Ben Affleck Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters

And they yelled at us, and they called us

by our character names, and like

the guys were really scary.

And it was exhausting physically.

And to this day, it's the hardest thing

I've ever done.

[upbeat music]

School Ties.

[upbeat music]

I was playing like this anti-semitic bully,

and it seemed like those were the roles

I was kinda getting cast as,

was like bad guys all the time.

It's so hard to find decent help these days.

[laughing]

Can't you move any faster, please?

[laughing]

If you care to step outside,

I'll show you how fast I can move.

[yelling]

Come on!

Obviously I knew Matt, and that was fun.

And I got to know Anthony Rapp and Chris O'Donnell

and Randall Batinkoff and Brendan Fraser

and those guys really well.

And it was definitely like a sort of thrilling moment

because it was the first real movie,

like I knew it was actually gonna come out,

you know that I was gonna be in.

It was a little frustrating to have such a small role

and for it to be so relentlessly unpleasant,

but you take what you can get, I guess.

Dazed and Confused.

[upbeat music]

And you, get the hell off my property.

I'm sorry, ma'am, I was just

escorting your fine young son home from school.

There were some ruffians about.

Oh and Mitch, Carl,

we'll be seeing other again.

[Interviewer] What were you channeling

for the O'Bannion character?

I remember reading at one time that you

wrote Fah-Q on the paddle yourself.

Oh, I don't know if that was me

or if that was Rick's idea.

I can't remember, but Rick encouraged everyone

to like write their own stuff, to you know,

try their own scenes, which is kind of amazing to me

that he gave us all that much freedom.

It was a little bit disappointing to be

like the only unlikable character in a movie

full of incredibly likable people,

but it was kind of a lot like what it looked like, you know.

Sort of like a bunch of young people having fun,

mostly workin' nights,

sort of running around.

I feel like we were sort of making it up as we went along,

and as I look back, I'm amazed that Rick

was so comfortable with that,

given like how much you need to schedule movies

and plan them out and know where you're gonna shoot.

But he was really fluid,

and he created a great creative environment.

It was definitely the movie where I got the sense

that like, this is somethin', you know,

it kind of was de-mystified.

Like I could do this, you know what I mean?

Maybe we could make our own movie.

And he was very inspiring in that regard.

Chasing Amy.

[upbeat music]

Alyssa, there isn't another soul

on this [beep] planet who has ever made me

half the person I am when I'm with you.

And I would risk this friendship

for the chance to take it to the next plateau

because it is there between you and me.

You can't deny that.

That was the first time that I was like

got to play a full sort of developed leading role

and also got to play kind of a range of emotions

and express myself emotionally

and had this speech about being in love with her.

And it was really an interesting experience

because we had so little time

that we had to kind of rehearse like a play.

So we rehearsed the whole thing all the way through

a bunch of times,

so we just knew the thing back to front.

And when we shot, it went by really fast,

you know what I mean?

And we shot on 16 and I don't even remember,

20 days or something like that.

And I guess I kinda thought maybe there would

be that much rehearsal on most movies.

You know, I didn't realize

that was a totally unique experience.

I slept on Kevin's couch.

We all soft of bunked together,

and you know we all wore our own clothes.

And it was definitely that sort of Indie era feel, you know.

And he had made Clerks, so he was already kind of famous

in the Indie world, you know.

And Rick had already made Slacker when I worked with him,

so both those guys I kinda looked up to and admired

as sort of DIY filmmaker models.

What did you say?

[spits]

You're chasing Amy.

What do you look so shocked for, man?

Fat bastard does this all the time.

He thinks just because you don't say anything,

it'll have some huge impact

when he does open his fucking mouth.

Jesus Christ, why don't you shut up.

Kevin was a big inspiration to me

both like because he was able to do all this stuff

and he also was very specific about his writing.

He was very text oriented.

You know, it was not, like he was opposite of Rick

in a sense of like there was no improv,

no changing anything.

He wanted the writing to be exactly

as he kind of laid it out.

And not only that, but in some cases he had like

the inflection in mind that he wanted you to use.

And I didn't know any better.

I didn't know you weren't supposed to give actors

line readings, so I was just like,

Okay, I'll say it like that.

We ended up just becoming friends.

And I think I did end up doing like six movies with him

or something like that.

And you know, he's my friend today,

and I really love him.

And he really wore his heart on his sleeve,

you know what I mean?

He was caring and thoughtful and empathetic.

And it was really like a, made a big impression on me,

that this was a guy who was making films

when I thought you had to be much older

and much more experienced and much more I don't know what.

You know, have more gray hair or something.

I thought, well you know, if Kevin can do it.

Again, that was right around the time

when we were working on,

start trying to get Good Will Hunting made.

And he was a big inspiration, and he helped us with that.

So that was a big part of that.

Good Will Hunting.

[upbeat music]

Most of the writing for Good Will Hunting

was done improv style.

We knew we wanted to do this sort of

Reservoir Dogs, Slacker, Clerks version of a movie.

And the way you did that was to do it inexpensively.

So we deliberately wrote a movie

that was mostly people talking in rooms.

And we wrote a part for, you know,

what we knew would be the person

that would get the movie financed

because we knew that wasn't us.

And so we tried to write some monologues

that would appeal to somebody famous.

We didn't even know anybody famous at the time,

so it was all sort of guesswork.

And mostly it was done because we had nothing else to do.

You know, we lived together.

We were goin' on auditions.

And a lot of days would go by and we just were hangin' out.

So we would talk about it,

and you know, it evolved quite a bit

and changed quite a bit.

But some of it is like still those early improvs

that we did and we would tape record

and then re go over the tape and pick out the good parts.

So, when are ya done with those meetings?

I think the week after I'm 21.

Yeah, they gonna hook you up with a job or what?

Yeah, fuckin' sit in a room and do long division

for the next 50 years.

Probably make some nice bank though.

It was odd that we even thought that we could do this,

you know what I mean?

That it was something that was possible

or that would ever happen.

I think we were young enough to be just sort of

and inexperienced enough to just sort of think,

Maybe it'll work.

You know, instead of realizing how stacked against us

the odds were.

It was definitely like, you know, some of those early

Indie movie experiences that made me feel like

maybe with the right luck, this could happen.

And it did, mostly due to our agent, Patrick Whitesell,

who kind of made people believe in it

and got people the script.

That was the biggest hurdle that movie had to get over,

was kind of, you know, to get in the hands

of somebody who actually could make a movie.

And he was a young agent at the time,

he's still our agent, and kind of made his bones

on selling Good Will Hunting.

I guess we all sort of did.

Gus definitely lent a maturity to the movie.

It was a little bit adolescent,

a little big naive, you know,

in it's original sort of form.

And because Gus was much older than us

and much more mature and more sophisticated

and kind of had a better sense

of when we were pushing too far, you know,

for sentiment or reaching for something.

He definitely has made those real.

You don't know about real loss

because it only occurs when you love something

more than you love yourself.

I doubt you've ever dared to love anybody that much.

Robin was just like the biggest star in the world.

You know, we just couldn't believe that

we were working with Robin Williams.

It was like the fact that he was doing it,

the fact that we would get to hang out with him

and like ride in the van with him

and listen to him like tell jokes.

We went up and watched him do stand-up once.

It was like, you know, the beginning of a very sort of

dream-like fantasy sequence or something,

where I was doing all these things.

All these things were happening in my life

that I thought I wanted to do,

but never actually really believed

would quite come true, you know.

And yet, there we were with Robin Williams.

And I think he was just coming off like

this great run of movies, you know,

Awakenings and Good Morning, Vietnam,

and he was like such a big star.

And I hadn't even been around somebody

who was famous before.

And we would walk down the street and like

people in Boston would be like, Mork from Ork.

And I was like, Wow, all those movies

and that's what you remember, Mork from Ork.

It was a fantasy, I mean he only worked for three weeks,

and it was like I remember every single day,

every bit of daily, every bit of dialogue.

It was literally a dream come true.

Armageddon.

[upbeat music]

Doing Armageddon was so alien to me,

you know what I mean?

It was like I had done Chasing Amy so recently,

and we did that for $250,000.

And I remember thinking like,

we could make 400 Chasing Amy's

for what we're making this movie for.

[Man] Those 14 brave souls traveling into the heaven.

That man's no salesman, that's your daddy.

It was a really good experience because it was with

all these actors I really respected,

like Billy Bob Thornton and Steve Buscemi and Owen Wilson.

And there were all these cool people that were doing it.

Liv, who was so great.

And Bruce was such a like iconic figure

and such a nice guy.

And he was so generous and kind and fun,

and he was kinda the leader of the gang, you know.

And Micheal had a totally different attitude

about filmmaking from anyone I had ever met before.

It was so visual, and he obviously has

a very distinctive iconic kind of style

that is like a Micheal Bay movie that you can recognize.

[explosions and screaming]

Whoa!

I learned a ton about what filmmaking was like

on a big scale, and you know,

it was a 120 days or something.

And you know, I had just never seen anything that massive.

Plus we had cooperation from NASA,

and there we were on the space shuttle.

It was like, it was an incredible experience.

[dramatic music]

I really learned a lot about the sort of professionalism,

and you know from the crew was really excellent.

They were really talented.

It was a lot of fun.

I wasn't expecting that we were making an art movie,

I mean I knew enough to know,

this isn't really an Oscar-type movie.

This is a, you know, a fun movie,

where like for some reason it's easier

to send, like to teach oil drillers to be astronauts

than it would be to teach astronauts

to drill a hole in the ground.

I have some great memories from that movie.

It was a lot of fun.

Pearl Harbor.

[upbeat music]

The prep for the movie was

some of the most intensely interesting and powerful stuff

I ever did.

After two years of training,

you believe that a $45,000 airplane

is there for your amusement?

I was doin' it to try to inspire the men, sir,

in the way that you've inspired me.

I believe the French even have a word for that,

when the men get together to honor their leaders,

they call it an homage, sir.

A what?

An homage, sir.

That's bullshit, McCawley.

I took flying lessons.

So I basically learned how to fly,

and that was really interesting and fun.

You know flying like a little McCarley aerobatic airplane

out of Santa Monica Airport.

And I had been kind of afraid to fly up to that point,

and it really helped my fear of flying

to realize the sort of physics behind flight

and how it worked.

Bombers, dead ahead.

Let's drop in on 'em and give 'em a reception.

[airplane engines]

I don't know how they got permission to do this,

but they put us in a boot camp in the actual U.S. Army.

So we did this, I think it was Fort Lightning

was the name of it, and it was pre-Ranger Training Course

that basically you did before you went to Ranger School

to sort of prepare you for the rigors of that.

And they somehow got us all in it.

And it was horrible.

It was an incredibly agonizing,

painful, miserable experience,

and I would have definitely quit like the first day

if I had just wouldn't have been too embarrassed

like to have it get out that I quit the training.

You know, and they yelled at us and they called us

by our character names and like the guys were really scary.

And it was exhausting physically,

and to this day, it's the hardest thing I've ever done.

It was really personally satisfying to get through it

and to like, after it was over, have the drill sergeants

like treat me like a normal human being

and to sleep in a nice bed.

Like I just appreciated everything so much more.

It's hard to think about that movie

without like thinkin' about how like slammed we got for it.

You know what I mean?

Because I really thought we were gonna do something

kind of different, and it ended up sort of

being Armageddon in World War II.

But it wasn't as bad as it was like made out to be.

And it also wasn't a bomb.

People always say, Oh, Pearl Harbor bombed.

We did half a billion dollars.

It turns out, that's the way it goes.

Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose,

sometimes you kind of win, but they say you lost.

The Town.

[upbeat music]

[Interviewer] Let's fast forward to 2010, The Town.

This is coming off of Gone Baby Gone,

which was the first movie that you directed,

but this is your first time, I believe, directing yourself.

What was that experience like?

I wasn't confident enough to direct myself

for the first movie, and I really wanted

to focus on directing.

And I really wanted people to see

how talented my brother was.

So there was definitely an added level of pressure

with The Town in the sense that

I was gonna be in it as well.

And I was really self-conscious about

how many takes I did on myself.

And one of the pieces of advice I got early on

from an actor director was like,

make sure you get enough coverage on yourself

because the tendency is to sort of like, you know,

do a bunch of takes with you,

do a bunch of takes with you,

do a bunch of takes with you,

and then just do like one quick take on yourself

and be like, Okay, we can move on.

And you just end up sort of screwing yourself.

So I remember like purposely saying ahead of time,

I'm gonna do extra takes on myself.

Don't think it's, you know,

it's because someone told me to do it.

It's not because I'm narcissistic.

And being on set, I was used to being on camera actually.

That wasn't the stressful part.

The stressful part was the directing,

and the directing of other actors,

and the directing of action, and the car chase,

and that was the stuff that I really had no experience with.

[car screeching]

[dramatic music]

[police sirens]

You know, I often times felt like I was, you know,

doin' on the fly and making it up as we went along,

and that was what I was really scared,

it wasn't gonna work,

that I would be revealed as a bad director

because, you know, the car chase wasn't tense enough

or the shootouts weren't realistic feeling or whatever.

Here we go.

[dramatic music]

Heat loomed large over that movie, you know,

it was such an iconic movie about bank robbery,

and you know, it had such great acting in it.

And it felt like I definitely did tip the hat to the movie

because we had a clip of the movie in the movie,

but I definitely remember being intimidated by the fact

that Heat had been so good and thinking that

we would be compared to that and being really nervous

about the technical aspects of that movie.

The truth is that movie was really made

in the research of it.

Marty McGuire, Cummins Armored courier.

Five ten, 220, 52-years-old.

Picks up every Wednesday and Friday at exactly 8:12.

Makes $110 a day, carries a Sig Nine.

I spent a lot of time with guys at the FBI.

I went to a bunch of prisons and talked to a bunch of guys

who had robbed armed trucks

and got a lot of really interesting stories from that.

I spent a lot of time in Charlestown.

Really it was more of Charlestown of the late eighties,

then it reflected the reality of Charlestown at that time.

But there was a time when it was really, you know,

this sort of bank robbery capital of the world.

Argo.

[upbeat music]

Argo was written by a guy named Chris Terrio,

produced by Smokehouse, and made at Warner Brothers.

And it got submitted to me.

You know, I was like, because I had done The Town

with Warner Brothers and they said, you know,

mid-level sort of drama seemed to be where I kind of fit in.

And you know, they had this script.

And as soon as I read it, I just thought like,

this is, I have to make this movie.

Mary, who were the last three prime ministers of Canada?

Trudeau, Pearson, and Diefenbaker.

What's your father's name?

Howard.

[Tony] What's his occupation?

[Cora] Fisherman.

[Tony] Where were you born?

Halifax, Nova Scotia.

What's your date of birth?

February 21st, 1952.

Good, what's your job on the movie?

Producer.

[Tony] Associate Producer.

What was the last movie you produced?

High and Dry.

Who paid for that?

CFD.

[Tony] What's your middle name?

What's your middle name?

What's your middle name?

Leon.

Shoot him, he's an American spy.

It touched on all these different parts of my life

that I was interested in.

You know, obviously there's the Hollywood aspect,

but also the Middle Eastern studies major aspect

of my life.

And it was a part of the world that I thought

was really fascinating, and it was an event

that I knew a little bit about,

but didn't really know as much about.

And I had done some research with the CIA

around the Sum of All Fears,

and so I knew that it was a much more

sort of bureaucratic place than it was

like a sexed-up headpiece and rifle,

you know, like assassins den.

And I thought that was really interesting.

And I just thought Chris's script was so smart

and so unique and it had such great characters.

You know, I thought like this is something

where I could use a lot of the actors who I know out there

who are really good who aren't necessarily stars,

but who are just fabulous actors.

I mean it just seemed obvious to me that

it was a really brilliantly written movie,

and I could only screw it up.

You know what I mean?

And all I had to do, I remember thinking,

was just like deliver on each day,

each moment, like really approach it sort of

on a one day at a time basis because,

you know, otherwise it was a little scary.

You know, it was like these two competing tones.

You had a comedy, you had a thriller.

You had Hollywood and you had the Middle East,

things that didn't necessarily seem to go together.

So I was nervous that it wouldn't sort of all gel and work,

and I just definitely approached it

as just get this scene right.

Just get that moment right.

That was just a movie where I just got lucky

every step of the way.

Lucky to get the script, got the best actors,

ended up getting the locations we wanted.

We shot at the CIA, we shot at the State Department.

We had amazing technical people workin' on it

and an incredible cast and crew,

and it was just like, I know that I was the beneficiary

of a lot of talented people and a lot of good luck.

Batman Versus Superman.

[upbeat music]

Justice League.

I don't think I even realized how iconic the character was

until I took the job and like that was a big story.

And it happened at the time when Internet was expanding

into the movie business in a kind of a different way.

You know what I mean?

And like, the fan sites and the relationship with the fans

and the studios and the comic book creators and stuff

was changing and evolving.

Zack told me he basically wanted to do the tone

of The Dark Knight, you know, Frank Miller series,

where he's older and he's kinda broken down

and more vulnerable.

And I thought that was a really interesting

approach to Batman.

[sad music]

[dramatic music]

[bats screaming]

The spirit of that, as a guy who's vulnerable,

as a guy who aches when he gets up in the morning,

as a guy who like feels a lot of

psychological sort of torment,

I thought was a really interesting approach

to playing a hero.

And that was how, what we wanted to do,

and you know, I really, I had a better time

on Batman versus Superman,

which I really enjoyed doing.

Justice League was unfortunately like, you know,

touched by you know some personal tragedy,

a death in Zack's family, and it just,

like I say, sometimes things sort of work and gel

and sometimes it just, you know, you seem to be

just having one problem after another, you know.

I really loved Batman Versus Superman,

and Chris wrote on it,

and I really love Zac, and I loved puttin' on the costume,

and the idea of doing the digital alterations,

and the voice was really interesting to me.

And I had a good time, I loved Detroit.

It was a really fun city, a really cool place.

You know, my kids came out and visited me

and saw me in the bat suit.

And they let me borrow the suit for my son's birthday,

and so that was a lot of fun.

I sort of had my fill of that.

They said, Do you want to direct and star

in like a solo Batman movie?

I found that I had kind of at just some point

lost my enthusiasm or passion for it.

You know, I was like this should really be made

by somebody for whom it's their wildest dream come true.

And for me, it had become like something different,

and it was clear to me that it was time to move on.

But I do have some really fond memories,

particularly of Batman Versus Superman,

and how exciting that was and how energizing it was

and how much fun we had.

The Way Back.

[upbeat music]

The Way Back was a really interesting movie for me

because some of it was I could really identify with.

It was like, you know, I'm a recovering alcoholic.

This guy's an alcoholic, and I understood

a little bit of that and I kind of could understand

what he was going through.

And so it was like interesting to have such

an intimate relationship, on some level,

with an emotional issue the character had and also,

you know, the main source of pain

obviously in his life was the death of his son,

which I couldn't even imagine what that would be like.

So it was kind of on the one hand something

I was really comfortable with and on the other hand it was,

I had to totally sort of use my imagination

for what it would be like to feel that much pain

and to suffer that much and to kind of carry

that much resentment, you know, against sort of the world.

And also, you know, I had never been a coach before,

so I had to develop this relationship with the guys

playing the players, who are amazing, fantastic guys.

And that one just turned out to be a little bit like Argo.

Like I just felt like everything was sort of working well

and the cast was great.

You know, we got lucky with a bunch of stuff,

and I felt really emotionally connected

and in tune with where I needed to be character-wise.

It was really just fun every day.

I know that's a weird thing to say about a movie

that's got a lot of dark emotion in it,

but ultimately it was an inspirational movie.

You know, it's kind of a movie about overcoming adversity

and had a message of hope that really resonated with me.

And it really still does now,

and it's probably the performance I'm the most proud of.