Down and Dirty Pictures by Peter Biskind

Author:Peter Biskind
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks

Nine

Ace and Gary

1997

• How a couple of kids from Boston named Matt Damon and Ben Affleck launched Good Will Hunting, while October beat Miramax to The Apostle and found Happiness.

“The mainstream sucks, and it always will, is the bottom line. Because they don’t understand how to make movies—they went to Wharton. They’re selling widgets. The thing I love about working for Harvey is that it’s like the old studio system. He tells you right to your face to go fuck yourself.”

—MATT DAMON

Good Will Hunting began in the early 1990s as a writing assignment Matt Damon turned in to his Harvard class in directing. Damon grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The family lived on the wrong side of the tracks, so to speak, in Central Square, worlds away culturally and economically from nearby Harvard. A wannabe actor struggling through one disappointing role after another, he shoehorned his career into his on-again off-again stint as a Harvard student. He finally did what many actors in extremis do—he wrote a role for himself, and enlisted Ben Affleck to help him do it.

Damon and Affleck were childhood friends. Two years younger than Damon, Affleck was born in 1972. His parents were ’60s people, antiwar activists. When he was growing up, they tried to take him to films they liked, mostly foreign. “They dragged me to movies where nobody spoke English,” he recalls. “They wouldn’t take me to movies that other kids were going to, that were fun. To me a real movie was, like, The Terminator. Or Star Wars. When I was five years old, I thought it was the greatest thing that had ever been done. It was the equivalent of The 400 Blows or The Bicycle Thief or whatever it was that made Scorsese fall in love with movies. I just thought, anything my mother likes, with her outdated view of the world, like Truffaut, or any of that boring shit, can’t be good.” Affleck’s father, Tim, himself a sometime actor, used to ask Ben and Matt, “Why the fuck do you guys want to be actors? It’s the stupidest fucking job in the world.” But they ignored his advice, as kids will, and hopped onto the Hollywood merry-go-round.

When Rick Linklater cast him in Dazed and Confused, Affleck had few credits, mostly TV movies and one Hollywood feature, School Ties. “My agent said it was by the guy who did Slacker. I saw Slacker at an art theater in Waterville, Maine, when I was eighteen. I thought, This is a strangely nonlinear movie, experimental. I should like it more than I do, but you have to understand that at that time, Lethal Weapon was my favorite movie. It was the bad guy part. I didn’t want to play the bad guy, but I figured I would do it anyway. Then Rick sent out the script with a note that said, ‘If this movie is realized as scripted, it will be a massive underachievement. I want to solicit contributions from everybody,’ and he was true to his word.

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