on a role that other leading stars might well have refused. “I love that Michael says it was a brave role for me to take and not for him,” he laughs. “But the truth is that I didn’t need to think twice about it. For me it just felt like an incredible opportunity.”

Not least, it was an opportunity to work with Douglas – a friend of many years standing – and to collaborate once more with Soderbergh, a director he greatly admires, on a compelling story of excess, tenderness and extravagance.

It’s all there, says Damon, but at the heart it’s a love story about two people who, because of the prevailing modes of the time, had to deny their homosexuality and live together in secrecy.

“It’s really tragic and we do go into that in the movie,” says Damon. “It’s so different now than 20 years ago. I had friends who were in the closet 20 years ago and it was brutal to watch them, for whatever reason, not being able to tell their families.

“They were wonderful people and not feeling able to tell the truth for whatever reasons they had – be it their career or being afraid of being shunned by society– just meant that they could never fully be themselves. And the fact that situation has changed and is changing so radically is really, truly great.”

But back in the 1970s it was different and Liberace – known as Lee to family and friends – feared that if he publicly acknowledged his sexuality there would be a backlash amongst his legion of fans.

Liberace first met Thorson in the summer of 1977 when they were introduced, by a mutual friend, backstage after one of his shows at the Las Vegas Hilton. Within weeks the younger man had moved in the star’s mansion and later, he was introduced into his stage act as the chauffeur who drove Liberace on stage every night in a sparkling Rolls Royce.

Later in their relationship, Liberace embarked on a series of cosmetic treatments to try and fend off the effect of the encroaching years on his face and he encouraged Thorson to have plastic surgery, too – to make him look more like his lover.

Physically capturing Thorson was, then, a huge challenge for Damon. “But everything that we did to capture the physicality of Scott – the tan, the clothes, the wigs, the prosthetics – helped enormously to tease the character out of me.”

Damon gave himself over to the physical transformation required and says that no other role in his career has called for him to spend so much time willingly with the costume, hair and make up departments.

‘”Previously, I’ve always hated costume fittings,” he admits. “I always go in and try to find the most comfortable clothes as quickly as I can because I don’t want to be standing around for 12 hours a day in them otherwise.

“But it was impossible to do that with the costume designer Ellen Mirojnick.  She completely Jujitsu-ed me. She started bringing in these clothes and I started to really see this guy and it turned into a real creative process where I had 12 fittings with her that would go on and on and on.

“I got into it to the point where I’d see a potential costume and think, ‘now, if I lost a little more weight these pants that I can’t get into now would actually fit. How long have I got? Could I do it in three weeks?’ And that part of it became really fun because it was so different from anything I’d ever normally wear.”

The wigs – four of them worn at different stages in the story – also proved essential to the role as did the prosthetics, used on Damon in the latter half of the movie after his character has undergone extensive plastic surgery to make him look just like his lover.

“Both Michael and I were in the make up chair for a couple of hours while the prosthetics team got to work on us. Then we’d come out and our faces would look so different, we’d barely recognise ourselves. Your chin is jutting out and, man, those cheekbones! But again, all of it was so helpful when it came to playing Scott.”

Shoe lifts, which added several inches to Damon’s height, also helped. “Scott was really tall – 6ft 3ins or 6ft 4ins so he was a good head taller than Lee, which

is obvious when you see pictures of them together,” he explains.

“In reality, I’m about the same height as Michael. So we put lifts in my shoes to make me taller and then, any opportunity I had when I was standing next to Michael, I’d get a little apple box and stand next to him and start laughing.”

Having captured the physicality the next job was to render the emotions of what both men saw, essentially as a love story, albeit one that was to end in sorrow.

“Yes, that’s how we played it and that’s how it was interesting to us,” Damon says. “Everyone who’d known them who we asked said, ‘they were, basically, married.’

“One of the people close to Lee said  ‘look, it wouldn’t have an issue if this were a man and a woman. They would have been married.’ So, when they broke up Scott would have gotten whatever it was he was entitled to.

“Of course, had he been more patient, Lee was going to give him a huge amount of money. But he was just so desperate for money because he’d become addicted to drugs as a result of the plastic surgery.

“It was all so twisted because by that time he was a pretty severe drug addict and was completely broke. He’d sold all the jewellery Liberace had given him or pawned it all to pay for drugs.

“But the second that Scott sold his story (to The National Enquirer) that was it. Lee just went into the foxhole, which was his default position when he was under attack. He completely cut Scott out and then it was war. And with hindsight it’s really tragic.”

The story is all the more poignant, Damon says, given Scott’s background. “He was a kid from a foster home and Lee said to him, ‘I’m the family you’ve been looking for and I want to be all these things to you. I want to be your father, your lover, your brother, and your friend. I want to be everything.’ And that was exactly what Scott had been looking for his entire life.”

What does he think that Liberace, who died in 1987, would have made of Behind The Candelabra? “I don’t know if anybody would be comfortable with a biopic of themselves unless it was just flat out hagiography. But, more than that, I think he’d probably be so much more comfortable living today than he was in his own era,” he notes.

“And maybe he’d be happy to know that his influence really was far reaching and that in such a short time after his life, we’ve had iconic entertainers like Elton John who’s now been out of the closet for a very long time. Yes, I imagine he’d feel good seeing how far everything has moved in such a short time and that he was a part of that.”

Damon was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and made his movie debut as an 18 year old, delivering one line in Mystic Pizza. He continued to act whilst a student at Harvard University and his breakthrough came with Good Will Hunting, a film written with his good friend Ben Affleck. Both Damon and Affleck starred in the movie which was nominated for nine Academy Awards, winning two, including Best Original Screenplay.

Damon’s film CV includes Courage Under Fire, The Rainmaker, Saving Private Ryan, The Talented Mr. Ripley, All The Pretty Horses, Ocean’s Eleven, The Bourne Identity, The Departed, The Informant, True Grit, Contagion, We Bought A Zoo and Promised Land. He is currently filming the World War Two thriller Monuments Men with George Clooney co-starring and directing.

Q and A follows:

Q: Michael was saying that one of the benefits of working with Steven Soderbergh is that you get to view everything that you’ve filmed as you’re going along. Is that right?

Matt Damon: Oh my God, beyond that. We shot this movie in 33 days and bear in mind that we shot Promised Land, the film that I did last year in 30 days. But that film was contemporary whereas this one was period with all the spectacle and performance pieces that Michael had to do included. So to do it in that time is mind-boggling. But Steven works incredibly quickly – in fact every day we finished early. As we shot mostly in LA, I’d be home in time for dinner with the kids. My wife and I would read them a story and put them to bed and by the time I came downstairs having done that there’d be an email waiting for me telling me that the dailies were available to view on the website PIX. Now, for instance, on Promised Land you’d go onto your PIX account and what we’d shot would be uploaded for us to look at, which was great in itself. But the difference here was that I’d go to the PIX website and I’d find not just he scenes we’d shot that day but completely cut together! So Steven had downloaded the stuff, cut it, uploaded it to the website in the time it had taken me to get home and get the kids to bed.

Q: And in practical terms how does that help your job?

MD: It’s a huge help and I’ve never experienced it before. Essentially, by the time we’d finished everyone had the cut movie cut on their laptops. The scenes were all out of order, but we had it all there. The benefits of being able to work that way were huge because, of course, movies are always shot out of sequence. So if you knew you were filming scene 78, where maybe the relationship between Lee and Scott is deteriorating, you could always go back and look at scene 77, even though you’d shot it three weeks ago. It was like, ‘well yes, that was the scene we shot in the bedroom and that was the scene that ended on a close up of Michael’ or whatever. It was great because it took the guesswork out of it and you didn’t have to rely on your memory of what you were doing or how you felt.

Q: Michael was praising your performance. He also said he thought it was a brave role for someone at the peak of their career to take. Did you think it over before accepting the role?

MD: I love that he says that it was a brave role for me to take and not a brave role for him!  (Laughter)

Q: But did you have to think twice about it?

MD:No, the truth is that I didn’t need to think twice about it at all. For me, it just felt like an incredible opportunity. The concerns that Michael raised on my behalf would never have bothered me anyway but, in this day and age, I also really don’t think it’s an issue. I remember one of our producers, Gregory Jacobs, who does all Steven’s movies, telling me that his 13-year-old son, Declan had asked him about the movie we were making and so he’d shown him some You tube footage of Liberace performing. Declan looked up and said, ‘What do you mean nobody knew he was gay?’  And he was like, ‘Were you people asleep? What’s wrong with you?’ And Greg said, ‘No, it was a thing back then nobody talked about.’  Declan couldn’t have cared less about the whole gay thing, he was more interested in how great a piano player Liberace was. He was instantly beyond the sexuality. It was more like, ‘I’ve never seen a guy play like that!’  And so I think we’re just living in a different era.

Q: And yet Liberace had to live a secret life..

MD: It’s really tragic and we do go into that in the movie – what that must have felt like. It’s so different now than 20 years ago. I had friends who were in the closet 20 years ago and it was brutal to watch them, for whatever reason, not being able to tell their families. They were wonderful people and not feeling able to tell the truth for whatever reasons they had – be it their career or being afraid of being shunned by society– just meant that they could never fully be themselves. And the fact that situation has changed and is changing so radically is really, truly great.

Q: Do you think that Liberace was right to fear his private life being exposed at that time? 

MD: Yes, I think he was right. There’s famous story that Steven heard from one of the guys around him at the time. The night that Scott broke the story to the National Enquirer, Lee was petrified back stage. He had a full house waiting for him and he was absolutely terrified that he was going to get booed when he walked on stage. But, in reality, what happened was that when he walked onto that stage the audience erupted into cheers and you could see the energy coming back into Lee because he realised that his fans weren’t going to abandon him or leave him. Perhaps they didn’t believe it, even though, Liberace and Scott had been photographed everywhere together and were essentially married. Or, perhaps, they just didn’t care whether it was true or not. There was just an implicit agreement between everybody to say, ‘we love you and we want to keep hearing you play. So let’s move on.’

Q: And times are so different now aren’t they?

MD: Completely. Now we’re at a place where someone like Anderson Cooper came out and made this beautiful statement about being gay and it was, basically, a day in the press and then everybody went, ‘Ok, you know what? We’re not giving upon Anderson Cooper. Let’s move on.’ And I think Harvey Milk got it right when he said, “Everybody just come out. No matter how hard it is.’ Because the sheer numbers will challenge people who are resistant to the idea of homosexuality or living in a bubble where homosexuality doesn’t exist. And it will make their position untenable. In the world of the arts it already really couldn’t matter less. And if you want to make movies and you have a problem with homosexuality you better get over it real quick.

Q: What was the key to playing him – the clothes, the hair the spray tan?

MD: That stuff helped more than usual although I could have done without my wife witnessing me getting a spray tan in the garage every Sunday night. I’d stand there with my boxers hiked up my butt while a girl from make up sprayed the colour on (laughs). But it was beneficial in terms of nailing the character.

Q: The costumes must have helped too?

MD: Most definitely. Previously, I’ve always hated fittings. I always go in and try to find the most comfortable clothes as quickly as I can because I don’t want to be standing around for 12 hours a day in them otherwise. But it was impossible to do that with the costume designer Ellen Mirojnick. She completely Jujitsu-ed me. She started bringing in these clothes and I started to really see this guy and it turned into a real creative process where I had 12 fittings with her that would go on and on and on. I got into it to the point where I’d see a potential costume and think, ‘Now, if I lost a little more weight these pants that I can’t get into now would actually fit. How long have I got, Could I do it in three weeks?’  And that part of it became really fun because it was so different from anything I’d ever normally wear. On top of that there were the wigs – four of them all – which also helped me tease the character out. As soon as I put them on I felt completely different.

Q: You also seem much taller in the film. Is that an optical illusion?

MD: No, not at all. Scott is tall, maybe 6ft 3ins or 6ft 4. He’s a good head taller than Lee, which is obvious when you see pictures of them together. In reality, I’m about the same height as Michael. So we put lifts in my shoes to make me taller and then any opportunity I had when I was standing next to Michael, I’d get a little apple box and stand next to him and start laughing.

Q: It’s a relationship that started because Liberace was drawn to Scott physically. Did it become deeper than that?

MD: Absolutely. So at the outset I’m a blond, beefcake bimbo and at the beginning the relationship is very physical and it’s all about the sex. But, of course, as the movie progresses the relationship gets much deeper than that.

Q: How difficult was it to achieve Scott’s post-plastic surgery look?

MD: Both Michael and I were in the make up chair for a couple of hours while the prosthetics team got to work on us. Then we’d come out and our faces would look so different, we’d barely recognise ourselves. Your chin is jutting out and, man, those cheekbones! But again, all of it was so helpful when it came to playing Scott.

Q: Did you think of it essentially as a love story? A long-term relationship, just like any other, with all of its ups and downs? 

MD: Yes, that’s how we played it and that’s how it was interesting to us. We asked that questions and everyone who’d known them said they were, basically married. And one of the people close to Lee said this wouldn’t have been an issue if this was a man and a woman. They would have been married. And so when they broke up Scott would have gotten whatever it was he was entitled to. And, of course, had he been more patient, Lee was going to give him a huge amount of money. But he was just so desperate for money because he’d become addicted to drugs as a result of the plastic surgery. It was all so twisted because by that time he was a pretty severe drug addict and was completely broke. He’d sold all the jewellery Liberace had given him. I don’t know how much it was worth but, anyway, he’d pawned it all for the drugs. But the second that Scott sold his story that was it. Lee just went into the foxhole, which was his default position when he was under attack – exactly the same when he’d won his lawsuit in England. He completely cut Scott out and then it was war. And with hindsight it’s really tragic.

Q: Do you also think that Scott saw Liberace as a father figure?

MD: Exactly, it was all tied in. Scott was a kid from a foster home and Lee said to him, ”I’m the family you’ve been looking for and I want to be all these things to you. I want to be your father, your lover, your brother, and your friend. I want to be everything.” And that was exactly what Scott had been looking for his entire life.

Q: Then he arrives amongst all this excess and wealth and coming from his background that would be over whelming, wouldn’t it? .

MD: Yes and, again, he talks about it in the book – the experience of walking into this world, which was like going to a different planet. And Lee was unbelievably generous and really wanted to share all that stuff and it was a really heady thing and for Scott, that would have been like going to the moon or something.

Q: Did you know Michael before making Behind The Candelabra?

MD: Well, Michael produced The Rainmaker, which was one of my big breaks. He wasn’t on set but he had to sign off on me taking that job. So he’d already played a huge part in my life from a distance. But then I got to know him on Ocean’s Twelve because Catherine was in the cast. So we were all in Europe together and Michael, of course, was travelling with us. And so every night the whole group of us – including Michael – would be on the roof of the hotel watching the sun go down. So I got to know him socially at that time. Then in 2007 – just after I’d found about the role and read the book – I bumped into him at the Deauville Festival. And I was like, “Hey, we’re gonna be lovers.”  And he said,  ‘Oh is that really happening? We’re really doing that?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, Steven’s serious. He just gave me the book.’ Then we’d see each other because we both live in New York a few blocks from each other. So we’d bump into each other.

Q: And what was it like when the pair of you first came out of make up as Scott and Lee?

MD: We just started laughing. I had my full Scott look on and Michael was also Liberace to the max. He was wearing one of those spectacular outfits with the cape. And he had all the make up on. He had a prosthetic nose and chin and a black wig and he’d dyed his own hair. Usually, he’s got beautiful grey hair which he dyed the most horrible fake black. His real hair went under the wig and when he came out with this whole look the pair of us just started laughing. And it was partly relief because we knew it was going to work.

Q: And what do you think of his performance?

MD: It was perfect and I’ve always said that when you’re acting opposite a great actor everything becomes easy and, because they’re so good that elevates you with them. What he was doing was so compelling and real and, no matter what the scene, all I had to do was show up and listen and I’d get lifted. So he made it easy for me. And then to have Steven on board was incredible too, because he really had his finger on what the whole piece should be and so his direction was very succinct and smart. Often his direction is just really easy and practical. He’ll say, ‘do this faster’ or ‘take another moment there before you say that’. Small things that could make a really big difference.

Q: The movie is interesting about celebrity. Was that a theme you discussed?

MD: Yes, I think that’s part of it. He created this fiefdom and it was just a completely sequestered world for that very reason. People’s insatiable need to know every detail of his life resulted in his life and his image being so managed in a way that you can’t do it today. But he and the people around him spent a lot of their energy trying to manage and create another persona that was publically acceptable.

Q: There is more tolerance now, but at the same time there’s a lot less privacy isn’t there?

MD: Yes, in those days managing the image required you putting an act on for a 15-minute photo call, now you’re on camera all the time and if you’re not then you put yourself on camera. It’s relentless now.

Q: You’re currently filming The Monuments Men with George Clooney. How’s it going?

MD: It’s great. Very interesting. George is very locked in and he’s cutting ‘in-camera’ as well and while he’s not uploading footage at the end of every day the way Steven did, he’s shooting the first half of the scene in one set up and you go, ‘OK, that’s the final take of that one.’ So you know exactly how the thing is being put together. And so there’s George and Steven and Clint (Eastwood) but very few other directors who cut ‘in camera’ that specifically and that rigidly. But it’s a huge advantage to you as an actor

Q: That’s quite a hall of fame that you’ve been able to work with…

MD: It’s nuts the directors I’ve been able to work with in my career – Martin Scorsese, Paul Greengrass, The Coen Brothers, Gus Van Sant and now both George and Steven too. I’ve got to that point where if I could just work with the people I’ve already worked with I’d be good with that. I’d be happy to keep working with that same group forever (laughs).

Q: And is this intended to be Steven’s last film for a while?

MD: Yes, but then he’s never taken any time off. In fact, I think it’s impossible for him to take time off. Literally, since Sex, Lies and Videotape, he’s been in one stage of production or another. And that’s 25 straight years. So I suspect that the retirement talk started because he honestly was fed up and he didn’t know what else he could do. But, also, I think he was just psychically exhausted and needs to do whatever everybody else does which is to take a few months off here and there. But he’s incapable of doing that. So he had to say he was stopping completely and he’ll take a year or two to recharge and then, hopefully, start again. It would be a shame because there are very few, if any people, who’ve arrived at the place creatively that he’s arrived at. In other words, every single project that he’s taken on for 25 straight years has been an aggressive attempt to learn more about directing and he’s learned more and worked more consistently and done a greater volume than anybody in that time. So his reservoir of knowledge is now vast and to not do anything with it ever again would be a real shame.

Q: What do you think Liberace would make of the movie?

MD:  I don’t know if anybody would be comfortable with a biopic of themselves unless it was just flat out hagiography. But, more than that, I think he’d probably be so much more comfortable living today than he was in his own era. And maybe he’d be happy to know that his influence really was far reaching and that in such a short time after his life, we’ve had iconic entertainers like Elton John who’s now been out of the closet for a very long time. Yes, I imagine he’d feel good seeing how far everything has moved in such a short time and that he was a part of that.

ends