Ben Affleck finds role behind the camera
Is still a leading actor, but in Argo a serious director, too
BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF. — Before Ben Affleck began shooting The Town, his 2010 hit about Boston bank robbers, he made a series of phone calls.
Kevin Costner. Robert Redford. Warren Beatty. All three had directed movies in which they also starred, and Affleck, about to do likewise, wanted tips.
“The one thing they all said to me, in one form or another, was: Make sure you get enough coverage of yourself,” he recalled, referring to the number of takes of his own performance. “They said the natural tendency is to go do a scene, and there’s three of us, and I do 10 takes on actor A and 12 takes on actor B, and now we’re probably in a rush, so the polite thing to do is bang out one take on yourself and move on. Because you don’t want to look like a prima donna.”
He risked looking like a prima donna. “And on the first day, on Take 10 of me, I could just feel the crew’s eyes rolling,” he said. “I started telling anybody who would listen that story,” about the Costner-Redford-Beatty advice. He wasn’t being vain, he swore to them. Just obedient. Really. “I was told to get a lot of coverage.”
He laughed as he recounted this, because he was finally far enough past his self-consciousness and jitters to be able to. And now comes his third. Called Argo, it opens next month, and it explores a little-known footnote to the Iranian hostage crisis, which began in 1979 and lasted more than a year. Affleck not only directed it but also plays the lead role of a CIA “exfiltration” expert who posed as the producer of a nonexistent science-fiction movie in order to get into Tehran and try to rescue six Americans hiding in the home of the Canadian ambassador. It combines comedy, drama and high-stakes politics, and required shooting in Los Angeles, Washington and Istanbul.
In Argo his confidence shows. Many who have seen the movie consider it the best of his three directing efforts, the one that will make him as prominent a Hollywood player behind the camera as in front of it, the one that
“The biggest challenge is figuring out how to raise my kids in this environment.”
BEN AFFLECK
will move him forevermore beyond his seemingly playboy past.
He and Jennifer Garner have been married more than seven years and had their third child in February. And two days before the interview for this article, he turned 40.
How did he mark it? “I wept and gnashed my teeth,” he said, kidding. “We had dinner at the house.” It was a quiet evening, with just a few couples, including Matt Damon and his wife, joining him and Garner for a meal of — he couldn’t remember. Took out his mobile phone. Checked with the wife.
“Truffle fries,” he said, repeating what Garner was telling him. “T-bone. Fresh shrimp from Santa Bar- bara.” A kale salad. A mixedberry crumble. “Thanks, honey. I love you.”
Affleck now has subtle flecks of silver in his hair, an unsubtle tone of contentment in his voice and a relaxed air. He’s quick with jokes and lavish with selfdeprecation, as when the subject of his performance 15 years ago in the movie Chasing Amy came up.
“I was supposed to kiss Jason Lee,” he recalled, referring to a pivotal scene. And he had heard peers say that “you were a really great actor if you could convincingly play homosexual as a man,” he continued. “And I just blew it. The kiss is in there, but it looks like Tom & Jerry. It’s not anything good.” Open-mouthed? “I tried to go openmouthed,” he said. “But something in me was, ‘Take your tongue back.’ And I was like, ‘No, you can do it! Push!’ It was not my proudest moment.”
The Argo script, by Chris Terrio, gives him a broad canvass as director. It also had a leading role, a way not to disappear as an actor while he made the much longer time commitment that directing requires.
Part of the story sends up Hollywood and its hucksters, two of whom, played by John Goodman and Alan Arkin, agree to help the U.S. government set up a fake production of the nonexistent science-fiction movie, titled Argo.
But the heart of the action is set in Tehran, where the lives of six Americans are on the line. Affleck’s character, Tony Mendez, travels there to coach them on new, fictive identities, in the hope that they will be able to pass themselves off as a movie crew scouting locations and to leave Iran that way.
The movie puts extra emphasis on the character’s estrangement from his wife and distance from his young son, and it becomes, in some ways, an allegory of fatherhood, with Mendez acting as a parent to the stranded, terrified Americans.
He has to “create boundaries and limits and a whole world and then say, ‘I’m going to keep you safe, and I’m going to get you home,’ ” said Affleck, who worries about the welfare of his own children in Hollywood.
“This business can be ugly, and I used to think the biggest challenge was keeping sane. But the biggest challenge for me now is figuring out how to raise my kids in this environment.”
He has roles in two movies — a thriller, Runner, Runner, and a romantic drama, To the Wonder, directed by Terrence Malick — that have been shot but not released. He wants to continue directing too, but the project must be right.
Turning 40, he said, made him wonder: “Is that halfway?”
“It’s a zero-sum game,” he said. “You have from now until the end. And if you take a year to do one thing, it’s a year you no longer have to do something else.”