AT: In the first section of the movie, Ollie and Gertrude Steiney, (Affleck and Lopez, respectively) fall in love, get married, and have a baby. In watching a rough cut with Mr. Smith in November of 2002, that section of the film was much longer than it is now. Some editing of JERSEY GIRL took place very late in the movie’s post-production process that either shortened or cut completely a lot of those scenes. How do you feel about the final cut of JERSEY GIRL?

BA: I think this is the best version of the movie. I think it was a mistake to fatten what was always, structurally, a prologue. The inciting incident in the movie is really the wife’s death. You have three full acts in the movie that happen after that. To have anything longer than a ten or twelve-minute prologue is awkward. There was pressure at one point to make [the death] the midpoint of the movie, because there was this idea like ‘Let’s jump on this bandwagon of The Ben And Jen Show!’ I also think [cutting those scenes] has allowed them to market the movie more honestly. Otherwise you’d have seen me and Jen on the poster, and I’m glad that didn’t happen because that’s bait-and-switch marketing anyway. And I don’t know if Kevin would admit this, but Kevin’s more willing to be ruthless with his own material now. It’s the first time that I’ve worked with him on a movie and haven’t sat there and said, ‘You still should have cut those four lines.’ It was not pulling teeth to get Kevin to take his own stuff out. He’s able to see it with a more mature eye. It’s really uncommon with writer-directors to be able to get them to part with [material]. Every time I’ve worked with a writer-director, I’ve always thought they’ve included things they shouldn’t have put in the movie.

AT: You’ve got some really intense emotional scenes in this movie. To be honest, you spend a lot more time crying in JERSEY GIRL then I would have ever imagined. There’s one scene in a hospital that I was struck by a real sense of honesty in your performance, a reaction to tragedy. I myself have stood in that emergency room, and I myself have gotten that kind of news, and I know that your reaction is exactly what happens. I know it’s difficult to talk about where you go as an actor when you’re preparing to do a scene like that, but can you shed a little light on your technique in that moment?

BA: It’s just being able to realistically imagine getting that news about somebody that you really care about. You have to make it real to yourself to make it work. It was a combination of a couple of things. I haven’t had to be in that particular situation, thank God and knock wood, but eventually most of us are. I’ve been around it and seen it. I had some memory of what it looked like from the outside. A moment like that, when you read the script, always stands out. You think about the fact that, ‘Okay, this is going to be a big deal. How am I going to do this?’ For me, I just put it in my subconscious and work on it over time. You get there on the day, and it’s scary because either it just happens, or it doesn’t. You can’t fake it. It was a brave and new thing for one of Kevin’s movies, too, so all of us were wary and respectful of it…When something is well-written, it’s easier to play than trying to imbue some asinine wooden scene with some resonance. With JERSEY GIRL, there are so many cues that the writer gives you as an actor to tell you where the character is. You can fall into it. It’s refreshing. Every day I felt like I was coming to work and contributing something, not being part of some giant story juggernaut that sort of rolls over everything with effects. The time was time taken, and the attention was spent, and there was patience that said, ‘We have to get this right.’ It was a great opportunity for me, and it’s the kind of thing I want to continue to do.

AT: You speak a monologue during the movie, standing over the crib of your daughter. That speech is rather epic in length. How long did it take you to shoot that?

BA: We took all day. That was another one of those highlighted scenes. Kevin sent me forty pages of the story, and like any first draft, half of that stuff’s not in the final draft. [The crib] monologue was there [in the end] word for word. I got to that in my reading, and that was the moment where I thought, ‘This movie’s going to work. You haven’t seen anything like this. It’s a really interesting idea, this guy talking to his own daughter who isn’t even able to understand, but he’s giving himself over to her.’ In a weird way, the conservatism of this movie is kind of radical to me. There’s the suggestion that we live in a society that is very professionally oriented, and that everyone takes for family for granted, that these goals that we have in our profession are not what we should be pursuing. Playing it kind of reminded me that, particularly being an actor with a bunch of stuff swirling around me, there’s a tendency to want to be able, at some time, to say, ‘Forget it. I give this up. I want to just have this simpler life that’s about something more intimate.’