Ben Affleck reveals his father’s job as a Harvard janitor inspired him and Matt Damon when writing Good Will Hunting | Hollywood

Ben looks back

During a conversation with GQ magazine, Ben looked back at writing the film with his close friend Matt. After being turned down for the ‘big roles’, Ben, together with Matt Damon, were inspired to write the script for Good Will Hunting. And he shared that his father inspired him a lot.

Ben said, “My father had that job at Harvard… He was a janitor, I think at the time I like a lot of young people and maybe even older people really wanted to have my dad to be a hero. And I think I took some of that and into that sort of idea, but we really… faked it. When we had to have elaborate sophisticated mathematical solutions, we had to call on people who could do that.”

He added, “We heard that on Star Trek when they were going to write their sci-fi stuff, the writers would just say ‘tech, tech tech’. So we did it. And then people were like, ‘I’m sorry, what is the tech?’ We’re like, ‘Oh, we thought that was a thing’. That’s how you do it in the show business. And they were like, ‘No one does that’. We had mathematicians at MIT who by the way, could have been totally making it up.”

About the film

Robin Williams-starrer, Good Will Hunting (1997) features a very young Matt Damon in the prodigal titular role being led to greatness by the mentor he simply chanced upon, Sean Maguire (played by Robin Williams). The biggest takeaway from the movie, which the audience realises through Matt’s Will, is that happiness and success aren’t always about obligations. Directed by Gus Van Sant, the film was written by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. Ben and Matt won an Oscar for best original screenplay.