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 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 Casey we talked about this film and “The Assassination of Jesse James” – another film that I loved which also featured Casey in the lead. While Casey has been in a lot of movies…I think this is the year he becomes a star.

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.

Before reading this interview --- be warned --- spoilers are discussed about half way in.

Question: So did you ever think that uttering the line (singing) “I thought I had a double burger” would lead 10 years later to all this?

Casey Affleck: Has it? [Laughter] That’s the thing. I was trying to figure out what exactly brought me here. Yeah… Nope. That was something that I made up in the moment. I don’t know where it came from or why but it was … I probably afterward felt like “Jesus, why was I singing the double burger song?”

Q: How was it being directed by your brother?

Casey Affleck: Has he said anything about me yet?

Q: We haven’t talked to him yet.

Casey Affleck: No. I don’t know. Should I slam him or should I…? [Laughter] It was real easy. It was great. It was easy mostly because it was…you know…we kind of just spoke the same language, very comfortable saying to one another “I think that’s a terrible idea” or saying like “That’s a great idea and what if…?” We could sort of both build on the other’s excitement or the way that we agreed. We also kind of had a shorthand where we could go like…you know…he’s trying to articulate something and I wouldn’t get it and he’d say, “It’s like the time that we went and saw Frank at the place and we showed up and he was asleep” and I’d be like, “Oh, right, okay. Now I get it.” And those kind of things are really helpful because there’s not a lot of time when you’re doing a movie. Very often it’s like you do a take and then you rush over and go “Now try it like this. You gotta do it a little bit faster and on the second line you gotta do it like this.” And if you can have some kind of master key that creates some common reference, some sort of reference, it’s really easy. So there were a lot of things that made it great, but more than anything, I have to say it was sort of not that special. It wasn’t something that changed our relationship. It wasn’t like a huge difference between the way that we relate to any other director. I would just say that he did it very well. He articulated what he wanted. He was also very inclusive, collaborative, patient, and he would listen to me. He would say, “I want to do it like this” and I would say, “I really want to try it this other way first.” “Fine. Do that.” It was always that attitude and that made me and the other actors and the cinematographer and everyone else I think feel like they were included in the process, that it was their ideas that were on the line as well. And that brings everyone together and makes everyone feel like they all want the movie to be good because it’s their stuff that’s out there.

Q: Is he sort of the proverbial big brother – kind of gives you unsolicited advice, looking out for you, kicking you around a bit?

Casey Affleck: He’s not, not really any of those things. He’s a lot better than that.

Q: Did you have lots of family and friends coming by to visit? It’s your home and everyone knew where you worked from The Boston Herald.

Casey Affleck: Yeah, they’re all coming by and standing around. There’d be like the camera and then there’s all the people in front of the camera and then there’s all the friends and other people that heard about it behind the camera and very often Ben would just say, “Let’s take everyone that’s in front of the camera and move them behind the camera and everyone that’s behind the camera move them in front of the camera” and in that way you’d kind of get like a real, a much more…both…you get to sort of employ your friends and neighbors but you also get a more authentic, like actual, literal neighborhood vibe.

Q: It felt so authentic. Would that just be spontaneous?

Casey Affleck: He did that a few times, yeah, for sure, and that’s great. That’s kind of what he wanted and I think that worked in the movie. I felt like the one thing above all is he captured a real sense of place. It’s not easy because there’s a way of doing things. You know like conventionally in movies you have to go through the casting director to get extra castings, to get the 100 people who are supposed to be sitting in the park, and what shows up are the 100 people in Boston that do that for a living that are actors. So you get all these kind of (strikes an actorly pose) actors who are sitting there on the benches and they don’t…and it’s exactly the thing you didn’t want. He has a good eye for that and I think that adds up being a real asset.

Q: How often do you actually get a chance to go back home?

Casey Affleck: Well pretty often, you know, holidays and stuff, just enough to go home in the summer for a month or so or a few weeks and hang out. I love it and my family likes it. I still have a lot of friends there and it feels great. L.A. is kind of like home to nobody, you know, city of many kind of a place so even though I live there, I never really feel like it’s my home but Boston definitely feels like a home.

Q: Being a father yourself and seeing what your character did at the end of the movie, do you agree with that?

Casey Affleck: I don’t know if I would have done that. I don’t think I would have done that but I definitely agree with it. I mean the problem is that it’s sort of required an enormous, I think, a considerable amount of wisdom in the moment to make the right choice. I don’t know if I would have had that and been able to kind of put my emotions aside and make what is really kind of in the bigger picture the right decision. I think it’s the right decision because two wrongs don’t really make, obviously as you’ve heard, don’t make a right. It’s something that you can’t just kidnap a kid from a bad home. It’s not the way it works, you know. That would be total anarchy and the truth is that most of these children sadly who are kidnapped are kidnapped by people who think they’re doing the right thing for the kid. They’ll say, “Well I’m taking him because I’m the better parent” or “I’m taking him because I’m crazy and I think that I can love them in the right way.” You know what I mean? Whatever it is, it’s very rare that you get that kind of bogey man off the street who just wants to do something horrible. It’s a parent’s worst nightmare, both cases, you know, but the truth is that most kids are taken by someone they know, a relative or someone who think they’re doing the best thing for the kid and that’s not the case. And the way we need to stop letting children down and protect them better in this country, because we are sort of letting them down and not protecting them, is to intervene before that happens. You know, get in there, Social Services needs to have more power, they need to be able to intervene, parents need to be protected less. So I think that he made the right decision. He also ends up following up and taking care of the kid.

Q: Do you think your character regrets the decision he made at the end?

Casey Affleck: Yeah, I think he’s definitely conflicted about what has happened. He shows up and the mother still sucks and no ones doing anything about it and it tears him up inside but he also says it’s not completely out of his control and he knows that and he’s going to stay and watch this kid. One hopes that the real life version of that character would then get involved in the kid’s life and makes sure she has a good life. But yeah, he’s not completely comfortable with the decision he makes for sure.

Q: Do you like this kind of moral ambiguity in the script?

Casey Affleck: I think that was always the strong suit, the ending, the kind of moral ambiguity at the end of the movie, and then that was sort of woven backwards throughout all the decisions of characters and moments in the movie. That to me was the movie. “A,” the question of what do you do? And “B,” how do you know what’s right?” That appeals to me for sure.

Q: “The Assassination of Jesse James” apparently had a lot of different versions or cuts before it finally came out. I wanted to know what you thought of the final version. Also, could you talk about some of the stuff that we might have not seen on screen?

Casey Affleck: My best stuff. [Laughs] No. There are a few versions, not as much as has been reported. Always when a movie takes a long time to come out people go, “The studio fighting, the director can’t agree, the stars are taking the movie away” or whatever it is. That wasn’t the case. It wasn’t as exciting or dramatic as that. Andrew is kind of a perfectionist and he just took a long time. I mean it’s absurd sometimes they offer you… You shoot a movie for 4 months, you prepare it for 4 years, sometimes the director’s a writer, a writer-director, and then they want you to edit it in 4 weeks and it doesn’t make any sense. The editing in a movie can be a million different things in post production. So it took a long time because it kind of had to. It was definitely Andrew’s vision throughout. It’s a kind of hand made movie by Andrew Dominik and every last little detail. It would be hubris to say, “Well I think 20 minutes here, we cut out this scene there, the movie would work better.” I wouldn’t want to say that before I sat down with the movie for 4 years like he did, you know, because it’s hard to say what makes a movie. Sometimes you go see a movie, you see two versions of it and you go, “A is better” and a week later you go, “What was I thinking? B is definitely better.” And then with 3 months distance, you then change your mind again and again. It takes a lot of time to really feel like you’ve found something that is the ‘quote unquote’ best version. The stuff that was taken out … It was a 165 page script. It mostly got wittled away here and there, you know, little trims. The scenes themselves stayed intact long, you know. He liked the scenes that played. They start in the beginning, a man walks up to another man, begins a conversation, the conversation ends. Instead of, as you see in some movies, they cut right into the middle of the conversation, to the point of the conversation that tells that point of the story. He just didn’t want to do that so he left the scenes as they were, as far as I can tell, and took out the scenes that he didn’t need without trimming the scenes themselves. You know what I’m saying? Some of the stuff that was taken out was always to me some of the really interesting stuff, you know, what happened to Robert Ford after people in the country turned against him, how he sort of had to go on living once he was despised by everyone. It was like the worst of both worlds. He kind of became super famous, more recognizable than the President of the United States, at 20 and then became despised. So everyone knew who he was and everyone hated him. It would have been different if everyone had hated him and no one knew what he looked like or knew where he was. He could have vanished but he couldn’t. He just couldn’t run away from it because everywhere he went, people would burn down his hotel or they’d hang a dead cat outside his door or they’d run him out of town and they’d try to kill him. He just had to carry on living and I thought that he did it with a lot of dignity. He never killed again, never became a violent person. He was always a kind of upstanding citizen. He kept opening businesses and just tried to live his life. I think that’s kind of admirable and sad and tragic.

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