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I think Ben had done Dazed and Confused and we’d both done School Ties, so we had these résumés that had some professional work on them. The only time it happened that I know of was when Sylvester Stallone did it in Rocky.ĭamon: Nobody knew us.
Director of good will hunting movie#
It’s almost an impossible thing to get a movie made that is written by two actors who want to star in it, when no one knows who they are.
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Whitesell: I read it over the weekend and I was blown away. Usually when you get a script from actors you don’t have high expectations.ĭamon: I didn’t realize the stereotype at the time was that every actor has a screenplay. Patrick Whitesell (agent): Matt had talked about the script he was writing with Ben. The script was completed in 1994, at which point Damon and Affleck approached their agent, who started shopping it around. Moore: They wrote a great script, and I read it and was like, “This is one of the best scripts I have ever read, and I would love to produce it.” The three of us agreed we would try to get it made. It was kind of hopelessly naive and probably really embarrassing in that respect. At the time we imagined the professor and the shrink would be Morgan Freeman and De Niro, so we’d do our imitations of Freeman and De Niro. We would improvise and drink like six or twelve beers or whatever and record it with a tape recorder. And it had a very Beverly Hills Cop, Midnight Run sensibility, where the kids from Boston were giving the NSA the slip all the time. So I said, “Sure, I’ll read the script.”ĭamon: It was the first thing we woke up thinking about and the last thing we thought about before going to bed.Īffleck: We came up with this idea of the brilliant kid and his townie friends, where he was special and the government wanted to get their mitts on him. They said they had this script they’d been working on. And I always liked Matt, because we’d met in Cambridge. Ĭhris Moore (producer): We had been working on Glory Daze-that’s how I met Ben. I brought my Act I of the Good Will Hunting script and gave it to him.īen Affleck: Matt said, “Look, will you help me write this? I’m not sure what it is or where to go.” So we started writing it sort of back and forth.ĭamon: The only scene that survived from that document-it survived verbatim, actually-is the first time that I meet Robin. I went out to Los Angeles and stayed with Ben. It was very authentic and real.ĭamon: I was gonna be getting out of school in two or three months when I got a part in the movie Geronimo: An Ameri can Legend. They can see whether you can capture the human voice and dialogue. So I handed the professor at the end of the semester a 40-some-odd-page document, and said, “Look, I might have failed your class, but it is the first act of something longer.”Īnthony Kubiak (Damon’s professor at Harvard): The thing that they always say when you submit a script to an agent is that they read the first page and they read the middle, and they can tell if they want to continue.
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There was this playwriting class and the culmination of it was to write a one-act play, and I just started writing a movie.
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Matt Damon: I was in my fifth year at Harvard, and I had a few electives left. that they connected with Chris Moore, a young Harvard alum who was just beginning to produce films. After high school, Damon went to Harvard, while Affleck moved to Los Angeles to attend Occidental College. How do you like them apples?ĭamon and Affleck grew up in Cambridge and attended Rindge & Latin School, where they took drama classes together. Still: How did we get here? To find out, we spoke with Damon, Affleck, Williams, Van Sant, and many of the movie’s cast and crew members. Next up, the pair is planning to reunite and return to Boston to film a movie based on the life of Whitey Bulger-Damon will play the gangster, and Affleck will direct. Affleck, meanwhile, recently directed and starred in Argo, his movie about the Iranian hostage crisis. This month, Damon and Good Will Hunting director Gus Van Sant will release their third movie together, Promised Land, which was cowritten by Damon. With its authentic, affectionate portrayal of the city and some of its rough-around-the-edges characters, the film-and its stars-won our hearts.Ī decade and a half later, Matt and Ben are bona fide stars, with more Oscars in their sights. Today, the movie is beloved from coast to coast, but nowhere more than right here in Boston.