Ben Affleck Says His Actors Co-Wrote Animals With Him
Ben Affleck says Animals is about the gap between image and truth in L.A. and in marriage, and credits Gone Girl and Fincher as key influences.
Ben Affleck says the way he makes movies today traces back to a lesson from Dazed and Confused: treat every part as equally important and let the actors help shape the material. In an interview with Brian Formo, he explained that he took the idea further than ever on his latest film, Animals, asking cast members including Kerry Washington and Steven Yeun to work as co-writers. He admitted the approach is riskier and a little scarier, but said it reliably makes the movie better. The inspiration, he told Formo, is Richard Linklater, who sent the Dazed cast music and invited them to contribute to a script he believed would underachieve if it were shot exactly as written.
Animals is also a more personal project than its Los Angeles setting might suggest. Affleck said he has now lived in L.A. longer than in his hometown of Boston, and he wanted to show the city the way he sees it, not the version projected to the rest of the world. The film, he explained, is about the gap between advertised morality and true selves, and about how fragile the things people build can be, especially a marriage and a family. He contrasted it with Argo, which poked fun at the hypocrisy and absurdity of Hollywood, saying this new film tackles something more serious and reflects where he is as a person now.
That theme led him to David Fincher, who directed him in Gone Girl, and Affleck called working with the filmmaker the great privilege of his life. He described Fincher as having an artist's taste and an engineer's mind, ranked Seven among the most perfectly constructed films ever made, and said Fincher's many takes are a search for mistakes, not perfection. Both Gone Girl and Animals, Affleck noted, compare marriage to a criminal conspiracy and ask how vulnerable two people must be with each other. Thinking it through during the conversation, he said he probably owes more to Gone Girl than he had realized.
Affleck also looked back at the directing lessons that shaped his approach, starting with Gone Baby Gone, his 2007 debut. Worried about his technical skills, he built the film around performances, casting mostly non-professional Boston locals and pairing them with trained actors. He gave the lead to his brother, Casey Affleck, partly because his own career was then coming off several high-profile flops, and because a lesser-known actor could bring vulnerability. On The Town, he said the stakes felt even higher, since he believed it could decide whether he kept getting acting work, and the stress gave him migraines. After a test screening, he changed an ending in which his character dies, feeling he had misjudged the audience, and he said he now sees real value in forgiveness and redemption.
Affleck also praised Letterboxd, saying he is grateful for a social platform dedicated to movies, and that the variety in people's favorites matters more to him than the titles that top the rankings. Since films are subjective, he said, they work when they are honest enough for audiences to see their own lives in them. It is the same instinct behind his latest project, where he trusted his actors to help write the story, and Animals is the clearest sign yet of how far he will take that idea.
