Ben Affleck
Ben Affleck
Benjamin Geza Affleck-Boldt, better known as Ben Affleck, is an American actor and filmmaker. He began his career as a child actor, starring in the PBS educational series The Voyage of the Mimi. He later appeared in the coming-of-age comedy Dazed and Confusedand various Kevin Smith films including Chasing Amyand Dogma. Affleck gained fame when he and childhood friend Matt Damon won the Golden Globe and Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Good Will Hunting. He then starred in...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth15 August 1972
CityBerkeley, CA
CountryUnited States of America
Also, getting the chance to play a supporting part meant that I didn't have to do as much as the protagonist, such as running around telling the story. [As the protagonist] you push the story whereas, paradoxically, as a character part, you have a chance to explore some of the nuance and some of the more complicated aspects of a character.
I like acting for myself as a director. I act and I know that I'll have a chance to have some say in what gets used and that I'll be able to give myself enough takes and be on the same page as myself about how the scene should play.
I lived with this tremendous fear of failure because my father was a playwright and a director, and I think he did a couple of things as a child as an actor as well, and he... he failed, basically.
One of the differences between now and then is that the idea of body image is a much bigger issue now. Back then, just being kind of heavy and barrel-chested passed for heroic. Now, you wouldn't dare to play a hero without a lot of dieting and various specialised abdomen machines. But that was one of the things which was interesting about it and I did want to portray because there's good and bad.
In keeping with Miramax tradition, I was instructed to find the 'hottest young stars around' to cast in the movie. I got a list of two names: Michelle Monaghan and Casey Affleck. I was lucky enough to get them both.
I kinda see my current position like this: 'Here's your five minutes in the toy store, so you gotta do all the good movies you can before Chuck Woolery rings the bell.'
You can just start to feel really pregnant. Like you are the hugest person on the face of the planet,
On contract clauses: 'There's all this language where you can't jump out of a plane or ride motorcycles. You have to go home and just sit there.
The thing that kept bringing us back to Pete's movie is that it was a story about real people. It (also) had a very specific locale; Chicago is to this movie what Boston was to 'Good Will Hunting,' ... It was enormously heartfelt and, ultimately, nobody could deny being moved by his story.
Sometimes it's Britney Spears and sometimes it's Carrie Fisher. I can't tell if I've got a Lolita complex or an Oedipus complex.
One of the ways that I could contribute was to shill some memorabilia, and the other was to talk to you and try to get people to pay attention to this auction.
I am a first-time director given an opportunity to pursue an artistic ambition I would not likely have the chance to elsewhere. The budget is excruciatingly tight, I am regularly abused and I expect to be fired sometime before we shoot. It's nice to see that, at Miramax, continuity has been maintained.
I think we all like to see ourselves as good dads, but there's also that fear, 'Oh, I don't want to be like my father,' or, 'I hope my kid doesn't turn out like me.' You know, I have those feelings too. So the key is optimism.
I don't think the government should be involved in any way in people's bedrooms or lives. With so much hatred and unpleasantness in the world, why would you want to get in the way of people who love each other marrying each other?