I’ll come out and say it… I didn’t think Ben could do it.

 

When I first heard that Ben Affleck was going to write and direct a big Hollywood movie and it would be based on a book by Dennis Lehane (“Mystic River”), I figured this could be a real bad career move and it might cause some irreparable harm. Instead, shockingly, Mr. Affleck has delivered a great film and one that might be remembered at the end of the year come award season. Yup, it’s that good.

 

The film stars Ben’s younger brother Casey (who’s having a fantastic year) and Michelle Monaghan as two private investigators in Boston that are hired by the family of a missing girl to augment the investigation by the Police. Playing some of the cops are Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman – two great actors who always deliver top performances.

 

Of course nothing in the investigation is simple, and every layer uncovered causing more questions.

 

So to help promote the film, Miramax recently held a press day here in Los Angeles and I got to speak with both Ben and his younger brother Casey. During the roundtable interview with Ben we covered a lot of ground, but the thing I took away from the interview was just how nervous he was about the film. Like he knows how important this is for his career. But as I said above, he absolutely hit a home run with his feature debut and I think you’ll all agree with me when you see it.

 

As always, you can either read the transcript below or download the audio as an MP3 by clicking here.

And if you missed the movie clips I posted from the film, you can watch them here.

“Gone Baby Gone” opens at theaters everywhere this Friday.

Question: Clint Eastwood said at the time of Mystic River that Lehane was a very textured crime writer which meant he posed some real challenges to him being adapted to the screen.  Did you encounter that?

Ben Affleck: Yes, and if he challenged Clint Eastwood, imagine how he challenged me (laughs). 

I’m talking about in adapting it as well.

Ben Affleck: Yes the adaptation was extremely challenging and I had the benefit of a gifted partner named Aaron Stockard who worked on it with me.  It was challenging for a number of reasons, chief among them was that simply on a basic kind of plot level, it was extremely complicated just trying to get all the, not to mention the nuances, but the basic fundamental plot twists seeding enough of the elements that you buy the reveals that happen at the end and understanding simply the basic factual elements of the story was really tough considering tough that you have how many pages that the book is and you have to distill that into an hour and 54 minute movie.  It is hard and then you don’t want to lose all the wonderful nuances, the texture, the dialog, the ambiance – I picked it really kind of foolishly first of all because I really liked it and because I also thought you know, I’m not that good at writing plot.  I don’t really want to write and original story.  I’ll find something that has a story architecture that I can fall back on set in a world I understand, and I can work on character and dialog which I feel more confident about.  It just turned out that I set myself up for the most difficult job possible. 

Well you did it well.

Ben Affleck: Thanks.

Did you have Casey in mind in particular when you were writing the story?

Ben Affleck: I actually was not.  The character in the book and the character in the original adaptation was older….say 35 or almost as old as 40.  It got to the point where the script was completed, started to go as far as looking for an actor.  I wasn’t still really happy how I was feeling about this whole story arc and couldn’t find an actor really and thought what if I make him younger and make him 29, 30 somewhere in there and that I thought gave him more to lose and somewhere to go and thought if you’re 40 and something bad happens to you, it’s scarring but it doesn’t really change you fundamentally.  But if he’s 10 years younger maybe it could sort of put a fork in the road of your life.  Then I thought, and, it lets me cast this great actor who knows Boston, who I can get, who I can afford (laughs) so…

You never thought of starring in this yourself?

Ben Affleck: Initially I wanted to.  When I first optioned it or went to the guy who had the rights with Aaron and said let us just try and adapt this.  I thought maybe I’d just adapt it, we’d go to director and I’d act in it.  That was the idea.  But then as I got more and more invested in it…first I didn’t think it worked as a screenplay and we just hadn’t done a very good job, and then I thought we did a mediocre job, and then we thought we had done an OK job and then I thought maybe I should direct it, and then I thought I can’t direct and act in it.  So it just sort of shifted because I was terrified of acting and directing…the thought was completely daunting.  The idea of directing, alone, was terrifying much less…I don’t know how in the world guys like Clint Eastwood manage to do Unforgiven or Dances with Wolves is every shot you’re in it and acting and it just seems incredibly difficult.

How did you know that Amy could do this accent so well? 

Ben Affleck: I was auditioning people; I was really concerned.  This part is pivotal.  The mother needs to be, she’s vial, yet I wanted to find somebody you could even…there are moments in the movie where you empathize with her.  You feel like this is a woman whose child has been taken and you feel for her and you recognize her humanity and yet, she should be also repugnant in some ways.  Then there are times when you recognize she is a victim in her own way of her own upbringing.  All this complexity in this character and I had read a ton of actors.  And she’s a drug addict and she’s skanky.  I had read all these actresses in Los Angeles but none of them could do the accent or they seemed too put together, not real people.  Most of the actors I was casting in small roles were non professional.  So I was getting very discouraged and very frayed.  And I was sitting there and they brought in this woman and she read the 1st scene and I thought, Oh, it was really good and it was of the shorter scenes and I said oh you’re from Boston.  And she said naw, I’m from Queens (hits himself in the forehead).  I couldn’t believe it.  It was the first time in my life that someone had truly, totally fooled me right to my face that I know of and I said Well, can you read the next scene?  And she read it and I said you’re hired, you’re hired.  I thought I had found this one thing in the movie I know will be good now and the producers kind of huddled and (whispering) you can’t just offer her a movie like this, you have to have a meeting, you have to talk.  So we had to have a fake meeting (laughs).  She came in and sooo…I’m offering you the movie and she’s like OK.

Is there anything that surprised you about Casey now that you were directing him?   Did you see him in a different light or was it business as usual? 

Ben Affleck: You know I have respect for him so it’s a weird thing to say I have more respect for him but you see someone in a different light seeing how talented he is…I was really struck by that and impressed by that.  He was brave.  And I got to see that he had a fearlessness that I really admired.  And I really was just so satisfied and kind of felt personally rewarded by the fact that I saw that he was…it got to a point halfway through where I was just like he was going to be really good in this movie.  It just makes me so happy.  I know on some level there are people who thought oh he’s just casting his brother.  And there were some people around and they were going to see the movie and they were going to see that he was wrong.

It’s interesting in the fact that he’s never had a leading role before but it’s interesting in the fact where a couple of us were at the Jesse James press conference, he was there and there was tons of press.  He didn’t want to say anything.  He’s obviously very proud of the performance but he doesn’t want to step into the shadows by the roles he’s taken.  Did you feel you were kind of pushing him into the role?

Ben Affleck: It was a new thing for him just in terms of that role.  He has played leads before like Lonesome Jim and Me and Jerry but those are more unconventional films.  This is a much more conventional movie so there were definitely ways in which he was in new territory even though he’s been acting for 15 years, I don’t know how long…a long time.  And there’s two distinct and separate arenas.  There’s the work that you do as an actor in the movie when they turn the camera on and they point it at you and you talk or don’t talk.  Then there is this arena here where you come in and talk to people and communicate with members of the press and talk, or don’t talk.  Yet those two obviously have some overlap and they have a relationship with one another.  And a lot of people make no distinction between those two yet they are totally separate.  So the evolution in his navigation of those two things, the one, the acting thing, he gets and he can do.  It’s a small adjustment.  The other is a bigger adjustment.  I’m confident that he’ll make that.  And he’s been around a lot of people who have done a lot of movies…it’s not his first time like being around like Wow, there’s a lot of cameras here.  But still it’s a bigger transition.  So if he’s being quiet at the Jesse James press junket, it’s probably because he’s just like taking it in and that’s maybe not a bad thing.

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