The 1992 movie that convinced Matt Damon he could win an Oscar: “It just made it doable”
In 1992, Matt Damon was just about scraping by as an actor, and his prospects were anything but bright. While that might sound harsh, since he was only in his early 20s and barely had a filmography to speak of, he felt the same way.
Around that time, Damon abandoned his education, moved to Los Angeles, and bet his entire future on the following year’s Geronimo: An American Legend to launch his career. It didn’t, and he was back to square one and right up shit creek. With School Ties his only relatively high-profile or notable role beforehand, and a box office bomb his latest, the plan he’d concocted to elevate himself above the actors he was competing with at every audition hadn’t gone too well.
That inspired Damon and Ben Affleck to make their own luck. Together, they joined forces to write a screenplay that they would only sell to a studio if they played the two leading roles, but nobody was willing to bite. There were offers for Good Will Hunting, sure, but usually on the proviso that the duo would be replaced in the cast by a couple of bigger names.
Confidence and inspiration were in short supply, and running into those constant brick walls was growing tiring, but he’d already had his epiphany by then, so he never lost hope. The Bostonian best friends took a trip to a local cinema in 1992, caught a low-budget independent flick called Reservoir Dogs, and suddenly they could see the light at the end of the tunnel for the first time in a long time.
“I mean, this guy, Tarantino, worked in a fucking video store,” Damon accurately noted. “It just made it doable, and it was shortly after seeing Reservoir Dogs that we started writing.” That convinced him that not only could he and Affleck sell a script as unknowns, but all they needed was one established star to push Good Will Hunting over the top.
“We heard the story about how Lawrence Bender had given Harvey Keitel the script in his acting class, and his name got the movie made,” the star elaborated. “It was worth $500,000 or a million bucks or whatever they got, because of Harvey Keitel. We said, ‘Jesus, we need our Harvey Keitel.'”
With that, the Good Will Hunting script was altered to create a part specifically for a movie star to play. It didn’t matter who it was, but Damon and Affleck’s renewed inspiration made them realise that a key supporting role that would entice an A-lister could be to them what Keitel had been to Tarantino.
“We called it our Harvey Keitel part,” the Bourne veteran admitted. “We figured any great actor could step in and make it theirs. If it were Morgan Freeman, we’d make the guy from Roxbury, or if it’s a white guy, we were going to make him from South Boston. If it’s Meryl Streep, that’s a different kind of tension.”
That character was, of course, therapist and psychology professor Sean Maguire, played to Academy Award-winning effect by Robin Williams, written to Academy Award-winning effect by Damon and Affleck. They didn’t care who it was: all they wanted was a Reservoir Dogs-level investment from a known name to get their film made, and with the benefit of hindsight, it’s hard to imagine them doing any better.
