Twentysomething Ben Affleck has been a baddie long enough. After evil turns in Dazed and Confused and Kevin Smith's ignoble Mallrats, Affleck welcomed the opportunity to play a romantic lead with an entirely different set of problems in Smith's latest effort, Chasing Amy. Rough Cut's Wendy Wilson got to speak with Affleck about Amy before he began filming his next project, Good Will Hunting, directed by Gus Van Sant and co-starring Robin Williams. (He co-wrote the script, too, girls.)
When you read the script, what was your initial reaction? When I read it, it was in pieces, so I read it as it sort of developed. There were times that I thought, "this is interesting." I really didn't know where it was going a lot of times, and I thought that was cool, because there's no real model for this kind of genre. It is, I guess by strict definition, a romantic comedy, but there's not a lot of romantic comedies like it, so there was never any point where you could say, "OK, well, here comes this scene," or, "Yeah, he's taken the woman for granted and he's gonna learn his lesson and he's gonna have this kind of moment." So, there were a few surprises, like all the suggestion about the relationship between Holden and Banky (Jason Lee) and, God, Alyssa's (Joey Lauren Adams) sexual history. Kevin broke a lot of rules. After a while, you understand the generally accepted assumption that you can't run the risk of alienating the audience by making the characters be sympathetic. So, to take those risks is scary and you hope the audience will respond. Then there's that morning-after thing where you're going like, "Oh, God. Did I really do that last night?"
I talked to someone about Fargo who suggested that the reason that movie worked was because of the humor that was used; otherwise it might have been too grim. I think Chasing Amy works for the same reason. There is all of this out-of-bounds stuff, but you laugh at it. I think Kevin's kind of fused two things for the first time: He's taken something heavy and serious and used his enormous talent for comedy to make that palatable, you know what I mean? And there's certainly something that I learned about tone from this movie, about the way that you marry almost two different movies in a way, and make them the same movie. I think a pretty cool accomplishment on Kevin's part was that he was able to pull it off.
What's Kevin like to work with? He was a joy to work with. He was a lot of fun just because he's just a funny guy.
He's a wicked funny writer. Yeah, he's enormously funny. And he's just as funny in person, if not more so, because he knows how to deliver his own stuff, as you can see by the Silent Bob character. He also knows how to write himself the best scene in the movie.
Did you recognize or did Kevin tell you that Chasing Amy is an expanded study about the scene between Dante and his girlfriend in the convenience store in Clerks? I always tease Kevin because my mother was the one who actually told me to go see Clerks.
Your mom did? Yeah, my mother really gives me a hard time. She thinks that if I haven't seen Burnt by the Sun or some movie, she'll say, "You don't see the right movies." She's constantly giving me grief about it. So she said, "You ought to see this Kevin Smith-guy's movie. It's called Clerks, and it's really neat." And I'm like, "I don't know, Clerks? What do I want to see that for?" So finally I went, and I think because my mother told me to go see it, I had an even lower opinion of it, but in the end I kind of loved it. So I always tease Kevin about how my mother told me to go see the most profane movie I'd ever seen.
What did your mom think of Chasing Amy? She hasn't seen it.
Are you going to go with her? I will be there when she's in the theater, but I think I'll be sitting far away from her. I'm sure she'll be really embarrassed. My mother ... while she'll tell me to go see Clerks, she will get embarrassed watching stuff with me and my brother, yeah.
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