Matt Damon in 'Bagger Vance' trained for a week,

[Director Bill Paxton] told me to watch 'The Legend of Bagger Vance,' ... I go watch it, and I come back and he goes, 'We are not making 'Bagger Vance.'

Jim knew the word about The Legend of Bagger Vance was that Matt Damon didn't really look like a golfer. He didn't want that to be the case here. He wanted to have it all down, even the mannerisms. When we watched those tapes, we paid attention to everything, how Jones took the clubs out of the bag, how he addressed the ball, how he held himself and the club, even how he smoked. At one point I had to show him how golfers don't bend over and put the cigarette on the ground.

And yeah, my handicap was down to a 10 when we were at the thick of it. I trained for six or seven months, golfing every day for six hours, seven days a week, with eight trainers. It was intense.

And if you're a golfer and you watch a golf film and Matt Damon swing, and it's not great, then you're not going to believe in the golf story, you're not going to believe in the rest of the film. That's the whole movie, so if that swing looks like crap, the movie's crap.

Talent is to actors what luck is to card players. It's not really anything; it's just a fictitious word that people have created and labeled things. Talent is like, you know, I never really believed in talent, I believed in drive and determination and preparation, but talent is sort of like luck.