Good Will Hunting
Good Will Hunting is a 1997 American drama film directed by Gus Van Sant and written by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. It stars Robin Williams, Damon, Affleck, Stellan Skarsgård, and Minnie Driver, with Casey Affleck and Cole Hauser in supporting roles. Set in Boston, the film follows Will Hunting, a troubled but self-taught mathematical genius working as a janitor at MIT, whose talent is discovered by professor Gerald Lambeau. To avoid jail, Will agrees to study under Lambeau while attending therapy with psychologist Sean Maguire, which forces him to confront his past and his relationships, including with Harvard student Skylar.
Released by Miramax Films, Good Will Hunting premiered on December 2, 1997, and opened in the United States on December 5. Produced on a budget of about $10–16 million, it became a commercial success, grossing $225.9 million worldwide.
The film received widespread critical acclaim, particularly for Williams' performance and Affleck and Damon's screenplay. At the 70th Academy Awards, it received nine nominations and won Best Supporting Actor and Best Original Screenplay. The soundtrack features a score by Danny Elfman and songs by singer-songwriter Elliott Smith, including the Oscar-nominated "Miss Misery".
Plot
After being paroled, self-taught mathematics genius Will Hunting, a rebellious twenty year old man, of South Boston works as a janitor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and spends his free time drinking with his friends Chuckie, Billy and Morgan. At work, he anonymously solves a complex mathematical problem posted on a blackboard by Professor Gerald Lambeau as a challenge for his graduate students. Later, Will and his friends start a fight with a gang that includes one of Will's childhood bullies. When police intervene, Will is charged with assaulting an officer. Lambeau posts a more difficult problem to test the mysterious stranger and later catches Will writing the solution. Mistaking Will for a vandal, Lambeau chases him off but quickly realizes that he was solving the problem. At a bar, Will meets and flirts with Skylar, a student about to graduate from Harvard University, with plans to attend medical school at Stanford.Lambeau asks the campus maintenance staff about Will's whereabouts, but learns that he did not come to work. He discovers that Will was placed at MIT through a program for parolees and obtains his parole officer's details. At Will's court appearance, Lambeau watches as Will argues in favor of pro se legal representation and later arranges for him to avoid jail time, on the condition that he study math under Lambeau's supervision and participate in psychotherapy sessions. Will agrees but treats his therapists with mockery. A desperate Lambeau contacts Dr. Sean Maguire, his college roommate, who teaches psychology at Bunker Hill Community College. Unlike the previous therapists, Sean challenges Will's defense mechanisms. In the first session, Sean threatens Will after he insults his deceased wife. In the next sessions, Sean encourages Will to open up and Will invites Sean to move on from his wife's death. Will starts dating Skylar but lies to her about his background.
Sean recounts to Will his first meeting with his wife: he saw her at a bar and fell in love at first sight, giving up his ticket to the famous sixth game of the 1975 World Series to his friends by saying he had to go "see about a girl". Sean tells Will that he never regretted that decision, despite the hardships that followed. Will decides to introduce Skylar to his friends. Lambeau sets up several job interviews for Will, but he scorns them. In particular, he turns down a position at the National Security Agency with a scathing critique of the agency's moral position. After Will refuses Skylar's offer to move to California with her, she calls him out for being scared, and he tells her about his past as an orphan and the abuse he suffered at the hands of his foster father. Will breaks up with Skylar and ridicules the research Lambeau had been doing. Sean confronts Will on his fear of abandonment and failure, and invites him to be honest about what he wants from life. Chuckie encourages Will to take the opportunities offered to him, telling him that every day he hopes that Will will not answer the door, having gone away to pursue a better life.
Will hears Sean and Lambeau argue about his potential, with Sean saying that Lambeau risks ruining Will's future by pushing him too hard. Lambeau leaves, and Sean and Will talk about their shared experience as victims of child abuse. Sean helps Will accept that the abuse he received was not his fault by repeatedly stating, "It's not your fault", causing Will to break down in tears. Will accepts one of the job offers arranged by Lambeau. Sean reconciles with Lambeau and decides to take a sabbatical. For Will's birthday, his friends gift him a car to allow him to commute to work. Chuckie goes to Will's house to pick him up, but happily finds that he left. Will leaves a note for Sean, asking him to tell Lambeau that he had to go "see about a girl".
Cast
- Robin Williams as Dr. Sean Maguire, a therapist and professor of psychology at Bunker Hill Community College from South Boston
- Matt Damon as Will Hunting, a rebellious 20-year-old self-taught mathematics genius and janitor at MIT from South Boston
- Ben Affleck as Chuckie Sullivan, a construction worker and Will's loyal childhood friend
- Stellan Skarsgård as Professor Gerald Lambeau, a Fields Medal-winning professor of mathematics at MIT
- Minnie Driver as Skylar, a wealthy British student at Harvard and Will's love interest
Production
Writing
Actors and screenwriters Ben Affleck and Matt Damon met in their hometown of Cambridge, Massachusetts, becoming friends at a young age. Years later, Damon started writing Good Will Hunting as a final assignment for a playwriting class that he attended in his fifth year at Harvard, turning in a script of around 40 pages instead of the one-act play requested by his professor. Damon said that only the scene of Will and Sean's first meeting survived verbatim from the first script. He left university after getting a role in the 1993 film Geronimo: An American Legend and joined Affleck in Los Angeles, bringing with him the script. Damon asked for Affleck's input, leading to the beginning of their long-standing creative collaboration with Good Will Hunting. Affleck and Damon were inspired to work on the script by director Quentin Tarantino's success story with the production of his 1992 film Reservoir Dogs, which had been picked up despite him being a store clerk due to word of mouth: Tarantino had talked about the film with producer Lawrence Bender, who brought the script to film star Harvey Keitel, whose interest in starring in it led to Tarantino being able to find funding for the film. In Los Angeles, the duo secured small roles in films and commercials, sharing their earnings to sustain themselves while trying to break in the film industry without much success.Affleck and Damon were inspired by the resentful feelings experienced in their childhood toward students who came to Cambridge to attend Harvard and MIT, taking over the city uncaring of respecting its residents. However, Damon became conflicted after attending Harvard himself, seeing that the students were good-willed and witnessing first-hand the dichotomy between local and college life in Cambridge. Affleck and Damon drew on their families and friends' life experiences for inspiration: Affleck's father and his then-girlfriend worked as janitors at Harvard, Affleck and Damon had worked in construction in the summers, and some of Affleck's father and Damon's mother past experiences informed Sean's background story. The duo purposefully wrote Sean's part as one with flexible characteristics, devising it as "the Harvey Keitel part"—meaning a role that suited a Hollywood star, giving the character their best lines but little screen time so it could easily fit in a busy schedule. 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."
Initially, the script dealt with the life of a young self-taught physics genius from South Boston sought after by the NSA for his extraordinary abilities. In scenes inspired by Martin Brest's Beverly Hills Cop and Midnight Run, the young man and his friends lead the NSA agents in chases around the city, as Affleck and Damon felt they had to include an action subplot to make the film commercially appealing. The duo improvised some of the scenes and recorded them on tape while imitating Freeman and Robert De Niro, who they envisioned playing the roles of the therapist and the professor. Affleck and Damon shared the script with film producer Chris Moore, who liked it and decided to help them find a studio to produce it.
Financing
The duo completed the script in 1994 and brought it to their talent agent, Patrick Whitesell, who liked it. However, Whitesell thought it would be almost impossible to find a studio who would produce a film written by and starring two unknown actors, with the only precedent known to him being the 1976 film Rocky, in which previously unknown actor Sylvester Stallone wrote the script and starred in the lead role. At that point, Affleck and Damon had not yet agreed either on the title or on the main character's name, which Damon thought should be Nate. The duo then read a script named Good Will Hunting written by their high school friend Derrick Bridgeman, to whom they promised $10,000 in exchange for using the title if they managed to sell the script. Bridgeman later appeared in the film as a student in one of Lambeau's classes. Whitesell brought Good Will Hunting to the attention of several studio executives by initially promoting it as a Shane Black-style film like The Last Boy Scout. Information about the script spread to other Hollywood creative executives in the span of four days, initiating a bidding war. Affleck and Damon accepted Castle Rock Entertainment's offer of $600,000 in November 1994 at the suggestion of director Richard Linklater, with whom Affleck had worked on the 1993 film Dazed and Confused. After splitting it evenly, both of them spent all of the money in six months, between paying taxes, giving their agents a fee, buying a Jeep Cherokee, and renting a party house by the Hollywood Bowl for months.Film director and Castle Rock founder Rob Reiner urged Affleck and Damon to focus on either the thriller aspect or the relationship between Will and Sean. In one meeting set up by Castle Rock, screenwriter William Goldman read the script and agreed with Reiner, telling Affleck and Damon to drop the thriller storyline. The duo decided to focus on the characters' interpersonal relationship and removed 60 pages of the NSA storyline from the 120-to-130-page script, ending up rewriting it almost entirely. Castle Rock had them rewrite the script several times, but after a year Affleck and Damon began to suspect that studio executives had stopped reading it attentively. To test them, the duo began inserting scenes of Will and Sean having oral sex incongruous to the script, which the executives never mentioned in meetings. Affleck and Damon wanted to direct and star in the film, but the studio did not allow it. After they disagreed with Castle Rock's pick of obscure director Andrew Scheinman, the studio put the film into turnaround, asking Affleck and Damon to find another company that would buy Good Will Hunting for $1 million in thirty days. If they failed, Castle Rock would oust Affleck and Damon from the production, going ahead to make the film with another creative team.
Affleck and Damon went back to the studios that they had previously refused. Several executives set up meetings just to tell them that they would not buy the film. Affleck said that one such meeting with Interscope Communications founder Ted Field inspired him to write a scene of his 2012 film Argo. Studio executives wanted to cast more established actors like Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt in the lead role, but Damon kept reminding them of Stallone's story, which inspired him not to give up. Affleck asked Kevin Smith if he would direct the film and bring it to Miramax Films, as Affleck and Smith had worked together on the 1995 film Mallrats and had been developing the 1997 Miramax production Chasing Amy. Smith said he "wouldn't dare direct" it given its beauty, but brought the script to the attention of Miramax founder Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein liked it, but asked them to remove scenes in which Will played chess and had sex with Sean, proving to Affleck and Damon that he had thoroughly read the script. In the fall of 1995, one day after reading it, Weinstein bought Good Will Hunting from Castle Rock for $1 million, sending the film into production with Affleck and Damon set to star. At Miramax, some executives disagreed with his decision; in particular, producer Cary Woods had previously turned down Affleck and Damon.