Terrence Malick’s “Good Will Hunting”

Sorry, I had to go see about a girl.

Tom Shone has a few “Good Will Hunting”-centric excerpts from a recent interview he did with Matt Damon on his blog. One particularly tasty anecdote involves Damon and cowriter Ben Affleck getting notes from Terrence Malick, who, Shone notes, “happened to be best friends with Affleck’s godfather”:

“We just asked if we could have a meeting with him. We went to Boston to see him. And we had it in the script that my character and Minnie’s left together at the end of the movie. Terry didn’t ready the script but we explained the whole story to him, and in the middle of the dinner, he said, ‘I think it would be better if she left and he went after her.’ And Ben and I looked at each other. It was one of those things where you go: of course that’s better. He said it and he probably doesn’t even remember that he said it. He started talking about Antonioni. ‘In Italian movies a guy just leaves town at the end and that enough.’ And we said of course that’s enough. That’s where we come from. If you just leave that’s a big enough deal. It doesn’t have to build up to anything more.”

Also recommended — the one in which they have to tell Gus Van Sant “What are you talking about? You can’t just fucking smush Ben. That’s a terrible idea.”