Matt Damon’s X-rated idea to check who was actually reading the ‘Good Will Hunting’ script
No one ever said making a movie would be easy, and as relatively unknown figures in the industry, when Matt Damon and Ben Affleck began working on Good Will Hunting, they were initially met with resistance.
But the pair were set on bringing the script to the big screen, no matter what. The project had evolved from a college assignment Damon had to write, with Affleck eventually helping him turn his ideas into a fully fleshed-out screenplay. Over the course of the 1990s, the pair cut their teeth in various movies, trying to find a way to get one step closer to their dream of turning their movie into something real.
Eventually, they got their script out there, and in 1994, they accepted $600,000 from Castle Rock Entertainment, but there was a long way to go before the movie would get the greenlight, with the production company hesitant to allow Affleck and Damon to either star in the movie or direct it. The duo wanted to be in control as much as possible, this being their baby, after all, and they weren’t going to allow Castle Rock to take charge and destroy their vision.
Affleck told Boston Magazine, “They told us that someone else would direct it, rewrite it, act in it, and that we’d be lucky to fucking get invited to a premiere. But instead of scaring us, it kind of emboldened us. Because then we really thought, ‘Fuck this. We’re gonna go out there and do it’.”
It was a trying time for both of them. “At that point, Castle Rock was having us do these rewrites, and we were going in circles,” Damon said. The most difficult part of all of this, however, was that it didn’t feel as though Castle Rock were even paying attention to these rewrites, so Affleck and Damon devised a way to catch the company out.
“We were so frustrated that Castle Rock wasn’t reading the script, so we felt like we had to develop this test,” Affleck revealed, “We started writing in screen direction like, ‘Sean talks to Will and unloads his conscience’. And then, ‘Will takes a moment and then gives Sean a soulful look and leans in and starts blowing him’.”
Putting in some questionable X-rated moments between Robin Williams’ Sean and Damon’s Will was one way to get their attention, and the test inevitably worked, because Castle Rock clearly wasn’t paying attention, as Affleck recalled of the meetings, “We would turn that in, and they wouldn’t ever mention all those scenes where Sean and Will were jerking each other off”.
In the end, more disagreements over hiring the right director and actors led to the now-disgraced Harvey Weinstein buying the project for $1million and hiring Gus Van Sant to direct. Of course, Damon and Affleck were cast in their film, allowing them to remain authentic to their initial vision.
The pair would then win ‘Best Original Screenplay’ at the Oscars, with Good Will Hunting becoming one of the most beloved movies of the 1990s.
