Interview Magazine

These boys haven't arrived out of the blue. Damon, who first grabbed audiences' attention in Geronimo (1993) and then gave a fine performance in last year's Courage Under Fire, plays the embattled lawyer in Francis Ford Coppola's The Rainmaker. Emerging from jock roles in films like Dazed and Confused (1993), Ben Affleck was outstanding this year in both Chasing Amy and Going All the Way. With Good Will Hunting, they're finally going solo together.

 

Ingrid Sischy: I want to start at the beginning of your friendship. Did you both grow up in the same neighborhood? Ben Affleck: Yes. Two blocks away from each other in Cambridge, Massachussettes. Matt Damon: Cambridge is not that big of a town. It's like the People's Republic of Cambridge. BA: And what people of similar political persuasions tend to flock together. Most lefties in "Cambridge County" know each other. MD: And we were basically best friends since I was ten and he was eight. IS: How did you meet? MD: My mother is a professor of early childhood development, and she knew of Ben's mother -- who's a teacher of little kids -- and sought her out after we moved back to Cambridge. So I was pretty much forced into hanging out with Ben. BA: And Matt was a break-dancer at the time. IS: Can you remember Matt, what Ben was like in those days? MD: Absolutely. I remember exactly what he was like: gregarious, outgoing. It was no suprise that he grew up into the totally obnoxious guy he is now. Number one, he claims that I never struck him out in Little League. Which is total bullshit -- I was the best pitcher in the league. BA: That achievement in Little League grows exponentially with each passing year. IS: I see. BA: We are the warrior and the clown.     IS: Did you do theater in high school? MD: A lot. I knew since I was twelve that I was going to be an actor. I was originally going to be a basketball player. Tiny Archibald was my favorite player -- he's called Tiny because he's only six foot one. My father sat me down and said, "I'm the tallest Damon ever to evolve and I'm five eleven. But I'm never going to play in the NBA." I gave up basketball at that moment and took up acting. Whatever I did, I wanted to be the best at it. I remember the moment in The Natural when Robert Redford says, "I just want to walk down the street and have people say, 'There goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was.'" So I was talking to my mother one day -- this was when I was sixteen or seventeen -- and she goes, "Matt, why are you so obsessed with acting?" And I said, "Because someday I want to walk down the street and have people say, 'There goes Matt Damon, the best there ever was.'" And she said, "Did I raise you? That's just an egomaniacal pipe dream. How does it help other people?" Of course I hadn't given much thought to that. BA: In fact, in high school I can remember trying to convince Matt's mother that not everybody in Hollywood was a total liar and scum. I was saying that there are people in Hollywood who have a social conscience, too. I only repeat this years later now that I realize it was a total lie. (laughs) IS: When you've had relationships, have you always respected each other's choices? BA: There's respect, but I think you have a false relationship if you pretend all the time that everything's fine. I think you can only have a healthy friendship with somebody if you're willing to say, "Listen, man, you're not fucking picking up after yourself," or, "The person you're dating is obnoxious." I think that happens and you kinda accept it. MD: Ben and I lived together in probably ten different apartments with ten other people who we grew up with at different times, and the arguments are always the same. For example, I am a slob and I get yelled at for not cleaning up when the house is a mess. When Ben brings the hookers over, it's --- IS: Are you roommates now? MD: We were up until a few months ago. We had a place in New York, but we didn't live there because we were both off doing movies. Now Ben's living with his girlfriend in L.A. and I jut finished working on a film, so I'm going to stay with a friend of mine, Cole Hauser, who's one of the actors in Good Will Hunting. IS: Was Ben always the one with all the girls calling? BA: That was Matt, really. I was a total failure with girls; it was a catastrophe. It was the girls from the United Way that called me. (laughs) The real story is that I have a problem with the telephone and I don't return phone calls if I can't deal with something. It's not because I'm cool -- it's because I'm a loser and I'm afraid of dealing with something that's awkward and uncomfortable. MD: Which made one of our roommates mad. He would say, "Would you just call her back? That's all you have to do." And Ben would say, "Yeah, I know. I will, I will." And then the phone would ring again and he wouldn't take the call. BA: Matt's just better at being diplomatic about these things. IS: What's Good Will Hunting about? MD: First of all, let me preface this by saying we are the worst people in the world at doing pitches. We could make really good movies sound terrible, and this one's not very high concept to begin with. BA: The thrust of the movie is that it's about a kid from a working-class neighborhood in South Boston. MD: He's an orphan, a born genius, who's discovered working as a janitor at MIT, and it's about him being caught between all these different worlds: the world of his friends; the world of the therapist [played by Robin Williams] he comes in contact with; the world of this really amazing woman [Minnie Driver] he meets who challenges him; and then there's the lure of the world his genius introduces him to, which is represented by this math professor [Stellan Skarsgard]. So he has to face all these different forces that are at work. It's like a comedy and a drama and a coming-of-age story. IS: Would you say the film is about your friendship or that it's in any way autobiographical? MD: It has those elements, but it's totally fictional story. BA: Telling this story came naturally to us. It wasn't like we sat down and had a formula. It was much more like: Well, what would be fun to act? MD: We never fancied ourselves writers. And actually, it was more a source of embarrassment for us when we sold the script, because a lot of our friends really are writers and can write a lot better than we can, except maybe dialogue. Writing a script is different, though, because to me it's not really writing. It's acting, is what it is. We still don't call ourselves writers. We just kind of go, "Well, I guess that worked." IS: When you began the script, it was partly because you weren't getting the roles you wanted at the time? BA: Right. If no one else was going to give us the chance to do the kind of acting we thought we could do, we decided we'd just make that movie ourselves -- however we could do it, low-budget, whatever. The whole idea was to have a videotape on the shelf at the end of the day and be able to say, "We made this." MD: We wrote it right out of frustration. It was like, Why are we sitting here? Let's make our own movie. And if people coem to see it, they come; and if they don't, they don't. Either way it beats sitting here going crazy. When you have so much energy and so much passion and no outlet for it and nobody cares, it's just the worst feeling. And there are hundreds of thousands of people like that in L.A. right now. This whole "I'm too cool to care" thing you get among young actors in this country is so weak and stupid and played out, and it just brings everybody down. You shouldn't be too cool to care, for Christ's sake. You should be full of vim and vigor, and trying to do everything you can to make a change. IS: What happened next with the Good Will Hunting script? BA: We are living proof that fortune favors the fool more than once. We showed it to our agents and various people --- MD: And it literally turned into a four-day event. It started on a Monday, and by Thursday night there was an all-out bidding war for the script. © Copyright Interview Magazine.