Matt Damon Once Shared His Biggest ‘Good Will Hunting’ Regret
Matt Damon owes a lot of his career to his star-making feature Good Will Hunting. However, there’s one thing about the film he’d change if he could.
Matt Damon once shared this mistake dated ‘Good Will Hunting’
On the surface, it might be hard to believe Damon would end up regretting anything about the movie that made him and Ben Affleck household names. The feature received both critical and commercial praise, earning the two Boston natives their first Oscars in 1998. The movie even far exceeded expectations. Many industry professionals were taken by the script Damon and Affleck crafted. But very few, even the film’s director Gus Van Sant, thought Good Will Hunting would become a phenomenon.
“I didn’t think it would be so successful,” Van Sant once said in an interview with Vulture. “I hoped that if we were lucky, it would do well, but I didn’t envision Oscars.” He paused, then admitted, “Well, there’s always a lottery ticket side of me that thinks ‘You might win,’ so it’s in your head, but you don’t expect it.”
Even years after the film, Damon was still shocked by some of the movie’s noteworthy accomplishments. It was mentioned in the same interview that Good Will Hunting was the seventh highest grossing film in the same year Titanic came out. The Bourne Identity star was floored by this information.
“Was it? Wow, that’s cool,” Damon said. “We were in the theaters with Titanic, and we kind of just drafted them. It didn’t follow any of the models that people were used to, so the box office every week just seemed like a surprise.”
However, for everything the movie did right, there was one glaring error Damon couldn’t help but regret about the feature. Damon sported a particular hairdo as the titular character Will Hunting that he’s never worn before. In hindsight, he wished he didn’t start wearing that hairstyle to begin with.
“You know, and I fought for that hair,” Damon said. “That is so my fault. For whatever weird reason at that age, I loved that haircut. Gus was like, ‘Really?’ Ben was like, ‘Really?’ If you look at Ben’s hair in that movie, it’s totally acceptable by today’s standards, but no, I wanted the frosted fuckin’ hair. I don’t know what my problem was. I looked like I should be singing backup for Color Me Badd.”
What Matt Damon learned from ‘Good Will Hunting’
Good Will Hunting famously went through a lot of rewrites before it became the version audiences saw in theaters. As legend has it, Damon first wrote Good Will Hunting as a 40-page story he’d hand in for a college course. Later, he and his best friend Ben Affleck would spend a few years hammering out the script to make it a full-length feature.
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 once said in an interview with Boston.
However, Affleck and Damon were advised to omit the thriller aspect of the script to focus on the relationship. Still, the script would go through several development stages after the story was made smaller. The changes would continue even while the movie was being filmed. The process taught something valuable about the film industry. But at the same time, it gave him a lot of appreciation for Good Will Hunting.
“It was a lesson in how not to do things,” Damon once told The Age. “And yet it does hold together extraordinarily well, even to somebody like to me who has seen it so many times through so many different stages. I’m glad it’s as cohesive and as coherent as it is, given all the different pieces that we had to put together.”
