The legends of “Good Will Hunting” have generally been told at this point. There’s been books and many oral histories written about the making of the movie. Ben Affleck and Matt Damon worked on the script for years, wrote many different iterations of the movie, some wilder than the finished product and on the way to making it, they considered folks like Kevin Smith, Mel Gibson, Ben Stiller, and others before eventually settling on Gus Van Sant, who would become a good friend of theirs and direct them in lots of films over the years.
But one of the directors who was considered and isn’t super well known is Michael Mann. Damon spoke about this a little bit on the recent Marc Maron podcast and said, even for a test shoot, Mann shot a ridiculous amount of film.
Damon, talking about Clint Eastwood‘s efficiency as a filmmaker (he directed Damon in “Invictus“), noted that once, John Huston shot 18,000 feet of film on his last movie “The Dead.” “That’s nothing. To put that in perspective, I did a screen test with Michael Mann, and we shot 18,000 feet of film in a day,” he revealed. “It was for ‘Good Will Hunting,’ and he was one of the directors considering doing it, and he wanted to put me and Ben on film.”
READ MORE: Ben Stiller Says He Turned Down An Offer To Direct ‘Good Will Hunting’
OK, fine, fun, nice anecdote, right? But on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Damon got into the story much deeper, basically suggesting that Mann was off his rocker, misread the film and totally wanted to turn it into a Michael Mann film.
“I remember he showed us clips of Mexican gangs,” Damon said. “He was like, ‘this is your movie!’ ‘This is the movie you gotta make.’ I was like, “what??’ These dudes have neck tats; they’re Mexican; that’s not at all what South Boston is, man. I didn’t understand, and I dunno; I think he wanted to take it in a really dark, like these dudes are like wacking people in the street. [It was] like… ‘uh, yeah, we’re not doing the Whitey Bulger thing, we’re doing kids from that neighborhood,’ but you know… “
“Anyway, I hadn’t thought about that in a long time,” he continued. “But I do remember him showing to Ben and to us [the Mexican gang bangers footage], we’re sitting there, and he walks out of the room, and we looked at each other, ‘what the f*ck is going on?’ Like we wrote it, that’s our movie. OK. You’re telling us that’s our movie?? But look, every director comes at it from their own [perspective]. It is a director’s medium, so thank god Harvey [Weinstein] gave the job to Gus [Van Sant]. We had wanted Gus the whole time.”
So yes, Michael Mann did not go on to direct “Good Will Hunting,” made lots of crime masterpieces instead, and Gus Van Sant dialed down his arty style to make one of his simplest but most soulful and effective movies of his entire career; talk about understanding the assignment and putting your ego aside. Both conversations are a good listen to give them both a whirl below and perhaps breathe a sigh of relief that we dodged a bullet with Michael Mann’s “Good Will Hunting.”