By Lisa Yi
(October 2007)
Reporter: How was it being a first-time director?
Ben Affleck: Very nerve-wracking; very, very intimidating; but very exciting. Ultimately, very thrilling. Reporter: Would you prefer it if there were less attention paid to you being a director?
Ben Affleck: I would prefer if it was less about...the rest of my life. I mean, I would like attention paid to directing and the movie. I think that's really interesting. I don't like the idea of all this other attendant stuff. One of the reasons I liked directing was because it's really just about filmmaking and not being out in front of it. Reporter: What was your experience from going from actor to writer to director in this film? Do you plan on doing it again?
Ben Affleck: I would definitely like to be a writer or a director as many times as I have the opportunity to be. Don't think I would act in something that I directed. Other people could probably do it, who have more bandwidth for it than I do. I think that would be very, very challenging for me. I don't think I would be able to concentrate on it well enough to do any of those things sufficiently well. I want to continue acting, certainly, if I had the opportunity or the right role. Lisa Yi: As you were making the movie and writing the script. Do you think your answers or opinions for the moral dilemma changed from when you first read the novel to the finishing point?
Ben Affleck: I think my opinions about the moral dilemmas sort of shifted a lot back and forth as I went through it. They went back and forth more times than just about having my daughter. Being a father made my opinions change from academic ones to emotional ones. In other words, they were kind of intellectual exercises. And then actually having a child allowed me to identify in an emotional way with children or with people who have children, whereas beforehand it was harder for me to do that. Reporter: How did you change professionally or as a person, having a family? How did it affect the work?
Ben Affleck: I think having a family just simply allowed me to mature a little bit and think a little bit long-term about my professional goals. Where I wanted to be twenty years from now, even thirty years from now, and what kind of a legacy or body of work I wanted to have, versus the "what do I want to do in the next three months?" Reporter: What are those goals you talked about? Where would you like to see yourself?
Ben Affleck: I would like to see, more than a destination, but in viewing the next year in the context of how will I see it thirty years from now, rather than what sort of instant gratification will it give me. It's, "How will this next job look in the long term?" Reporter: Could you talk about casting Casey? Since at the time he wasn't a proven leading man, was there trouble convincing the studio to go to bat for him?
Ben Affleck: You know, I anticipated that there would be, naturally, because he wasn't somebody who at the time had proven himself and had that track record where he had been the lead and the movie had made money and so on and so forth. It's that classic Catch 22 where you can't get the job unless you've proven it, and you can't prove it unless you get the job. But I had a kind of patron at Disney who really believed in me, this guy Ed Cook, who had bought the script and said, "You know, I believe in you as a director." I have no idea why. Talk about not having a proven track record. Obviously, I figured that people would think this is just nepotism, even though I knew that it wasn't. I wasn't going to leverage my one shot as a director on nepotism. I'm mean, that's just foolish. I was making this choice, as I think it's clear to anyone now, on the fact that he's obviously the right guy for the role. But the argument I was prepared to make was that here's this guy that just got this really contested role in this movie, The Assassination of Jesse James. It's going to be really good and it's going to come out; people are going to see it, and he's going to be known for that - which has happened from the movie. It was a little bit of a dice roll...'cause you never really know. But I really didn't even need to get to that. I went in and said, "This is who I cast. This is who I want." I couldn't even believe it; it was really an unusual case. And then I was really lucky to get Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman, and kind of round it out with all these amazing other actors like Amy Ryan. The long and the short of it is that I was able to cast the best actors for the role without regard for box office. I got supported on that, and Casey got his shot. He sure made good on it. Reporter: The scene where Casey's character pulls the trigger - I was wondering where and how you chose to black out and edit, to avoid getting a music video type thing.
Ben Affleck: That was something that was always kind of written from early on. The idea was...it was about the notion that in trauma, your memory of trauma tends to be interrupted consciousness. The memory of what happens to you, you remember it in sporadic broken streams of visual memory. It allowed me not to stuff down the audience's throat where you would have to see this terrible graphic stuff, and I thought that it was appropriate since it would be so disturbing for Casey's character; where he couldn't remember it, it was so traumatic. Reporter: We always talk about being focused, and how important it is when you're being creative to be focused. Could you have done this work, this project, back when you were acting and you were in the spotlight all the time?
Ben Affleck: I hesitate to say completely, "No." One never knows. First of all, when you have that much of a distraction with the press...when that sort of presence is in your life all the time, it's very oppressive. I was not really here or there. Not really in the right head space. It would have been very difficult for me to do any of this. I think a result of where I am now is that I got to a place where I felt like, for a long time, I was working with the idea that I was making choices based on, "I think this will be successful. Maybe I should do this movie because it'll be perceived a different way." It got to the point where I thought the only choices that I can be happy with are ones based on what I think are good, that I can be happy with, and ultimately succeed or fail in that, on those merits. That decision led me to Hollywoodland and, "Ok, I'm going to direct this movie now even though I'm scared of it." You've got to take that leap and try, and maybe it will be scary. And I certainly knew I lived in a world where if I failed the press wasn't going to let it go by unnoticed; no one was going to give me a pass. . Lisa Yi: Talking about media frenzy, it does play a role in your film, in the storyline. How do you think the media helps or hinders cases like this?
Ben Affleck: I really scaled back on that from the book, because Lehane really hammers the media. He really goes after it, and I thought, "I can't do too much of this." I think in a weird way it was one of the ways my own hand might start to feel visible in the movie. You might start to go, "Oh, here he is taking a shot at the media." Lisa Yi: Did you imagine that the Madeline Case in the UK would have such an impact on your film, as to delay the release of your film?
Ben Affleck: We thought it would be better to err on the side of discretion and good taste. We felt like we might as well just be on the safe side and be respectful. And to be honest, it's not as if Disney UK put the decision up to me. This was not my decision; I was just made aware of it. But I certainly was proud to be involved with a company that made decisions that I thought were respectful and appropriate. I think it's interesting, because there is this element in this movie about how something about these tragedies does engender a kind of frenzy in the media, that we all get very invested in them. I think one of the things that is suggested a little bit more in the book than the movie is about people looking at the television - at the Jon Bonnet Ramsey case, for example - at the expense, perhaps, of looking around. The scene in the end, for example, the child is watching something that's inane. You get the sense that what children are actually exposed to on television is toxic for them, and you get a sense that what adults are exposed to on television is kind of toxic. Lehane suggests there's a general kind of noxiousness from television, and there's only a tiny bit of that in the movie because I felt like, for one thing, you can only do so much. I didn't want to touch on that too much. I felt like it was too distracting. Return to intro to access interviews with Casey Affleck and Amy Ryan.
Click HERE for Moving Pictures' review of Gone Baby Gone. | 
