The 2012 movie Ben Affleck knew needed to be made: “I have to make this”
The entire story of Ben Affleck feels like one of the greatest rises from adversity anyone has ever seen.
Nothing about him and Matt Damon implied that they were going to be two of the biggest movie stars in the world, but the idea of them working against the odds and coming out with one of the best movies of the 1990s, in Good Will Hunting, is one of the best examples of people creating their own luck. Affleck wanted to do everything that he could to become the actor that he wanted to be, but the hardest part of being a Hollywood actor is keeping that hunger for as long as you can.
And when you look at how Affleck’s career panned out, he wasn’t exactly making the best movies right off the bat. Damon was the one who was being looked at for more heightened dramas back in the day, but while the checks for movies like Armageddon and Daredevil might have been great, they’re not exactly bringing out the unironic Scorsese memes these days and being lauded as peak cinema.
Affleck knew that when making Armageddon, but he did have some more ideas for what he wanted to do. He didn’t want to become a caricature of what a Hollywood actor was supposed to be, and the next few years would see him trying out different ideas to see what worked. His role as Batman in the 2010s did have a lot of shakiness behind it, but his passion projects always came from high-stakes dramas rather than the grandiose superhero movies.
Not everything worked, and even if The Last Duel was a triumph in many regards, the fact that no one went to see it at the time didn’t bode well for that kind of story. So if Affleck wasn’t getting what he wanted out of his starring roles, he felt that he would have a lot more luck when working behind the camera.
It’s not the easiest thing in the world for someone to make the transition from actor to director, but The Town showed a lot of promise for him as a visionary behind the camera. He didn’t want to make the traditional kind of high-stakes crime movie, and when looking at the way everything was shot, all signs were pointing to him being the perfect person to work on a movie like Argo when he first got the script.
Most people would have needed to take proper protocols when working with Affleck, but he knew there was so much more to what was on the page than anyone realised, saying, “They had the script, and as soon as I read it, I thought, ‘I have to make this movie.’ It touched on all the parts of my life that I was interested in. Not just the Hollywood aspect, but the Middle Eastern studies was something that I was really fascinated by. It was an event I knew a little bit about but not too much.”
And when looking at the way that the whole movie was made, it looks immaculate. And for a director that’s still starring in the movie, Affleck is brilliant at putting the audience right in the middle of the action, even when doing something as simple as running over lines that American spies would need to say in order to maintain their profiles.
It wasn’t always one of the easiest movies to make, but that’s the point behind so many iconic films. None of them get made without a little bit of elbow grease, and Affleck was willing to put in as many hours as he needed to before he realised that he had something great on his hands by the time he was finished.
