- We’ve been sitting on this story since Friday, but you know how busy we’ve been. Anyway, you probably know by now that Ben & Matt’s press assault is continuing, this time, the guys are on the cover of Entertainment Weekly magazine with a nice story within. Click here to read the story and look at Dan Crank’s excellent scan captures from the mag.
They successfully turned a high-tech thriller into a tearjerker, and struck a box office heart of gold–but the real payoff may come on Oscar night
MATH PRODIGY WILL HUNTING, ON A JOB interview with NASA, is given a test code to crack. He quickly spots an evil scheme: NASA and the FBI have set him up with a real code, which, once solved, could cause mass destruction. Hunting recruits his best friends and understanding shrink to hatch a plan, beat the government, and save the day.
This is not, most certainly, the subtle, warm-the-cockles-of-your-heart Good Will Hunting that has propelled cowriters, actors, and childhood best friends Matt Damon and Ben Affleck onto Hollywood’s most-wanted list, into the hearts of American audiences, and toward the Oscar podium. And the tortuous path Affleck and Damon were forced to navigate in order to transform the movie from a high-tech conspiracy thriller to an intimate character study is one of the most dramatic stories of the Oscar season.
After five years of knocking, Damon, 27, and Affleck, 25, have been admitted to the Movie Hall of Fame so suddenly that it’s a little disconcerting. A few weeks ago, an 80-year-old woman walked past the Manhattan set of Miramax’s Rounders, in which Damon plays a card shark, and–upon learning who the star was–exclaimed in wonder, “Matt Damon, the sex symbol?!” And when Affleck–in L.A. to film the summer blockbuster-in-waiting Armageddon with Bruce Willis–went to the Disney cafeteria and signed for his lunch because he’d forgotten his wallet, he learned the next day on a television gossip show that he had, in fact, pitched a fit and demanded a free meal. “It worried me,” Affleck says. “I haven’t trashed a hotel room yet, but yesterday I leaned back in my chair at the Four Seasons and it kind of snapped. What will they think?”
What they’ll think is that Good Will Hunting’s odyssey is a classic Hollywood-in-the-’90s Cinderella story, the kind that ends with the prospect of Academy Awards and surprisingly good box office. Which isn’t far from the truth, if the evil stepmother becomes a studio, and Prince Charming is redrawn to look like (gulp) Harvey Weinstein.
Affleck–who refers to his partner and himself as “the Milli Vanilli of screenwriters”–and Damon began to work on Good Will Hunting in 1993, basing the story on a one-act play Damon had written at Harvard (he left before completing his studies). They drew from their own life growing up in Boston, where they were introduced by their mothers, both teachers, 17 years ago. “We’re pretty inseparable, in terms of our experiences,” Damon says. “We look at things in exactly the same way.” While they wrote, Damon says, “it wasn’t like someone was good at structure and someone at dialogue. The only difference between us is Ben can type.”
Neither, however, can edit. “We must have written 1,500 pages,” Damon says. “We had Will Goes to the Zoo episodes.” Within months, they settled on a script combining a friendship adventure with a “banana in the tailpipe” plot, as Affleck described the then-thrill-a-minute NASA caper. The characters of Will (Damon), a down-and-out boy genius, and his best friend Chuckie (Affleck), a construction worker, were already in place. But instead of the mentor/professor eventually played by Stellan SkarsgÃ¥rd, imagine a nefarious FBI agent attempting to corrupt Will, and instead of boy-meets-therapist bonding, picture a climax with world peace at stake.
That may have been a tall order for what Damon and Affleck envisioned as an independently financed $2 million project–and in November 1994, when Castle Rock won a bidding war for the script, director Rob Reiner, a partner in the studio, told them to drop the adventure angle and focus on the relationships. “It was a scary moment,” says coproducer Chris Moore. “We started [all over again] with 63 pages and made it a character story.”
“It was a very passionate debate,” says Affleck, “and we left a little deflated. But after listening to [Reiner], we had to concede.” The partners locked themselves in a room, where, says Affleck, “we went on to write scenes that were so absurd.” In one draft, Will’s therapist, Sean, became Will’s construction foreman; Will and Sean bonded when Will tagged along to Sean’s book club meeting. In another version, “Chuckie died, squashed by a steel beam,” Affleck says. “No idea seemed too bad to pursue. We would have done Boogie Nights if we’d thought of it: Sean is a pornographer!”
After a year of rewrites, Damon and Affleck settled on the script that would eventually become Good Will Hunting. But when they returned to Castle Rock in October 1995, they hit an impasse: The studio demanded that another of its partners, Andrew Scheinman (whose only directorial experience was the flop Little Big League), helm the film. “It was certainly a big issue,” admits Castle Rock partner Martin Shafer, “but there were a couple of other creative issues as well.” Shafer says Castle Rock generously gave Hunting back to the filmmakers, something “we didn’t have to do.”
Affleck says, however, that he and Damon were given 30 days to sell Hunting to another studio and reimburse Castle Rock’s development costs. (He charges that the studio “significantly bloated” the tab, which Shafer denies.) If they failed, the film would return to Castle Rock. “I was told [by Castle Rock reps] if we couldn’t get another offer for the script, we’d be lucky to get tickets to the premiere,” Affleck adds.
Whatever suspense they’d dropped from their script seemed to be coming back at them, because the studios that initially expressed enthusiasm for Hunting now passed. “It was twice as expensive as when it first went out,” says Affleck. “It had the curse of being in turnaround, and [we] now had a reputation for being difficult.” After going to meetings that Affleck felt were held “just so people could say no to us after we passed on them a year earlier,” Damon headed off to film Courage Under Fire, and Affleck to make Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy. With three days left before Castle Rock’s deadline, a despairing Affleck persuaded director Smith to take a look at the script. After reading it overnight–“He said it made him cry on the toilet,” Affleck remembers–Smith showed it to Miramax cochairman Harvey Weinstein, who immediately bought the project for nearly $1 million. “The reader at Miramax had passed,” says Damon. “I don’t think he works there anymore.”
By the time the more-talk, less-action Good Will was ready to roll last spring, Damon and Affleck had given Will a Harvard premed-student girlfriend named Skylar (based on Damon’s similarly named premed girlfriend at Harvard and played by Minnie Driver) and a gifted therapist (Robin Williams, whose agreement to play the part was crucial to Miramax’s greenlight). The signing of Williams also made it easier for the studio to okay Affleck and Damon’s directorial choice, Gus Van Sant, better known for edgy material like Drugstore Cowboy. Williams, for his part, had great confidence in the script–until his first meeting with Damon and Affleck. “I walked in and thought, ‘When are your fathers getting here?’ ”
DAMON AND AFFLECK NO LONGER WANT FOR WORK, but they’ve had little time to savor being, as Affleck says, “on top of the pyramid.” Damon has filmed three movies back-to-back (he went from Hunting to Steven Spielberg’s World War II epic Saving Private Ryan, due in June, to Rounders), and hasn’t “had any downtime to process what’s going on, and where I am.” Or to enjoy it: His sole treat to himself, he says sheepishly, was purchasing a $10 scarf during a stroll through Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. “It was a big purchase,” he says. “I mean it. I always bought a winter jacket for myself after each movie, but now people give me clothes, so it would be wasteful to buy myself one.”
These days, Damon and Affleck’s snazzier public images are largely thanks to the free designer tuxedos they received to pick up their Golden Globes for best screenplay, and the beautiful women on their arms. (Affleck is dating Gwyneth Paltrow, and in a too-cute-for-words twist, Damon–who recently parted company with Hunting costar Driver–has been seen with Paltrow’s close friend Winona Ryder.)
In March, he and Affleck begin filming Kevin Smith’s Dogma in Pittsburgh; then they’ll head to Europe, Damon to play a cultured killer in Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Affleck to costar with Paltrow in the romance Shakespeare in Love. Along the way, they say, they’ll cowrite (via fax) their next film, Halfway House, about a pair of Boston drug-abuse counselors; Castle Rock, which retained rights to their next effort, will produce. “It’s sort of a low-concept stepchild of Good Will Hunting,” Damon says. “We’ve got 150 pages, and about 5 are good.” In addition, they have a two-picture Miramax deal that includes writing and starring in a buddy comedy.
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