When Matt Damon and Ben Affleck gained the Oscar for writing Good Will Looking, followers anticipated a follow-up. Each actors acquired delayed by blockbuster appearing careers, Affleck in Armageddon and Pearl Harbor, Damon in The Gifted Mr. Ripley and Bourne Identification. Solely in 2021 is a brand new movie they wrote collectively in manufacturing. So what took so lengthy?
Damon defined the wait to Marc Maron on his WTF podcast. Affleck and Damon co-wrote The Last Duel with Nicole Holofcener. The movie simply wrapped manufacturing and is due in theaters Oct. 15.
Ben Affleck and Matt Damon had been afraid to write down collectively after ‘Good Will Hunting’
Good Will Looking was the movie Affleck and Damon wrote collectively throughout their struggling actor days. As soon as it succeeded, they’d so many roles they didn’t have years to spend writing one other script.
“That was what was really funny,” Damon instructed Maron. “We hadn’t written for so long because the assumption was we didn’t have the time, because Good Will Hunting took us so long. We spent our adult lives making movies so we wrote really fast because we actually, just by osmosis over the last 25 or 30 years understand structure now.”
Trying again, Damon understood why Good Will Looking took novices so lengthy.
“With Good Will Hunting we wrote thousands of pages, what we understood were the characters,” Damon mentioned. “We’d go, ‘All right, what if there’s a scene where we take your character and my character and put them on a construction site?’ We could write that scene, we could write forever but we didn’t know that it would fit into a movie and cohere into some kind of narrative.”
‘The Last Duel’ collaboration got here up naturally
Damon was growing the guide by Eric Jager by way of his personal manufacturing firm. He merely instructed Affleck about it casually, however Affleck acquired hooked.
BEN AFFLECK, MATT DAMON
“We were looking for a writer and Ben came over for dinner,” Damon mentioned. “He was like, ‘Are you working on anything?’ I was like, ‘I’ve got this thing.’ I had come up with this idea with Drew Goddard who wrote The Martian. He and I in this series of e-mails, I feel like we fleshed out what the movie should be. I was explaining it to Ben, ‘We have to find a writer but here’s what I think it is and what would be really interesting. The idea of people looking at the same event and coming away with totally different ideas. Similar to Rashomon. Everyone’s got a different story, based on what you’re culturated to believe.’”
Ben Affleck and Matt Damon would possibly write collectively extra usually now
Now that The Last Duel assured them they’re environment friendly, skilled screenwriters, they may recreate the Good Will Looking magic extra usually.
“The process was actually really fun,” Damon mentioned. “We kind of left going, ‘Oh man, let’s do this again. We can actually do this and not consume our entire life.’”
Supply: WTF With Marc Maron podcast