“He was my first choice”: John Frankenheimer believes Ben Affleck is the second coming of James Stewart
Life is often cyclical, and so it proves in Hollywood too, where the young actors of yesterday often become the directors of the present, only to end up casting the stars of the future. One man who has seamlessly made the jump from in front of the camera to behind it is Ben Affleck, and he was once put in a movie by a former actor too.
In the late 1990s, Affleck was about as in-demand as it’s possible to be. 1997’s Good Will Hunting, the movie he wrote and starred in with Matt Damon, had put him in a stratosphere completely different to the Kevin Smith movies he’d previously been doing, and the asteroid blockbuster Armageddon the following year only cemented casting directors’ opinions that he was about to be the industry’s leading man of choice.
As the old millennium came to a close, a director called John Frankenheimer, who was known for making films like The French Connection II and Robert De Niro’s 1998 thriller Ronin, was putting together a cast for an action movie called Reindeer Games starring Charlize Theron about an ex-convict trying to rip off a casino. Affleck was a shoo-in for the main role, as Frankenheimer told The Harvard Crimson at the time, “He was my first choice. I wanted Everyman for this, I wanted the Everyman character. I wanted a young James Stewart”.
Stewart was indeed known as the quintessential Hollywood ‘everyman’, someone who people could relate to on a human level who would often find himself in unusually high-stakes situations, like in Hitchcock’s Vertigo or The Man Who Knew Too Much. Affleck had yet to bulk up into the future Marvel superhero, and so seemed to be the ideal choice.
Frankenheimer added, “I wanted somebody that men could relate to, that women could relate to… somebody who was intelligent, that you believe could think on his feet… I don’t like working with people that I don’t feel comfortable being around. And all of those things I feel with Ben.”
When Reindeer Games came out, it did not go down well. It lost tens of millions at the box office, and it proved to be Frankenheimer’s final movie, who died just two years after it was released. Affleck, however, was not affected by the movie bombing and was cast the following year as the lead in the war drama Pearl Harbor, a film that was roundly criticised but still pulled in four times its budget at cinemas.
Affleck would get his first stab at directing just five years later with Gone Baby Gone, the 2007 crime drama set in his native Boston in which he cast his brother Casey Affleck in the lead role, winning much acclaim for his debut work, and three years later he used another Boston movie, The Town, as a stepping stone to the highlight of his career at that point, directing 2012’s Argo.
A massive success, the espionage thriller based around the Iranian hostage crisis in 1981 earned seven Oscar nominations and won for ‘Best Picture’. Some of the scenes directed by Affleck in the movie, including the moment where diplomats tried to escape via Tehran airport, are some of the most tense and effective put on film in recent years.
