Good Will Hunting wasn’t the first movie for co-writers and co-stars Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, but it was the film that catapulted them into Hollywood stardom. It’s been nearly 30 years since the Academy Award-winning movie was released, but Damon says he still thinks about the way it felt when he realized the project they’d worked so hard on was actually happening. He also opened up about why he felt like Rocky making it.
Matt Damon was a guest on the New Heights podcast with Jason and Travis Kelce, and during the show, he was asked what his “Welcome to Hollywood” moment was, when he realized he had truly arrived professionally. Damon calls back to when Good Will Hunting first started shooting, which began production with a scene he wasn’t in, but it still meant everything to him. Damon said…
Good Will Hunting, when we, you know, it was such a rollercoaster from writing it, to selling it, to developing it, to going into turnaround to getting picked up at another studio. There’s all this stuff, that the first day we were shooting, and we were actually rolling film, and the movie was getting made, and it was a scene between Stellan Skarsgard and Robin Williams. Ben and I weren’t even in the scene, but we went to watch. And when they called action and those two heavyweight actors, amazing actors, started talking, started saying the shit that we wrote, we – just tears coming down.
Ben Affleck and Matt Damon grew up as friends with dreams of Hollywood, and while they were already working actors by the time they were shopping around Good Will Hunting, one imagines that getting somebody to buy a script from two unknowns was a difficult task. So many screenplays never become movies; it wouldn’t have been unusual if Good Will Hunting had just never been made.
One imagines that Damon and Affleck wouldn’t even fully believe the movie was happening until filming got underway, but once it did, and with the likes of Stellan Skarsgard and Robin Williams involved, it finally felt real. It’s not a shock that it was an emotional moment. Damon likens the whole thing to feeling like Rocky Balboa in Sylvester Stallone’s original movie. Rocky was never trying to win; he only ever wanted to go the distance, and so did they. Damon continued…
And I think that was definitely a kind of an amazing moment. It was like ‘This is real.’ Like, ‘Even if nothing happens with this movie, we got it made.’ We were like Rocky in the first one, where it’s like we didn’t even want the belt. We just wanted to go 15 rounds and still be there. And so that was kind of the moment where we were like, ‘This movie is actually going to happen.’
The Rocky comparison makes sense. Not only was the experience of getting Good Will Hunting made like the character's journey, but it was also similar to the story of Stallone attempting to get Rocky made, having written the movie and then fighting to make it real, and be able to star in it.
In the end, Good Will Hunting did happen, and far more than “nothing” happened with it. The movie would be nominated for nine Oscars, winning two, a Best Supporting Actor award for Robin Williams, and the Best Original Screenplay prize for Affleck and Damon. The movie was so successful that there have apparently been attempts at making a sequel, though, like Rocky did, that seems unlikely. However, the comparison still stands, and it really helps me understand just how much Good Will Hunting means to the people who made it.
