Ben Affleck Questioned His Entire Existence When He Directed ‘Gone Baby Gone’

Ben Affleck decided to fully commit to directing like he never did before when he filmed Gone Baby Gone. But the scale of his decision left the actor experiencing a bit of an existential crisis.

Ben Affleck found directing ‘Gone Baby Gone’ terrifying

Affleck was very passionate about his project Gone Baby Gone. It was Affleck’s comeback film after taking a brief hiatus from the spotlight, and helped rehabilitate his career. But Affleck had no idea how successful the film would be, and was understandably stressed during the process of making it.

“You use the word ‘nervous’ when you mean ‘jittery.’ I, on the other hand, was suffering from a fundamental questioning of my very existence. There are no training wheels for an experience like this. You can observe all the directors you like when you’re an actor, but it’s not the same as being inside it. It was terrifying,” Affleck once told Orange County Register. “There was no time to worry about how I was being perceived. There was no time for personality or putting on airs. There was only time to worry about actual execution,”

But his concerns only pushed Affleck to make the movie as good as it could be.

“I think I was terrified because I wanted it to work so much. A lot of actors direct movies but I thought the stakes were kind of higher for me because I really, really cared,” he once told JPS Media. “And I had decided that if it wasn’t going to work it wasn’t going to be for lack of effort. So I just worked as hard as I possibly could on every single thing, every single day. I said that if this failed it would not be because I didn’t work as hard as I possibly could…every day.”

Ben Affleck realized his 1 weakness as a storyteller making ‘Gone Baby Gone’

Affleck is no stranger to scripting features. The actor famously collaborated with Damon to write Good Will Hunting, after all, which earned them both Oscars. But making Gone Baby Gone was a different experience, and not simply because Affleck was directing. Gone Baby Gone had a lot of twists and turns, operating as a very plot-driven movie. This made it even more complicated than penning the very character-driven Good Will Hunting.

“It was so complex, plot-wise and structurally – it was not a conventional screenplay structure. So I had some challenges,” Affleck said. “

Fortunately, Affleck didn’t have to come up with the plot, which was already served to him through the movie’s source material. He admitted that his true strength as a storyteller was character work.

“It was harder than I thought,” he said. “So I thought I could rely on the plot here [in the novel] and fill in the color between the lines, but I made a mistake with that assumption. It was really, really hard because you pull a few things apart and then you realize how everything relies on everything else and it can all fall apart. So it was a really tough thing to do, to try and distil it all and have it still make sense.”

Why Ben Affleck didn’t star in ‘Gone Baby Gone’

Although Affleck directed the movie, another Affleck would actually star in the film. His younger brother Casey was tapped to lead the crime thriller to critical and box-office success. There was a brief time where Affleck entertained starring in the project. But he couldn’t imagine directing and acting at the same time.

“It just sort of shifted because I was terrified of acting and directing,” Affleck said in a resurfaced interview with Collider. “The thought was completely daunting. The idea of directing, alone, was terrifying. I don’t know how in the world guys like Clint Eastwood manage to do Unforgiven or Dances with Wolves, [in every shot] you’re in it and acting and it just seems incredibly difficult.”

Affleck would later both direct and act in The Town a couple of years later, proving his ability to do both.