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Ben Affleck not only knows how to win an audience with his stellar acting talent, but also with his filmmaking skills. He made his behind-the-scenes debut screenwriting with good buddy Matt Damon for Good Will Hunting (which is streaming on your Paramount+ subscription) and then crushed his directorial debut with 2007’s Gone Baby Gone. When it comes to the Oscar-winning filmmaker making his own movies, Affleck doesn’t hold back the challenges, such as what he feels when seeing the first cut.
Back in 2014, statistics said that Ben Affleck was the best director of the decade. That’s no surprise considering, with the exception of the box office bomb Live By Night, all movies directed by Affleck are in the Fresh ‘90s range on Rotten Tomatoes. With the Gone Girl actor’s superb ability to mix suspense with emotional depth as well as creating characters that feel human, Affleck is clearly gifted with a director’s vision. But making movies is no cakewalk. He explained on an episode of the Screen Off Script podcast what it’s felt like seeing the first cut of his films, and it sounds gruesome:
When I see the first cut of my own movie, I wanna kill myself. Like, you should not go crazy seeing the first cut and not liking it. It’s a very iterative process to get better. More work is done after you finish shooting to make it good.
I can understand where the great actor/director is coming from. It’s almost like when you write the first draft of an essay or a story. You read through it and know it can be better than what was originally created. This proves how important post-production is for any movie. Directing is more than just shooting footage, but creating something beautiful from all of the raw material.
While Affleck has never directed a full-blown comedy, his movies do have comedic elements into them to balance their heavy subjects. The Dazed and Confused actor continued to talk about what’s really bothered him about his first takes when they contain humorous moments:
Go in and sit down and be like, this is what’s supposed to be funny about this scene, and explain it to them what you think is funny and is good because they— it may seem obvious to you, and it probably doesn’t do that to the person. It feels shitty too to put all that work into it and look at it and go, ‘What the fuck is this?’ It’s the worst feeling in the world.
It’s true how awkward that may be to shoot a scene that has comedic elements and the people around you watching aren’t laughing. Ben Affleck continued to explain the realism of how a joke may seem funny to the director, but not to everyone around you. When that happens, the Golden Globe winner said that making comedy stand out could mean going back to the dailies and using a different shot or closeup of a joke to make it obvious to the audience that they should be laughing.
Even though Ben Affleck brings his vision to his movies, it doesn’t mean he never gets help bringing his stories to life. The Argo director described how important it was to collaborate in order for a movie to become a success:
If I’m directing a movie with you in it, and it obviously is going to have your comic sensibility, like, I got to know what’s funny to you or I’m not the guy, that’s why you have to explain it and sorta talk about it, because that person has got to understand all those things that made you be funny in the first place. And then this is also where people sometimes get into fights, of course, because people’s ego gets in the way. But, ego will kill you. I don’t care what you do. You have to be able to hear, like this doesn’t work. This is dog shit because the audience will tell you, you know what I mean?
The filmmaking process can certainly be a struggle when you collaborate with people who have different perspectives. But at the end of the day, I’m sure a compromise can be achieved on how to make a scene work. Otherwise, it’s what Ben Affleck said about the audience not being afraid to express what isn’t working, compared to the professionals being the ones to notice first.
Ben Affleck is certainly capable of directing successful movies, but putting them together isn’t easy when the first cut feels like a failure. Fortunately, the Pearl Harbor actor has a collaborative team by his side that transforms his rough cuts into award-winning movies.
Make sure to catch Ben Affleck’s 2025 movie release, The Accountant 2, which is still playing in theaters. His next directorial project, Animals, is currently filming and plans to eventually hit your Netflix subscription.