Matt Damon: So, what happened was the DVD was a huge part of our business, of our revenue stream, and technology has just made that obsolete.

And so, the movies that we used to make, you could afford to not make all of your money when it played in the theater, because you knew you had the DVD coming behind the release. And six months later, you’d get a whole other chunk. It would be like reopening the movie almost.

And when that went away, that changed the type of movies that we could make.

I did this movie, Behind the Candelabra, and I talked to a studio executive who explained it was a $25 million movie. I would have to put that much into print now. Advertising right to market it—we call P&A—so I’d have to put that in P&A. So now I’m in $50 million.

I have to split everything I get with the exhibitor, right? The people who own the movie theaters. So I would have to make $100 million before I got into profit.

And the idea of making $100 million on a story about, like, this love affair between these two people—yeah, I love everyone in the movie—that’s suddenly a massive gamble in a way that it wasn’t in the 1990s, when they were making all those kind of movies. The kind of movies that I loved, and the kind of movies that were my bread and butter.