Matt Damon Once Compared Writing With John Krasinski to Writing With Ben Affleck

As many know, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck came together to write the Oscar-nominated movie Good Will Hunting. Years later, Damon found himself collaborating in a similar way with The Office alum John Krasinski.

Matt Damon found his and Ben Affleck’s writing process for ‘Good Will Hunting’ inefficient

Damon’s Good Will Hunting script went through a long and thorough process to hit the big screen. As Damon recalled speaking to Boston Magazine, the idea was initially conceived as an assignment he’d written for class.

“I was in my fifth year at Harvard, and I had a few electives left. There was this playwriting class and the culmination of it was to write a one-act play, and I just started writing a movie,” Damon said. “So I handed the professor at the end of the semester a 40-some-odd-page document, and said, ‘Look, I might have failed your class, but it is the first act of something longer.'”

Afterward, he brought his 40-paged script to Affleck, and the two would end up writing and rewriting the movie. But initially, the movie looked much different than it ended up being.

“We came up with this idea of the brilliant kid and his townie friends, where he was special and the government wanted to get their mitts on him. And it had a very Beverly Hills Cop, Midnight Run sensibility, where the kids from Boston were giving the NSA the slip all the time,” Affleck said.

Years later, a much older and more experienced Damon would look back on his writing process with Affleck. And although it was rewarding, he also found it lacking in some areas.

“I think that writing process for Good Will Hunting was so inefficient,” he once told Entertainment Tonight. “You know, because we didn’t really understand structure so we wrote thousands of pages. We’d be like, ‘Well, what if this happened?,’ and then we’d just write different scenes. So, we had all these kind of disparate scenes and then we kind of tried to jam them together into something that looked like a movie.”

Matt Damon compared writing a film with John Krasinski to writing ‘Good Will Hunting’ with Ben Affleck

Damon would eventually find himself partnering with another writer/actor for a feature film. Promised Land was a 2012 drama based on a screenplay by Damon and Krasinski. The two also ended up starring in the movie as the leads, although Gus Van Sant was tapped to direct.

Krasinski originally came up with the idea after being inspired by stories written in the New York Times about hydraulic fracturing.

“I wanted to make a movie about American identity,” he once told Fast Company about the film.

Likewise, the Bourne Identity star was similarly interested in the movie’s story and themes.

“That’s personally something I think about a lot,” Damon said. “The rise in corporate power, increasing disenfranchisement, a feeling that the system is rigged.”

Damon had such a good time writing the script with Krasinski that he compared it to writing with Affleck.

“The only other person I’ve ever written with is Ben [Affleck],” Damon once said in an interview with Elle. “I had never sat down and written a script since Good Will Hunting. And it was just so fun. I just found it to be exactly like writing with Ben. Ideas wouldn’t totally form until we got together, and when we got together things would happen really fast.”

John Krasinski found writing a film terrifying after starring in ‘The Office’

Before he transitioned into becoming both a successful movie star and director, Krasinski was primarily known for his role in The Office. But thinking about his career after The Office proved to be intimidating for the Quiet Place filmmaker.

“With the show coming to a close, my identity of being that character is going to be over. Basically I’ll be relying on what I’ve built and what I am and who I’m trying to be,’ Krasinski said.

His decision to write films only added to these concerns. But they were challenges Krasinski was able to meet and overcome with his success.

“So there’s a total terrifying fear there. There’s also the terrifying fear of writing something and being like, ‘This is actually who I am and who I’ve always wanted to be—I hope you guys accept that.’ That’s terrifying,” he confided.