Matt Damon Said Ben Affleck Was ‘a Lot Smarter’ Than Him
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck became friends when they were children and they grew up pursuing the same career path. When they graduated high school, their paths diverged, with Damon attending Harvard and Affleck leaving college to pursue acting. Damon said that while he had a more formal education, he thought Affleck was much smarter than him.
Matt Damon thought Ben Affleck was smarter than him
Damon said he knew since childhood that he wanted to be an actor. When he applied for Harvard, he made his ambitions clear.
“They saw that I was dedicated to something and that I tried hard at it,” he told Interview Magazine in 1997. “The opening line in the essay for my application to Harvard was, ‘For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be an actor.’”
Affleck graduated high school after Damon and bounced around colleges before dropping out.
“Then I decided that 20 grand a year could be better spent on things like liquor and women,” he said. “And so that’s the way I went.”
Damon didn’t let his friend disparage his intelligence, though.
“Ben’s too modest to tell you this, but he’s the most well-read person I know,” Damon said. “He’s certainly a lot smarter than I am.”
They teamed up in one of Damon’s college classes
Though Affleck did not attend Harvard, he played an important role in Damon’s collegiate career. Damon was in a playwriting class when he began to write the beginnings of Good Will Hunting. He brought in Affleck to perform the scene for the class.
“I was doing a playwriting class and a theater directing class with David Wheeler, who knew this world that Ben and I both come from,” Damon said. “And when Ben came back from L.A. for Christmas, I showed him this thing I’d written and — because he knows David, too — he came into the class and we acted it out. It was a scene from what later became Good Will Hunting.”
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck wrote ‘Good Will Hunting’ together
By spring break of that year, Damon had a longer draft of the screenplay. Affleck believed what he had was strong and offered to help finish it.
“By then I had this 40-page thing and didn’t know what to do with it. I gave it to Ben, and he looked at it and said, ‘This is really good. We should write this together,’” Damon said. “And I said, ‘I know, but I don’t know where it should go,’ and he said, ‘I don’t either,’ but we agreed to write it. After about a year, Ben and I started talking one night, and the script began flowing right out. Then we wrote it very fast.”
They said that once they started writing together, they raced to the end of the screenplay.
“Once we started, we really got into a groove,” Damon said. “While I was away, I’d write and fax the stuff to Ben, and Ben would fax stuff to me, and we’d write on and edit each other’s faxes. It was basically the same as sitting in a room saying, ‘No, no. I think you should say that.’”
They won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay.
