Smash Notes
Ben Affleck on “Animals,” Matt Damon, and His Family
Ben Affleck sat down with Willie Geist at Fouquet's in Tribeca to discuss his new Netflix thriller, "Animals," including the questions about marriage that inspired the film, and how he chose the cast. Affleck also discussed his decades-long friendship with Matt Damon, and their production company, Artists Equity. He also opens up about the recent passing…
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Notes
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Ben Affleck asked Jen Garner to play his wife, and she told him she was not going to do it. He thinks she is a great actress, and he wanted to see another side of her because he knows her so well. He says she is, as usual, a little wiser than he is.
Matt Damon had just gotten the Odyssey, and Ben Affleck says Damon was as happy as Affleck had ever seen him the day he got the job. Affleck knew it meant a lot. Damon had already had the opportunity to do lots of work, and the Odyssey was clearly meaningful. Affleck was really happy for him. He calls the experience great, and he thinks it would have been great even absent the result. Affleck decided to play the part himself rather than risk somebody else going off in another direction. Garner was the person he hoped would play the wife, for the same reason he likes working with Matt Damon, his brother, and people he has known a long time: you can steer them toward another side. He talked to her. She said she was not going to play his wife. He understood.
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One panelist knows for absolute certain that a movie is better when the people making it share the incentive to make it good. The environment is better, the likelihood of quality is higher, and the experience of the human beings doing the work improves.
If all twelve other people in the room are invested, they stay a little longer or try a little harder and pick up an extra piece or an extra shot, because people are going to watch. If all someone cares about is the check and going home, and nobody treats the person as important to the process, the extra shot gets no help. A slider that is off is just too bad. Some people still work to a higher standard anyway, just because of who they are, and they give a shit. One panelist does not want to ask someone to care a whole hell of a lot more for nothing, and wants people to feel connected to the final result because they are. The connection was the ethos.
Another panelist says buy-in works, and one panelist agrees. The highest likelihood of predicting a result has to do with the incentive. From a very early age, people learn by reward and punishment: a timeout or a spanking, or a cookie, shows a kid which way to go. In adolescence, the rules make sense because they help everyone get along. Sharing the incentive spreads the awareness that the work has to be good. Without the share, people are less apt to do the extra work.
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Ben Affleck says artificial intelligence is always going to be error prone. A calculator, the kind of computing people already know, gives the same precise result every time someone says four times four. Artificial intelligence is probabilistic. It works like a bookmaker setting a line and finding a mean, then landing in a zone. When a result is wrong, or when the system states something with tremendous authority and then admits the fault, the miss is how the technology does what it does successfully.
In 1982, traders had computers sell a stock as soon as it hit a certain number. Everybody did the same thing. The computer sales dumped the stocks, caused a panic, and wiped the market out. The lesson was to stop handing the wheel over entirely to the technology.
Ben Affleck calls the wish to remove the human from the loop the most pernicious notion. Treating efficiency as a count of how many people can be eliminated will fail. Nobody wants to live in a world like that. The technology needs management and expert guidance. Coding harnesses still have to be sat with, fixed, and iterated. Left unchecked, they will likely sail off and rewrite half a code base. They are bounded by context, they often forget things, and the permissions they receive have to be chosen carefully.
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Ben Affleck says what really stays with him, and what he hopes his children take from his life and career, is that their dad did not give up and did not hold himself above anybody else. He was successful in direct correlation to the hard work he put in. Sometimes you work hard and still do not get there. Doing the work anyway leaves an esteem that no one can take away.
A happy life follows from your own sense of what counts as success and failure. It does not need someone else to say the work was great, and it does not need the approval of the whole world. He loves Animals, wants people to see it, and thinks they will like it. He makes movies mindful of the audience, their time, and their experience, and he can take appropriate pride in work he wanted to do without over-inflating himself. His kids keep him humble.
The most important example he can set is apologizing when he makes a mistake. He tells his children they are right, he is really sorry, and the mistake was his fault. A relationship with somebody who cannot apologize or admit when they have done something wrong is almost impossible to keep meaningful. He wants his kids to be able to say that when they read something as wrong, thoughtless, or unwise, they may be right.
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Ben Affleck says philanthropists should not show up and dictate how local work gets done. Flying in people from Europe or North America and paying them to stand around as experts leaves no real value and no real improvement where they work. His model is to invest in local organizations until they become sustainable and need no further investing. The work includes women victims of gender-based violence in war, capacity building with coffee farmers and growers, education, internal health, access to clean water, and healthcare.
The abrupt dissolution of USAID raised the stakes. Affleck calls USAID a tiny fraction of the US federal budget and a very meaningful piece of the aid that goes out to the world. He says it was one of the noblest things the United States government did, and it is now wiped out, so the need is even greater. An ongoing Ebola crisis is underway in the DRC, in Eastern Congo, where they are working. Half of the money from the millionaire went to trying to stem and limit the spread of Ebola.
Affleck says a problem far away is still your problem if Ebola gets out and crosses the borders. He also believes people with good fortune and something to give benefit from helping others. It gets them out of their own lives, connects them to other people, and is quite healing. He hopes the work has done some good for other folks, and he knows it has done a lot for him.