Twentysomething Ben Affleck has been a baddie long enough. After evil turns in Dazed and Confused and Kevin Smith's ignoble Mallrats, Affleck welcomed the opportunity to play a romantic lead with an entirely different set of problems in Smith's latest effort, Chasing Amy. Rough Cut's Wendy Wilson got to speak with Affleck about Amy before he began filming his next project, Good Will Hunting, directed by Gus Van Sant and co-starring Robin Williams. (He co-wrote the script, too, girls.)
When you read the script, what
was your initial reaction?
When I read it, it was in pieces, so I
read it as it sort of developed. There
were times that I thought, "this is
interesting." I really didn't know where
it was going a lot of times, and I
thought that was cool, because there's
no real model for this kind of genre. It
is, I guess by strict definition, a
romantic comedy, but there's not a lot
of romantic comedies like it, so there
was never any point where you could
say, "OK, well, here comes this
scene," or, "Yeah, he's taken the
woman for granted and he's gonna
learn his lesson and he's gonna have
this kind of moment." So, there were
a few surprises, like all the suggestion
about the relationship between
Holden and Banky (Jason Lee) and,
God, Alyssa's (Joey Lauren
Adams) sexual history. Kevin broke
a lot of rules. After a while, you
understand the generally accepted
assumption that you can't run the risk
of alienating the audience by making
the characters be sympathetic. So, to
take those risks is scary and you hope
the audience will respond. Then
there's that morning-after thing where
you're going like, "Oh, God. Did I
really do that last night?"
I talked to someone about Fargo
who suggested that the reason
that movie worked was because of
the humor that was used;
otherwise it might have been too
grim. I think Chasing Amy works
for the same reason. There is all
of this out-of-bounds stuff, but you
laugh at it.
I think Kevin's kind of fused two
things for the first time: He's taken
something heavy and serious and used
his enormous talent for comedy to
make that palatable, you know what I
mean? And there's certainly something
that I learned about tone from this
movie, about the way that you marry
almost two different movies in a way,
and make them the same movie. I
think a pretty cool accomplishment on
Kevin's part was that he was able to
pull it off.
What's Kevin like to work with?
He was a joy to work with. He was a
lot of fun just because he's just a funny
guy.
He's a wicked funny writer.
Yeah, he's enormously funny. And
he's just as funny in person, if not
more so, because he knows how to
deliver his own stuff, as you can see
by the Silent Bob character. He also
knows how to write himself the best
scene in the movie.
Did you recognize or did Kevin
tell you that Chasing Amy is an
expanded study about the scene
between Dante and his girlfriend
in the convenience store in Clerks?
I always tease Kevin because my
mother was the one who actually told
me to go see Clerks.
Your mom did?
Yeah, my mother really gives me a
hard time. She thinks that if I haven't
seen Burnt by the Sun or some
movie, she'll say, "You don't see the
right movies." She's constantly giving
me grief about it. So she said, "You
ought to see this Kevin Smith-guy's
movie. It's called Clerks, and it's
really neat." And I'm like, "I don't
know, Clerks? What do I want to
see that for?" So finally I went, and I
think because my mother told me to
go see it, I had an even lower opinion
of it, but in the end I kind of loved it.
So I always tease Kevin about how
my mother told me to go see the most
profane movie I'd ever seen.
What did your mom think of
Chasing Amy?
She hasn't seen it.
Are you going to go with her?
I will be there when she's in the
theater, but I think I'll be sitting far
away from her. I'm sure she'll be
really embarrassed. My mother ...
while she'll tell me to go see Clerks,
she will get embarrassed watching
stuff with me and my brother, yeah.
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