The Cinderella story of Good Will Hunting launching the careers of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck has the same amount of legend today as Rocky does for Sylvester Stallone. (There’s a story the boys support that they inserted an inappropriate sex scene into the middle of the script just so they’d know if potential producers read that far.) Winning the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay is the right twist for two struggling actors who wrote the film to boost their acting careers, and I’m glad they never completely abandoned that avenue, though it’s clear even though this is a well-written script, it’s full of moments designed to make them look cool, smart and brashly clever.
There’s another story that on the first day of shooting, during a scene between Robin Williams and Stellan Skarsgård, the duo were crying out of happiness hearing their words being spoken. This is a moment I have witnessed on indie films for other writers, and something I went through myself in Film School when I wrote short some actors in the College theater department wanted to perform.
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