Dillon’s first great success was his role in Gus van Sant’s Drug Cowboy (1989). He played the leader of a group that breaks into pharmacies. Years later, the actor admitted that it was his favorite film.
1998 was an exceptionally successful year for Dillon. He then appeared in two famous films, including “Wild Things”, in which he co-starred Neve Campbell and Denise Richards.
The second film was the Farrelly brothers’ comedy “The Blonde Way”. Dillon played the role of a repulsive detective who is hired by a loser in life to find his high school love. He finds Mary (Cameron Diaz) and falls in love with her. He decides to win her heart and does not hesitate to use the most disgusting tricks. He stalks Mary, eavesdrops on her and lies to her. The detective is surprised to discover that he is not the one who is crazy about the girl. Everyone loves her and wants to be with her at all costs. Dillion admitted that working on this film was extremely difficult for him – he had never starred in a comedy before.
Dillon’s greatest achievement was his role in Paul Haggis’s “Fury” (2004). For his performance, he received nominations for an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA in the best supporting actor category. The first two were stolen from under his nose by George Clooney for “Syriana”, the last by Jake Gyllenhaal for his roles in “Brokeback Mountain”.
In 2018, Dillon starred in one of the most controversial films of recent years – “The House That Jack Built” by Lars von Trier. Virtually everyone, however, praised the role of Dillon, whose Jack was as ruthless as – the character suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder – funny.
One of Dillon’s latest projects is the 16-minute film “Interfears”, which shows the reflections of a man locked in a tube of an MRI machine. Director Jesper Just takes viewers, literally and figuratively, into the hero’s brain. Matt Dillon – an actor and the hero of this story – tries to play various emotions, which the audience observes on his face, but also on scans of his brain. You can hear the mechanical noise of the scanner or the atmospheric sounds of Gustav Mahler’s 5th Adagietto Symphony.
Just and Dillon met in 2022 during the opening of the actor’s paintings. Shortly thereafter, Jesper offered the star participation in his film project. As Matt Dillon admitted in an interview for “Artnet”, accepting this offer was not easy, because he had to overcome claustrophobia by spending many hours in the MRI scanner tube. The photos were taken in one of Paris hospitals. The actor stayed in the device for two days, with short breaks for meals and when the equipment was needed to examine patients on a daily basis.
“The doctors were extremely helpful and told me that I could always come out. That helped a lot. I was very happy to be able to serve Jesper’s vision. We thought a lot about how to do it, and in the end I even proposed some of the text that the character says,” Dillon confessed .
The actor also compared working on “Interfears” with his performance in the film “The House That Jack Built” by Lars von Trier. “In both projects, it was about maintaining emotional truth. After spending 10 days in a freezer for the film, it simply felt like a long time. In this case, I didn’t have to learn a dialect or study a long text, it was more about working on the emotional state. With “My experience shows that it is not alchemy. For me it is a matter, maybe not technical, but a kind of craft,” explained the actor.
Jesper Just was impressed by Matt’s determination to commit to the project. “The doctors were really amazed that despite his claustrophobia, he went into that scanner again and again. We did real MRI scans, so what viewers are seeing is Matt’s brain. Interestingly, the doctors said it was one of the top 20 brains they had ever seen “They wouldn’t be allowed to publish the material if they found that there was something wrong with the results,” said the artist.
Matt Dillon will soon be seen alongside Charlotte Gainsbourg in “An Ocean Apart”.
The film is set in the late 1940s. The story takes place simultaneously in Chicago and Paris. “An Ocean Apart” will show a fragment of the extraordinary romance that began between the French philosopher, feminist, life partner of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and the American writer Nelson Algren, known for his books describing the lives of people from the lowlands of society.
The actor will also be seen as Marlon Brando in the film “Being Maria”, about the tragic life and career of Maria Schneider. The production will show, among others, the behind-the-scenes of the scandalous film “Last Tango in Paris”, in which Brando and Schneider starred.
Matt Dillon has been a confirmed bachelor for years. Although he dated many beauties, including Cameron Diaz, Brooke Shields, Heather Graham and Denise Richards, he never married.