Good Will Hunting

• 1. Introduction

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  Good Will Hunting began life as a homework assignment that came back far too long. Matt Damon, in his fifth year at Harvard, was asked for a one-act play for a playwriting class. He turned in a script of around 40 pages instead.

  That overgrown assignment became a 1997 American drama directed by Gus Van Sant. Its hero is Will Hunting, a rebellious, self-taught mathematical genius from South Boston who works as a janitor at MIT. A professor discovers his gift, and a court offers him a choice between jail and therapy. The therapist is a psychologist named Sean Maguire, played by Robin Williams.

  Behind the screen sits a second story, about the two friends who wrote the lead role for themselves. Ben Affleck and Damon were unknown actors when they started. What happened between their first pages and the finished picture raises questions that this documentary will follow. Why did a studio come close to taking the script away from its own authors? How does a film about genius make its mathematics convincing? And why did a hit made on a modest budget leave several of its makers feeling short-changed?

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• 2. Cambridge Roots

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  In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Ben Affleck and Damon became friends at a young age. Years later Damon left Harvard after winning a role in the 1993 film Geronimo: An American Legend, and he flew to Los Angeles with his script. By his own account, only the scene where Will first meets Sean survived word for word from that first version. He asked Affleck for input, and the request started a creative partnership that has lasted ever since.

  Quentin Tarantino's 1992 film Reservoir Dogs gave the pair a model for how an outsider could break in. Tarantino had been working as a store clerk when he talked the project over with the producer Lawrence Bender. Bender brought the script to the film star Harvey Keitel, and Keitel's interest in acting in it helped Tarantino find funding. In Los Angeles, Affleck and Damon took small roles in films and commercials and shared what they earned. Success stayed out of reach.

  Childhood resentment gave the story its edge. Growing up in Cambridge, the two boys had bristled at the students who arrived for Harvard and MIT and seemed to take over the city without caring about its residents. Damon's feelings grew tangled after he attended Harvard himself. He found the students good-natured and saw up close the gulf between local life and college life. The friends also borrowed from the people around them. Affleck's father and his girlfriend at the time worked as janitors at Harvard, and both friends had worked construction in the summers. Experiences from Affleck's father and Damon's mother fed into the backstory of Sean.

  The writers called Sean's part "the Harvey Keitel part". It was a role built to attract a star, with the best lines, little screen time, and an easy fit around a busy calendar. Damon said: "It could have gone to Meryl Streep, you know what I mean? We could have done some rewrites and it becomes more of a mother/son relationship. It could have gone to Morgan Freeman... and then you bring in elements of racial tension around Boston."

  The films Beverly Hills Cop, from 1984, and Midnight Run, from 1988, shaped the first draft's chase scenes. That early version followed a young, self-taught physics genius from South Boston whom the NSA wanted for his extraordinary abilities. He and his friends led agents on chases around the city, because Affleck and Damon felt an action subplot would make the film commercially appealing. They improvised some scenes and recorded them on tape, imitating Freeman and Robert De Niro, the actors they imagined as therapist and professor. The producer Chris Moore read the script, liked it, and decided to help the pair find a studio.

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• 3. Selling the Script

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  The talent agent Patrick Whitesell read the finished script in 1994 and liked it, yet he saw a problem. A film written by and starring two unknown actors had almost no precedent. The only one he could name was the 1976 film Rocky, in which Sylvester Stallone wrote and starred in his own breakout. At that point the pair had not settled on a title, and Damon thought the hero should be called Nate.

  The title came from a friend. Derrick Bridgeman, a high school friend of theirs, had written a script called Good Will Hunting. Affleck and Damon promised him $10,000 for the name if they sold their script, and Bridgeman later appeared in the film as a student in one of Lambeau's classes.

  Whitesell pitched the script to studio executives as a Shane Black-style thriller, in the vein of The Last Boy Scout from 1991. News of it moved through Hollywood in four days and set off a bidding war. In November 1994 the pair accepted an offer of $600,000 from Castle Rock Entertainment, on the advice of director Richard Linklater. Affleck had worked with Linklater on the 1993 film Dazed and Confused. They split the money evenly, and within six months both had spent all of it. Taxes, agent fees, a Jeep Cherokee, and a rented party house near the Hollywood Bowl took care of the rest.

  Rob Reiner, who founded Castle Rock, urged the pair to choose between the thriller and the relationship between Will and Sean. At a meeting the studio arranged, the screenwriter William Goldman read the script and agreed. He told them to drop the thriller. They cut 60 pages of the NSA storyline from a script of 120 to 130 pages, and ended up rewriting nearly all of it.

  Castle Rock then asked for rewrite after rewrite, and after a year the writers suspected that executives had stopped reading closely. To test them, Affleck and Damon slipped in scenes between Will and Sean that made no sense in the story. No executive mentioned them in any meeting. The writers also wanted to direct and star, which the studio refused. When they objected to the studio's choice of the little-known director Andrew Scheinman, Castle Rock put the film into turnaround. The terms were harsh: find another company willing to pay $1 million within thirty days, or be pushed out of their own project.

  Affleck and Damon went back to the studios they had turned down before. Several executives set up meetings only to say they would not buy the film. One such meeting, with Ted Field, the founder of Interscope Communications, later inspired Affleck to write a scene in his 2012 film Argo. Other executives wanted bigger names such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt in the lead, but Damon kept remembering Stallone's story and refused to give up.

  The rescue came through Kevin Smith. Affleck had worked with Smith on the 1995 film Mallrats, and the two were developing Chasing Amy for Miramax Films. Smith said he "wouldn't dare direct" the script, given its beauty, but he put it in front of Miramax founder Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein asked for the chess scenes and the scenes of Will having sex with Sean to be removed, which showed Affleck and Damon he had read every page. In the fall of 1995, one day after reading it, he bought the script from Castle Rock for $1 million. The producer Cary Woods, who had earlier turned the pair down, was among those at Miramax who disagreed. Smith, now an executive producer, had one more idea: that the two writers should direct it themselves.

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• 4. Director and Cast

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  Miramax rejected that idea, so Affleck and Damon proposed Gus Van Sant instead. They had come to know and admire his work through Affleck's brother Casey. Van Sant said of his first reading: "Usually when I read a script, after a few pages, I put it down - but this kept me going." He reached Affleck through Casey and set up a meeting.

  Weinstein disagreed with the choice and arranged meetings with other directors, among them Michael Mann. Ben Stiller, who had directed Reality Bites in 1994, turned the job down because he had never heard of the two writers. Mel Gibson, fresh from Braveheart in 1995, developed the film with them for a few months. His slow production schedule worried Damon, who feared that he and Affleck would grow too old for their roles, so he asked Gibson to step aside. Gibson agreed.

  Miramax then offered the film to Van Sant at a quarter of his asking price. Tarantino had told Van Sant about Weinstein's temper, and Van Sant hesitated. The two then argued over final cut, and production stopped. Weinstein kept looking, and Chris Columbus turned the film down. Affleck and Damon moved back to Boston.

  After a year, Weinstein put Bender on the film and agreed to pay Van Sant's price. Two things pushed him. Damon had been cast in Francis Ford Coppola's The Rainmaker, from 1997, based on the 1995 novel by John Grisham, and Robin Williams had shown interest. Damon explained that the Grisham adaptation gave Weinstein confidence in him as a leading man, but Williams was the pivotal figure. Williams had first heard about the project from Coppola, with whom he had worked on the 1996 film Jack, and Van Sant gave him the script. He compared the feeling to his experience on Dead Poets Society: "there was something really powerful there."

  Williams cut his usual fee of around $20 million to $5 million. In exchange, his Miramax contract promised him 20% of earnings if the gross passed $60 million, with the percentage rising as the gross climbed. Miramax did not believe the film would earn that much, and accepted.

  What drew Williams was Sean, a psychology teacher at Bunker Hill Community College and the college roommate of Professor Gerald Lambeau. Sean is a widower. In the story's best-remembered speech, he tells Will how he gave away his ticket to the famous sixth game of the 1975 World Series, saying he had to go "see about a girl". He is the one who repeats "It's not your fault" to Will until the young man breaks down in tears. In the last scene Will leaves Sean a note that reuses the same phrase.

  The ending itself went through changes. The writers had first planned for Will to be killed by the gang he fights at the start. Van Sant proposed that Chuckie die in an accident at a construction site, and the writers tried that version, but scrapped it after Van Sant read it and disliked it. They then sought out Terrence Malick, a film director and the best friend of Affleck's godfather. He suggested that Will follow Skylar to California rather than leaving with her together, as the writers had imagined.

  Casting went on through early 1997 at the Bowery Hotel in New York. Bender, Moore, and Van Sant found Cole Hauser for Billy, but struggled with Skylar and Lambeau. Minnie Driver won the part of Skylar, and Van Sant said of her audition: "She just blew us away." Driver later said that Weinstein sent a note to the casting director objecting to her, which left her "devastated". Weinstein denied sending it, but said he had first wanted to cast Ashley Judd. Stellan Skarsgård received the script while shooting Steven Spielberg's Amistad and accepted the role of Lambeau. Casey Affleck, for whom the role of Morgan had been written, first refused it so that he could film a documentary about the production. He then accepted.

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• 5. Blackboard Mathematics

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  Nobel Prize-winning physicist Sheldon Glashow was the first scientist Affleck and Damon consulted. They wanted help writing accurate dialogue for their physics-genius hero. Glashow insisted that Will should be a mathematician instead. Brian Greene later explained why: physics discoveries often come from groups, while a mathematical theorem can be solved by one person alone.

  In the spring of 1997, Glashow introduced the pair to Professor Daniel Kleitman of MIT. Kleitman and the mathematician Tom Bohman gave them a short lecture and suggested the computer science problem known as P versus NP as something Will could solve. Kleitman and Professor Patrick O'Donnell of the University of Toronto also took small roles in the film. Both served as consultants on set, wrote the equations on the blackboards, and helped coordinate extras. The real-life mathematician John Mighton appears as Lambeau's assistant, Tom.

  The hallway blackboard does double duty. It reveals Will's talent first to the audience, and then to Lambeau. Damon built the idea on a visit from his artist brother Kyle, who wandered through MIT's Infinite Corridor and wrote "an incredibly elaborate, totally fake, version of an equation" on a blackboard. It stayed up for months. Kyle told Matt that MIT needed those blackboards "because these kids are so smart they just need to, you know, drop everything and solve problems!"

  The first problem in the film is intermediate-level graph theory, though Lambeau calls it an advanced "Fourier system". Will answers the first part by chalking up an adjacency matrix. For the second part he counts the walks of three steps through the graph, which gives him the third power of that matrix. The third and fourth parts of the question involve generating functions, and the other characters are astounded that a janitor handles matrices so easily.

  Lambeau's second challenge is harder in a different way. It asks for every series-reduced tree on ten nodes. Will manages to write eight of the ten before Lambeau interrupts him.

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• 6. Filming in Boston

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  Toronto was the early choice for locations, and the production team began scouting there. They soon decided that some scenes had to be shot in Boston to capture the city's character. Affleck and Damon walked Skarsgård and Williams around South Boston, and one night they took Williams to the L Street Tavern. A large crowd of residents gathered. Williams loved the gritty atmosphere and phoned Weinstein to say he wanted to shoot some of the duo's scenes there.

  Filming began on the 14th of April 1997 and ended nine weeks later. Affleck and Damon left the shaping of the narrative to Van Sant and concentrated on acting. His method was to rehearse with the actors, find an unobtrusive spot for the camera, and let long scenes run without interfering. Damon said this produced "moment-to-moment honesty". Damon often needed one take, Affleck liked to try a scene a few times, and Williams needed at least seven, to have versions built around different emotions. Skarsgård said Van Sant gave "the actors space to grow". Williams improvised often, and one of his additions was the last line of the film: "Son of a bitch stole my line".

  The University of Toronto supplied many of the interiors, including Knox College, St Michael's College, Victoria College, and Whitney Hall. The production also used the McLennan Physical Laboratories, the Faculty Club, Central Technical School, and the Upfront Bar and Grill. Boston provided the exteriors and a few interiors. There Affleck, his brother, Damon, and Hauser shared an apartment and often spent time with Driver. South Boston residents welcomed the crew and offered suggestions to make the film "more Boston".

  Van Sant filled small roles with locals. He gave the part of Judge Malone to Jimmy Flynn, the production's head teamster and a member of the Winter Hill Gang. Flynn had once stood trial for murder, and been acquitted, in the same courtroom of the Boston Municipal Court's South Boston Division that the film used.

  The Boston Red Sox posed a puzzle. Major League Baseball had refused to let the production use its logo or footage of Carlton Fisk's home run in the 1975 World Series, because the film was rated R for profanity. The producers invited team representatives to the set to change their minds. The crew shot several scenes with Red Sox merchandise and logos, and the team's consent only arrived after filming had finished.

  Miramax's marketing team wanted chain restaurants as sets, but Affleck and Damon pushed for places like The Tasty and Kelly's Roast Beef. Harvard first refused to let the crew on campus, then relented when the actor and Harvard alumnus John Lithgow vouched for them. The crew shot in front of Dunster House and Lowell House. At the Boston Public Garden, the Boston Police Department provided security for a scene with Damon and Williams, which drew more than 3,000 spectators. The film ends with Will driving away on the Massachusetts Turnpike.

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• 7. Cut and Score

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  Pietro Scalia, the editor Van Sant hired for Good Will Hunting, had impressed him with his work for Bernardo Bertolucci and Oliver Stone. He cut the film on Avid editing software. The cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier and Van Sant thought the earliest assembly had too many cuts, and the three men reworked it together.

  One scene nearly vanished. Van Sant had cut a moment in which Will says "How do you like them apples?", but Affleck and Damon insisted on keeping it. Van Sant agreed after the scene got a positive response at a screening. In cutting Williams' performance, Scalia chose his first takes. He found that the later ones lacked "that early freshness, that insecurity, that fear". Williams was surprised by the result and thanked him at a private screening in San Francisco. After winning his Academy Award, he wrote Scalia a letter saying he had done "the kindest cut".

  Van Sant had first worked with the composer Danny Elfman on To Die For. While searching for "raw" sounds he had heard of the singer-songwriter Elliott Smith, but at first decided that a heavy metal artist would suit the film better. After wrapping To Die For, he began listening to Smith closely and changed his mind. He raised the idea with Bender during pre-production, filmed with Smith's music in mind, and told Scalia to start placing the songs in the edit. In Boston he asked Elfman for his opinion. Elfman approved and wrote a score to match the songs.

  Near the end of editing, Van Sant contacted Smith through mutual friends to ask permission. Smith agreed after watching the film, and it inspired him to write an original song, "Miss Misery". Elfman, Smith, and Van Sant then completed the score together by blending Smith's songs with Elfman's pieces. Elfman wrote the orchestral arrangement for "Between the Bars", and later rearranged "Miss Misery" for Smith's appearances at award shows, including the 70th Academy Awards. He called it "the best experience" he had working on music with an artist and added: "After 110 films, or whatever, it's been one of the only two times I feel I collaborated with anybody".

  Capitol Records released the soundtrack album on the 18th of November 1997, with only two of Elfman's cues on it. "Afternoon Delight" by the Starland Vocal Band and "Runaway" by Del Shannon play in the film but are missing from the album. In 2009 Alex Young of Consequence praised the pairing of composer and songwriter, and especially the contrast between Smith's gentle music and Will's tough exterior. In a 2015 review, Bernard Zuel of The Sydney Morning Herald gave the album three and a half stars out of five and felt that Smith's songs overshadowed Elfman's score. Music Box Records finally issued Elfman's complete score on the 3rd of March 2014, in a limited run of only 1500 copies.

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• 8. Money and Marketing

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  After production ended in June 1997, Weinstein ordered a test screening that scored higher than any film Miramax had ever made. The studio responded by moving the premiere up to the 5th of December 1997, one week before James Cameron's Titanic. Miramax was known for relentless campaigns aimed at winning Academy Awards. At the 69th Academy Awards it had collected twenty nominations for its 1996 films, twelve of them for The English Patient. Weinstein denied that the studio ran extreme campaigns, and an executive said the aim was to reach large audiences. For Good Will Hunting, Miramax mounted a similarly intense effort around Affleck and Damon, and it soon left them exhausted. Damon later called the experience "overwhelming, very unhealthy".

  The film premiered on the 2nd of December 1997 at the Bruin Theater in Westwood Village, Los Angeles. On the 5th of December it opened in seven theaters in New York and Los Angeles and earned $272,912 over the weekend. By its fourth weekend it had reached 157 theaters and $1,720,540. A wide release on 1,787 theaters followed two weeks later and brought in $14,844,684, enough for second place behind Titanic. By the following week the total gross passed $60 million, which triggered the rising share in Williams' contract. In the week after the Oscar nominations, earnings rose 23.8% to $11,075,873. In its fourteenth week the film crossed 100 million dollars.

  That success turned into a quarrel. Miramax found it cheaper to move the film to home video than to pay for advertising and keep it in theaters. Weinstein asked Damon to persuade Williams to renegotiate, promising to keep promoting the film toward a goal of $150 million. Damon refused. Miramax cut back the number of theaters and then pulled the film in its thirty-third week. By then it had earned $138.4 million against a budget of between $10 and $16 million, and had spent thirteen straight weeks in the top ten.

  Others were owed money too. Van Sant was due 2.5% of the adjusted gross, and Affleck and Damon were due a share of net profit. Van Sant said Miramax never paid and that Weinstein blamed Williams' deal for depleting its resources, which Weinstein denied. Miramax told Affleck and Damon that its accountants showed the film had lost $50 million. The studio later gave each of them a bonus of $500,000. Damon said: "I don't ever look back on that experience and feel ripped off." He added that the film had not been a one-time windfall, since he was still benefiting from it.

  Worldwide the film grossed $225.9 million. In the United States it passed Pulp Fiction to become Miramax's biggest release at the box office and the seventh highest-grossing film of 1997. The director Curtis Hanson saw it as part of a revival of character-driven stories, alongside As Good as It Gets and The Full Monty. Analysts had predicted that major studios would dominate the year, and the film's success, they noted, showed the strength of independent studios. Some commentators called it a model of counterprogramming against Titanic. Others argued that Miramax's relatively high budgets meant its films were not independent in the traditional sense.

  At the 70th Academy Awards, Good Will Hunting collected nine nominations and won two. Williams took Best Supporting Actor, and Affleck and Damon took Best Original Screenplay. Nominations also went to Damon for Best Actor, Van Sant for Best Director, Scalia for editing, Elfman for score, Smith's "Miss Misery" for song, Driver for Best Supporting Actress, and the film for Best Picture. At twenty-five, Affleck became the youngest person ever to win an Academy Award for screenwriting, and Damon, at twenty-seven, the second youngest.

  A rumor spread before the ceremony that Goldman had really written the script. Damon felt insulted and refused to address it in interviews. Goldman repeatedly denied the claim, including in his 2000 memoir Which Lie Did I Tell? In 2003 the rumor became the premise of the play Matt & Ben, by the actresses Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers, in which the script falls from the ceiling of Affleck's apartment. It played at the New York Fringe Festival, and Bruce Weber of The New York Times reviewed it positively when it returned off-Broadway.

  Critics were broadly warm. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave three stars out of four and called the story "predictable", but said "the individual moments, not the payoff, that make it so effective". Andrew O'Hehir of Salon was less convinced and found it somewhat superficial. Rotten Tomatoes lists a 97% approval rating from 91 reviews, Metacritic gives a score of 71 out of 100, and audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it an "A".

  Academic readers noticed the social tensions beneath the story. Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera observed that Catholic and Protestant divisions in Boston form a backdrop, with Irish Catholics from South Boston set against characters tied to Harvard and MIT. Emmett Winn described class conflict and stunted social mobility, and David Lipset called class inequality a driving subtext.

  The film launched the acting careers of both writers. Its success, together with Chasing Amy, helped Affleck, Damon, and Kevin Smith find funding for Smith's 1999 film Dogma. In 1998, however, Affleck made Michael Bay's Armageddon while Damon made Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. Audiences came to link Affleck with popcorn films and Damon with intellectual dramas, and Saturday Night Live aired a sketch portraying Affleck as unintelligent. Damon called it "terrifically unfair", and said that it took Affleck directing his own films and winning an Academy Award to change that view. The two did not write together again until Ridley Scott's 2021 film The Last Duel. In 2023 Affleck was offered a role in a sequel to Good Will Hunting, and said neither he nor Damon would pursue it.

  Elliott Smith's story ended less happily. The Oscar nomination and the performance at the 70th Academy Awards brought him national prominence, and his label, Kill Rock Stars, was able to pay its debts. Smith did not enjoy the fame and shied away from it. He released two more albums before dying in 2003. The film itself kept finding audiences: it reached home video on the 7th of July 1998, and in August 2025 it appeared on Netflix's list of the week's ten most-watched films.

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