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Your film script and perseverance ... a Lesson to be learnt. How Good Will Hunting (Finally) Got Made While the film is about how brilliant minds work outside traditional systems and institutions, the story of how it got made offers a similar lesson in success—and how difficult it is to achieve. Damon had started the script for a playwriting class he was taking at Harvard in 1993 and later sought Ben Affleck’s collaboration. At the time, both were Cambridge, MA, natives who were struggling actors in L.A. One of their main goals in working on Good Will Hunting together was to give themselves prominent acting roles. "We never cared about money—we wanted to be in the movie. That was our only thing. That was our big ask," Matt Damon later told Boston magazine. After their agent shopped the script to every studio in town, they found themselves in the unlikely position of being locked in a bidding war before landing their first-choice studio, the film giant Castle Rock Entertainment. But a short time later Damon and Affleck began butting heads with the studio over who would direct the movie. They were told to either find a different studio to buy the rights or lose the chance to act in it altogether. Walking away from their vision simply wasn't an option. They went back to studios that had previously shown interest only to realize they'd both become pariahs. Production companies that earlier had fought tooth and nail for the script now only met with them to tell them they could forget about ever getting a deal. When Miramax finally came through with an offer, it felt to them like a miracle. Still, for the next four years Damon and Affleck continued to sweat it out as the project repeatedly stalled—ultimately reaching an agreement on a director (Gus Van Sant, a relative unknown at the time), confronting script rewrites, casting issues, and the range of other delays typical of Hollywood productions. It was landing the late, A-list comedian Robin Williams in 1997 in a co-starring role that clinched the deal for the movie to be made. Upon its release in 1998, Good Will Hunting became a sleeper hit and garnered nine Oscar nominations, grossing $226 million worldwide. Williams won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, and Affleck and Damon won Oscars for Best Original Screenplay. The young Cambridge natives’ careers were made: The Bourne franchise, Ocean’s Eleven, Argo—all those later career achievements were built on the original success that took so much effort to pull off. Damon and Affleck believed in the dream they had, and despite so many obstacles they stayed true to the passion that first drove them.
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