HOLLYWOOD
Why Matt Damon and Ben Affleck struggled writing ‘Good Will Hunting’
“Nobody cared what we were doing, no one was waiting for the script, we were unemployed, so we literally had nothing else to do.“
Matt Damon looks back at his writing process with Ben Affleck, for the acclaimed blockbuster Good Will Hunting.
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The two Hollywood stars gained recognition and were catapulted to fame after winning the Academy Award for Best Original screenplay, however Matt is now opening up about the struggles the pair had during the pre-production stage of the movie.
The 50-year-old actor, who was recently moved to tears during the premiere of his latest film, went on to admit that the writing process for Good Will Hunting was actually very “inefficient,” explaining that they first focused on creating too many scenes, and didn’t think about the structure of the storyline.
He also revealed that the writing process was very different, because “back in the day,” they didn’t have deadlines, and because “nobody cared what we were doing, no one was waiting for the script, we were unemployed, so we literally had nothing else to do.“
Matt says that they “didn‘t really understand structure,” so they ended up writing “thousands of pages” and had a lot of issues trying to piece them together, “into something that looked like a movie.”
Now after their incredible career in the film industry, the actor says they were able to learn a lot and he is very confident about his work, confessing he will “write a lot more in the future.”
