Oscar snub? Affleck has an answer
Argo director and star says he’s happy with film’s chances at Academy Awards
Ben Affleck said to ask him anything. “Nothing is off limits,” he said, adding later, “There’s nothing that you can ask me that hasn’t been asked of me before.”
Not true. One thing Affleck has only recently had to answer for is how it feels to be snubbed by the Oscars. As the director, producer and star of Argo he was considered a shoo-in for a best director nomination, typically crucial in any campaign for a best picture prize. But last week the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences overlooked Affleck the filmmaker, though his movie earned other nominations, including best picture.
By Jan. 14, when he won two Golden Globes, for directing and producing (along with George Clooney and Grant Heslov), he had a line ready about the snub.
“We got nominated for seven Oscars, including best picture,” he said backstage. “If you can’t be happy with that, your prospects for longterm happiness are pretty sad.”
All along, Argo had seemed in step with the awards machinery. In August it was shown at the Telluride Film Festival, where The King’s Speech had earned the attention of critics, and in September its premiere drew a standing ovation at the Toronto International Film Festival, just like the future Oscar winner Slumdog Millionaire. As he has made the promotional rounds, Affleck has sounded confident and informed, in his filmmaking and political history at least. What he was not prepared for was going from early front-runner to late-season underdog. But underdog, as veteran Oscar-watchers know, is the pole position to be in for the race.
Though only three films have won best picture without a corresponding best director nomination — Driving Miss Daisy, in 1989, was the latest — Affleck’s fortunes, at least judging by the goodwill that attended his Globes victory, seem to be on the rebound. And it’s not as if he’s unfamiliar with having to rebound.
“I was nobody auditioning, and then I was seen as this young, emerging talent, writer, Oscar winner” — for the Good Will Hunting screenplay — “and then I was seen as this blockbuster actor, and then I was seen as this kind of train-wreck actor” (insert your own Gigli joke here) “and then I was seen as this resurgent director,” he said in a recent interview in New York. “And now I think I’m kind of seen as just sort of somebody in Hollywood who works.”
Argo, the true story of how CIA operative Tony Mendez (Affleck) used a fake sci-fi flick as cover for his rescue of six U.S. diplomats trapped in Tehran during the 1970s hostage crisis, appealed to him because it played out on a broader scale than his first two hometown directorial efforts, Gone Baby Gone and The Town. “I didn’t want to just keep doing movies in Boston,” he said.
Affleck’s own performance was inspired by the implacable, reserved Mendez, a former Master of Disguise.
“I met him at this sort of famous CIA hangout bar, and I thought I’d find all of these interesting hooks to use to play the character,” Affleck said. “Instead I found this very sort of withdrawn, kind of opaque guy, and I sort of panicked.”
But he decided to protect the reality and subvert the usual conventions of hard-charging, heroic protagonists. “I’d rather have a guy whose instinct is to fade into the background,” he said, “who is asked to stick his neck out to save these six people.”
Mendez, now retired and on the circuit promoting the film, based in part on his autobiography, joined the interview, praising Affleck for his attention to detail and veracity. He had even offered Affleck some of his own 1970s clothing to wear, sport coats and polyester prints.
“There was a green turtleneck, which I drew the line at,” Affleck said.
Affleck was also keen to home in on the workaday quality of spy life, especially the way it both connected and frayed its employees and their families. “The sacrifices that were being made were being done in silence,” he said. “We live in a culture now where you go on a talk show and say, ‘This is what I’ve done,’ or ‘This is the kind of victim I am.’ We’re very public with that sort of thing.”
By contrast he wanted to pay tribute to CIA officers who risk their lives yet take no credit.
“As Tony often says, it’s not a place of deranged assassins,” he said. “It’s a place of people who’ve come in to work, work really hard, care about life, care about their country.”
Marrying that vision with the satirical Hollywood storyline was the challenge that most worried Affleck. Clooney, Matt Damon (Affleck’s childhood friend and Good Will Hunting co-writer), his brother Casey Affleck, pals like Bradley Cooper and select non-entertainment industry confidants served as sounding boards, helping convince Affleck he had nailed the tone.
“It’s a little bit of what I did with The Town,” he said. “I kind of wrapped what I thought was thoughtful, thematically interesting drama in the hard candy of shootouts and gun chases.”
Though he called Argo “the best thing I’ve been involved with in my career,” there is one thing he fears will haunt him. With screenwriter Chris Terrio (also an Oscar nominee), Affleck coined the profane punch line that pivots through the movie, a catchphrase that puns on its title and is not quite fit for print.
“I almost wish we didn’t do it,” Affleck said, “even though I think it works, because I have doomed myself for at least a few years of strangers coming up to me on the street” and repeating the line.