“The Adjustment Bureau” may look like one of those serious-minded conspiracy films — and in a way it is, considering main character David Norris (Matt Damon) is being hunted down by strange suit-and-fedora-clad men trying to alter his destiny. But when sitting down with Damon and co-star Emily Blunt, the mood was more casual rom-com than nail-biting thriller, even after they were soberly asked to recall a moment in their own lives when fate seemed to intervene.
“I think Emily’s chance to work with me must’ve been one of those moments,” Damon cracks without missing a beat.
Blunt sarcastically admits he’s right and goes on to explain that getting into her second-choice university was what effectively gave her the career she has today. Damon counters by adding that if he had chosen to star in Werner Herzog’s “Rescue Dawn” rather than the Farrelly brothers’ “Stuck On You,” he never would’ve met his wife.
“Well, mine was better,” Blunt quips at Damon. “You went for the romance, you manipulated them.”
It’s obvious that the co-stars have a camaraderie that easily translated to “Bureau,” in which their characters meet by chance and share an instant attraction. The mysterious, titular bureau claims that the two cannot be together for reasons they cannot explain. For Blunt, the bond between the suffering lovers had to be palpable for the success of the film.
“We had a lot of fun with our scenes just because we wanted to find the right kind of chemistry for the characters in order for you to want to see them together,” she explains.
“I think we have similar senses of humor and that helped,” Damon adds, going on to explain that viewers don’t have to expect the kind of thinking-too-hard ice-cream headache that another notably complicated film recently presented.
“What it really works as, is that the Adjustment Bureau is the obstacle to these people being together,” he says. “It’s never going to be ‘Inception’ — it’s never going to be that kind of intricate and complicated.”
