Matt Damon is on a role ahead of Elysium release Matt Damon likes to take the whole family on his travels. MATT Damon talks family, friends, poverty, sci-fi's relevance and what it means for a child to walk the red carpet, writes Neala Johnson. It's a day or two after the Boston bombings and Matt Damon, a Boston native, is finding it all a bit hard to comprehend. "It's completely f---ing crazy and horrible," he says, as he sits at a table, frappucino in hand. All in all, however, Damon is in good spirits. Only a couple of weeks earlier, he had renewed vows with his wife of eight years, Luciana Barroso, in the Caribbean. And just last night - perhaps a clue as to why he's clutching that caffeine - he'd danced the night away with Luciana, Channing Tatum and "a lot of tequila." He's here to spruik Elysium, a sci-fi action film that could be termed a departure for Damon had he not already played, among other things, a super-spy with amnesia, Liberace's gay lover, Liz Lemon's pilot boyfriend and the captain of the South African rugby team. As Elysium director Neill Blomkamp puts it, Damon is unafraid to "damage his brand." "I never thought of it that way," says Damon, sporting black-rimmed glasses and salt-and-pepper hair to rival that of his old mate, George Clooney. I remember talking to this Japanese golf pro once and he told me the thing about a golf swing is, at the top of your backswing you have to say 'What the f---!' - you have to just let it go. Because if you try to control it, you'll ruin it. I thought that was good advice for a career in the movie business. It's impossible to micromanage an image, it's impossible to control your career. So it was always just a matter of trying as many varied types of projects as I could. Which is how Damon came to find himself, head shaven, tattooed, bolted into an elaborate cyborg exoskeleton and "literally eating s---" in the world's second-largest rubbish dump, outside Mexico City. Blomkamp, director of 2009 sci-fi breakout District 9, transformed Damon into Max, an ex-con in a future where the rich elite live on a space station called Elysium and the poor are left in squalor on Earth. When Max is exposed to a lethal dose of radiation, his only cure lies on Elysium. "I was desperate to do it," says Damon, recalling his meeting with Blomkamp. He came with a hardback book with probably 80 pictures in it - Max in the suit and all that. He had another book of weapons systems ... it's stuff you'll see for only a second in the movie, but he literally built this entire world. The only other time I'd seen that was Jim Cameron on Avatar, and I couldn't do Avatar because of scheduling. Jim was like, 'Well the script is the script, but here - look at the world!' and you go, 'Oh, my God!' So, I wasn't gonna miss this one. While Damon has pretty much been able to pick and choose since the first Bourne film struck gold in 2002, he reckons it's only now, at 42, that he's struck Hollywood's "sweet spot." A lot of the stuff out there tends to be written for men around my age. So, hopefully, the roles will get better. He had hoped to direct his first film (Promised Land, which he wrote with John Krasinski) last year before scheduling got in the way. Family life has also changed the logistics of his job. He and Luciana oversee a brood of four girls, aged from 2½ to 14 My wife's great, she wants to facilitate - if a good job comes along, we'll take the family on an adventure . Our kids feel the best when we're all together - that's what home is to them. While he reckons his girls have been on enough movie sets to demystify the business ("They're like, 'He's a movie star?' Yes, Uncle George is a movie star, believe it or not ..."), his eldest, stepdaughter Alexia, developed a fascination for the red carpet when she was seven. She heard at school about the red carpet - could she walk on the red carpet? She didn't even know what that meant, but she wanted to walk on the red carpet," Damon says. Luci and I had a tough time with that one, 'cos Luci doesn't even do that and we obviously don't want that for our kids. But when Alexia teamed up with Don Cheadle's girls, who had also been agitating for a red carpet moment, at the Cannes premiere of Ocean's Thirteen in 2007, her parents relented. "We all drove together to the big event," says Damon. They let all the Ocean's gang out of the car, so it's George and Brad and Julia and Al Pacino ... an unbelievable group of people. So this clump of people walks down the red carpet and every camera in Cannes is focused on this clump. Then our girls get let loose on the red carpet and they're walking down and waving, nobody's looking at them - they don't know! They see flashbulbs, they're having a fantastic time. Angelina (Jolie) gets out next and she's in this yellow dress, she looks like a vision, and every single camera that's on the clump of us goes right past the girls to Angelina. "So our girls all made it down the Cannes red carpet and not one picture was taken of them," he laughs. Alexia never cared, she was like, 'Yeah, I did the red carpet, it's not that cool'. And she's never done it again. Damon's childhood, though very different to his daughters', was equally well-travelled. My mother took me travelling when I was young. That was my first experience in the third world," he says. It was rugged travel - by bus around Guatemala in the '80s, all over Mexico, living with a family and going to language school. Those experiences were really eye opening for an American kid, so I hope I can do that with my kids ... when they're ready. Damon has also travelled to areas of extreme poverty with his foundation water.org, so was not shocked by the themes explored in Elysium or what he saw in that Mexico City tip. Any great sci-fi movie is relatable to the world we live in now. The disparity between the most rich and the most poor on planet Earth is as stark as some people living in a space station and some people living down here on a third-world planet. A joke comes to mind that Blomkamp told Damon earlier in the day: "He goes, 'There's no message to Elysium. I mean, don't be poor!'," Damon laughs. SEE: Elysium - opens August 15 Matt Damon will walk the red carpet with co-star Sharlto Copley at the Australian premiere of Elysium on Monday, August 12 from 6pm at Event George St, Sydney. Matt Damon was a very proud best mate when watching Ben Affleck win the Best Picture Oscar for Argo earlier this year. Damon says he always knew the Affleck redemption would happen. About six or seven years ago - it was after Gigli, after all that stuff - Ben had a movie coming out and it wasn't good. He and our agent, Patrick, went to a screening of it at DreamWorks and (afterwards) they were sitting on a bench and Patrick said, 'Don't read any of the press that comes along with this movie - the reviews are gonna stink, the movie stinks. But we're at the very bottom of the mountain now and we're walking back up, starting today.' Ben reminded him of that story the night he won Best Picture. But Ben really took some really tough shots. It was frustrating as a friend to see him mischaracterised so often and so blithely by so many people. I grew up with him, I knew how talented he was and the public perception of him was so different from who he really was that it seemed like such an injustice to me. Yet he was always pretty calm about it. I imagine on some level he knew that where he was then wasn't always where he was going to be. They were so young. They took their mothers. "We're just two young guys fortunate enough to be involved with a lot of young people ..." So began a very endearing acceptance speech, with a nod to Cuba Gooding Jr. The team, including director Gus Van Sant, reunited in Kevin Smith's Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back to take the mickey out of the movie business with this faux-sequel. "Think about the pay cheque," Damon tells a blond-tipped Affleck. At the peak of J-Lo madness, Damon dropped by (with Jason Lee) to heap ridicule upon Affleck (well, his character) in Kevin Smith's much-derided drama. After Sarah Silverman's catchy little ditty I'm F---ing Matt Damon went viral, her then boyfriend, chat-show host Jimmy Kimmel, responded in kind with I'm F---ing Ben Affleck. Both actors gleefully participated in their respective videos (Affleck winning bonus points for donning short-shorts and a sparkly, skin-tight top). Find the clips on YouTube.