The Instigators is an upcoming action heist comedy movie, which is set to premiere on Apple TV+ on 9 August 2024. Head on over here for our full review of the movie.

The synopsis reads:

Rory (Matt Damon) and Cobby (Casey Affleck) are reluctant partners: a desperate father and an ex-con thrown together to rob a corrupt politician’s ill-gained earnings. But when the heist goes wrong, the two find themselves engulfed in a whirlwind of chaos, pursued not only by police but also by backward bureaucrats and vengeful crime bosses. Completely out of their depth, they convince Rory’s therapist (Hong Chau) to join their riotous getaway through the city, where they must put aside their differences and work together to evade capture — or worse.

Directed by Doug Liman and written by Chuck MacLean and Affleck, “The Instigators” also stars Michael Stuhlbarg, Paul Walter Hauser, Ving Rhames, Alfred Molina and Toby Jones, with Jack Harlow and Ron Perlman.

We interviewed two of the main actors, Matt Damon (who plays Rory) and Casey Affleck (who plays Cobby). Casey Affleck is also the co-writer of the movie. This interview has been edited for clarity.

What made The Instigators the perfect movie for you both to work on together again?

Casey Affleck: Well, it’s fun to do something like this, it’s a buddy comedy.

Matt Damon: And we’re buddies.

Casey Affleck: Yeah, hanging out and having a good time. And also, Matt had such a good relationship with Doug Liman, who I didn’t know before this. That was kind of a perfect fit too. It’s nice when you’re having a good time when you’re trying to make a movie that is fun and that somehow comes across onscreen.

Did being buddies help in making the production of the movie easier?

Matt Damon: Of course, yeah. I think the other thing that really helps is we’ve been in each other’s lives for 43 years and very much like when I work with Ben (Affleck), there’s a staggering lack of diplomacy, creatively speaking, which actually saves a lot of time. And in our business, we’ve created a whole language around protecting people’s feelings and their egos, when they make a suggestion that maybe you don’t like. There’s a whole way to talk about kind of a long-winded way of saying, I don’t want to do that. With us, we just abandon all of that and it’s just, no, I’m not doing it.

What it means is that you just kind of get to the solution a lot quicker. If Casey tells me something that I’m doing isn’t working, even if I feel it is, there’s a level of trust, I know, where I know, I believe he sees things that I don’t see, I can see things that he doesn’t see. We support each other in that way and even when we did a play together in London over 20 years ago, that kind of intimate work day in and day out, where you’re really leaning on your scene partner, there’s just a level of trust that is really helpful.

So, there’s the buddy aspect of just enjoying being together and that hopefully comes across onscreen, irrespective of the dynamic between the characters, you can just feel that there’s a chemistry there. But in terms of working, it’s really helpful because that’s another thing Doug Liman does just naturally. He’s very blunt, I’ve seen it put actors off with Doug sometimes, because he doesn’t really have a filter. But it’s something I’ve always loved with him because we can just attack the problem in a very real way, without our egos being involved. And knowing for all of us, the real priority is this thing that we’re trying to make together and we all want it to be as good as it can be.

The Instigators can sometimes feel like a coming-of-age story for older or ‘aged’ people. What do you think of that?

Casey Affleck: Yeah, both of the characters have a problem. And there’s kind of an arrested development, I guess, in a way. So, that might feel like a coming-of-age story because they both sort of need to figure that part of their life out. Their personal life. So, that’s why it feels that way.

What distinguishes The Instigators from other heist movies?

Casey Affleck: I think heist movies usually have a bunch of clever twists and turns where the cool characters are executing the heist in ways that the audience didn’t expect. Sort of getting over the hurdles of whoever they’re trying to, you know, of the heist, in very smart ways and making it look good.

These guys (in The Instigators), that’s not what’s happening. They don’t have any great ideas and they’re not that cool in the way that they’re executing their heist. Something else is going on, which is that they, Matt’s character, is carrying a lot of guilt about his relationship to his son and wanting to pay down a debt. My character’s sort of lonely in life and can’t figure why he doesn’t have friends. Those are the objectives of the two characters, not that they need to steal a billion dollars from the bank.

In the writing of it, each scene is built more around those two motives than it is around your typical ‘we have to figure out a way to execute this part of the heist and how we can do it in a surprising and unique way’. We’ve done some of those movies, the Ocean’s movies, even though my character was never really involved in the cool executions of the heists but we’ve seen a lot of those movies.
I thought it’d be fun to see a movie where what would happen if two people who had never given too much thought about how to do something like this try to do it.

So, Chuck (Maclean) started and he had a great idea and he wrote a really great first draft and then everybody pitched in, really, in trying to make sure that the movie had some kind of emotional resonance in those two ways for each of those characters, and for Hong’s character as well.

What’s happening for her is that she works with a lot of veterans and that’s a tough job. She’s lost a lot of those people and it’s like being a teacher in a really, really, really tough school district or something. She feels like she’s let down people and she hasn’t been able to help everyone. So, when she thinks that Matt’s character might be in danger, she’s determined to make sure nothing bad happens to him. She really doesn’t want to lose him. So, she doesn’t care about the heist either. So, your three main characters don’t really care that much about robbing the mayor. So, yeah, that’s your answer.

Matt, you studied organized crime in Boston for this movie. What did you learn?

Matt Damon: Yeah, good question, we almost set it in the 90s when there was a more coherent organized crime structure. When we were researching it and looking at what things are like today, it didn’t really fit the template that we had.

But we abandoned that idea and just thought it would be more interesting to kind of look at, alright, first of all, it’s a heightened reality because it’s a comedy. So, what if we just cast this incredible group of actors and create these kind of more colourful characters and make it feel a little more like it is, it’s a very disorganized organized crime at this point.

The FBI in America really broke up organized crime pretty substantially in the 90s. By the end of the 90s, it was pretty much had been obliterated. So, what does it look like today? So, it’s two guys working in a bakery, who kind of pull off these small-time heists and they’re kind of a power centre, and how do people interact with them. So, it was more about almost building this kind of fun, kind of heightened comedic world around a reality that bears resemblance to where things are today.

Why did it take you decades to act as co-leads again?

Matt Damon: Yeah, we always write and we’re always working on stuff and talking to each other and trying to figure out ways to partner up on things. We counted yesterday, we’ve done nine movies together. Though, Christopher Nolan put us in two movies. The first time, he didn’t even put us on the same planet. And the second time, we don’t have even have any scenes together, though my character refers to Casey’s character. I feel like with Chris, we’re getting closer and closer to being eventually onscreen together.

It’s just like, with Gerry, which we did together 20 some odd years ago with Gus, that was more of a something we wanted to go do. It was very small, very personal, Gus took out a mortgage on his house to make that movie. We had a crew of 6 or 8 or 9 people, it was a very, very tiny group and we built that out of improvisation, and we all wrote it together.

But I think we just love doing this and to do this in all these different capacities. Obviously, the Ocean’s movies are much, much bigger and that’s a bigger canvas that we get to work on in those. But we like to make all kinds of different movies and we’ve never done a straight comedy together. And when Casey showed me the idea, I thought it was great and there was a lot there and we just got to work on it.

What is it like to work with Doug Liman again after The Bourne Identity 20 years ago?

Matt Damon: It’s great but I’m sorry that it took over 20 years. I’ve been looking for things to with Doug. I love him, we had such a good time working together. I love his process. First of all, I love the results that he gets. If you just look at his body of work, it’s really incredible and each movie is tonally different so different and tonally so specific and unique to him. That’s why when we started to talk about directors, he was the first person we thought of. Because this is a very different kind of heightened world, and we thought he would be just perfect. But his process is, I guess the way to describe it would be like creatively chaotic, which is really fun.

You go to work with the script, you’ve got kind of a battle plan when you go to work but usually you end up doing a lot of improvisation and a lot of people are putting forward ideas and suggestion and you really try to mine the scenes for everything that you can. It’s just a very fun way to go to work and really rewarding. At the end of every day, you feel like you’ve given every scene the chance to be the best version of itself.

The whole movie is set in Boston and I feel like it’s pretty much a part of the movie’s identity. What do you love most about Boston and did you plan to shoot the movie in Boston from the start?

Matt Damon: It was always set in Boston. I think for us, because we grew up here, there’s a real familiarity with the culture here, the sense of humour. There’s a way that we talk to each other here that is specific but there’s a universality in specificity. So, if you can get that, it feels like it’s relatable for a larger audience and it’s fun to come back and shoot. It’s such a familiar place for us and such as familiar kind of culture and brand of humour that it’s easy to fall into it. That’s one of the big reasons we wanted to come back and do it here.

Why was the political commentary included in The Instigators?

Casey Affleck: We’re not trying to put too fine a point on any political statement. That’s really just the fun of watching two guys who really don’t know what they’re doing take down ‘the man’.

Matt Damon: But it feels like just thematically those things are kind of in the zeitgeist, right. Political corruption, we all feel that. The movie is ultimately about these two guys, who are middle-aged guys, who feel like they don’t another option, which I think is something that’s probably very relatable in an increasingly-economically-disrupted world where people are losing jobs and worried about losing jobs and feeling that sense of insecurity. Again, it’s not to put a fine point on it, it’s a comedy, but those things are kind of in there, there are nods to those things because I think it’s a movie about today.

Casey Affleck: The fact that people see the movie and they immediately think, this must be about this person or that person, it tells you why the movie is fun to watch and why it should have been made. Because there’s so much of that out there, it’s relatable, and there are ‘good people’ to steal from.