<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Originally published in the April 2009 issue For some reason Ben Affleck doesn&amp;#039;t want me to see his car. So he&amp;#039;s picking me up at my hotel in a new hybrid sedan. White. Nice car but distinctly anonymous, devoid of detail, interior unblazoned by the obvious signifiers of a personal life. A fitted Red Sox cap on the floor and his BlackBerry \u2014 that&amp;#039;s it.  &amp;quot;You rented a car?&amp;quot; I say. Affleck sighs. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a loaner.&amp;quot;  We both know this is a tell that the guy doesn&amp;#039;t want to show me anything he doesn&amp;#039;t have to. &amp;quot;Nice,&amp;quot; I say. He opens the driver&amp;#039;s side door, takes a glance back at the hotel. We&amp;#039;re just off the apron, on the street, thirty yards from the valet Affleck has studiously avoided. He&amp;#039;s both jumpy and liquid in his movement. He carries himself as if held together with kite string, which means he looks at once crinkly and cool. Jeans, no belt, plain-Jane sneakers, a black long-sleeved T-shirt. And he looks a little more fragile than you&amp;#039;d expect, like a guy thinking about his persistent back pain. The effect: He walks light on the depthless veneer of the world, here on this lambent late afternoon at the joining edge of Beverly Hills and Culver City, where and when the house shadows always insinuate a little doom to me.  But I&amp;#039;m an out-of-towner. And what the hell, he is Ben Affleck, the one guy in the world who should own this particular geography. But being out in the world hurts him a little. That&amp;#039;s what Affleck shows. In the car behind us, two guys hold up their cell phones, taking pictures of him. For a moment, I think they&amp;#039;re just blocking out the sun. &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#039;t know it would be white,&amp;quot; he says, climbing in, checking the rearview. And would you look at this, there isn&amp;#039;t even a key to jingle. The goddamn car starts with a button or something. &amp;quot;You never know how many white cars there are until you&amp;#039;re driving one.&amp;quot; He up-nods the approaching traffic. A white car crosses. Then another. The guys behind us are in a white car. Yesterday, at LAX, I rented a white car. I swear. &amp;quot;You need to eat,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;You need fish tacos.&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;m fresh off four days in Las Vegas, just coming into the shallow end of my hangover, feeling as spiritless and empty as the very car we&amp;#039;re riding in. &amp;quot;Four days? In Vegas?&amp;quot; he says, the first sparks of animation lamplighting in his face. With the car door closed, the world sealed off, Affleck allows a little of himself to become known. Like every guy, he&amp;#039;s yanked to life by the thread of his own personal chimeras related to Vegas. He&amp;#039;s served time in Vegas. He knows a few things about a few things. He knows this: &amp;quot;Man, you stayed there too long.&amp;quot;  When he changes lanes or looks over his shoulder, he leads with his chin. Wouldn&amp;#039;t you, with a chin like that? He looks at me, chin first, and pronounces: &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re just a mud turtle. That&amp;#039;s what we call it. After three days in Vegas, you become, you know, like the lowest animal there is. Four days is too much. Freakin&amp;#039; mud turtle.&amp;quot; He rubs the pads of his fingers against his thumb, the way people do with grit, with money, and then presses his teeth together, which is how Ben Affleck laughs, starting molar on molar, bringing it up from his throat, from the depths of his chest. Suddenly we&amp;#039;re at a stoplight, and the woman next to us holds up her cell phone, stabs at him from across the lane. White car, too \u2014 I&amp;#039;m not kidding. He doesn&amp;#039;t notice. He&amp;#039;s still conjuring the image of the mud turtle: &amp;quot;You know, living down there, in some pond somewhere, breathing in the mud. It&amp;#039;s just hard to resurface.&amp;quot; I am fighting off the urge to assume anything, trying hard not to conclude that because he borrowed a car he&amp;#039;s a dodgy, fraidycat phantom, living a life governed by fear of what people will draw from the crustier edges of his private world. He&amp;#039;s already been right about a couple of things: how long is too long to spend in Vegas, the preponderance of white automobiles. I respect wisdom. I&amp;#039;m already beginning to see him, that Boston guy, the man&amp;#039;s man, the guy who tore off three of the best monologues in movie history \u2014 at the end of Good Will Hunting, in a cameo in Boiler Room, and at the climax of Chasing Amy \u2014 man-o-logues, transformative, deconstructible speeches that speak right into the skull box of the self-aware. They are what you remember about him. Not J.Lo. Not Gigli. Not his dim pass in Jersey Girl. Affleck the writer, once a cat-around guy, still a seriously good cardplayer, and now the emergent actor-director of his generation. He&amp;#039;s hard on the heels of Gone Baby Gone, a film so provocative in its moral questioning, so deep in the tissue of a Boston neighborhood that it made Scorsese&amp;#039;s much celebrated The Departed look genteel and chockablock with its crank-up-the-Goodfellas intensity. There was one great movie about Boston a couple of years ago: It was Affleck&amp;#039;s. And he wrote it, adapted it from Dennis Lehane, with a friend from high school. He is a man&amp;#039;s man, a friend&amp;#039;s friend.  Me, I am a mud turtle, and he&amp;#039;s still trying to help. &amp;quot;The best thing for a hangover,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;is something one straight man can&amp;#039;t do for another straight man.&amp;quot; He&amp;#039;s right about that, too.   It is 3:15 P.M. on a Monday. We are in the dark, quiet back room of a restaurant called El Cholo. When we dropped the car, a guy at the valet stand took out his camera phone and asked, just by poking the camera in the air, a gesture that didn&amp;#039;t exist ten years ago, Can I have your image to carry in my pocket? Affleck squinted, dipped his head. He gives in to this outside world \u2014 Yes, take my image \u2014 but it does not interest him to see it.  Inside the restaurant, when we are discussing his next movie, State of Play \u2014 a Beltway potboiler in which he plays an up-and-coming, last-great-hope-of-the-party congressman who gets caught in a scandal involving a woman \u2014 only then does Affleck start to take up space. Physical space. He sits up straighter, leans forward, crabs at the air with his finger, bends in conspiratorially. When he talks, he gets bigger. &amp;quot;I was looking for congressmen who were real stars, and when I told people that, they looked at me like I said I wanted to see a flying horse. But I got steered to three guys: Anthony Weiner, Patrick Murphy, and Rahm Emanuel. All were impressive. Rahm was good enough to have one lunch with me. Very intense, an explosive, fast-talking guy, very rapid-fire, able to delineate things very quickly, able to run through them \u2014 like boom! \u2014 he takes over the room.&amp;quot; Then he chins forward, head-tilts. &amp;quot;In a lot of ways, I just tried to study the way he moved, the way he sat. These guys are physical, too, but it&amp;#039;s hard to pick up on unless you&amp;#039;re with them.&amp;quot; He grinds things as he speaks, winnows details, finds a thread and pulls it. He speaks in runs, funny, at times halting, always bearing in on a cleaner, more relevant point. This tends to lead him to the larger issues of his work, his career, his path through life. And although there&amp;#039;s nothing obviously self-possessed about him, his answers always take the shape of a metaphor for himself.   Look at this next passage, for example. Read it aloud and you will automatically sound like Ben Affleck. I typed it carefully, direct from the tape, leaving out no stutter or fragment. Read it with speed, with considered imprecision, as if what&amp;#039;s occurring to you might really lead you to the next point. Replace calculation with momentum. Speak a little quicker at the end of sentences; be excited as you near conclusions. My question was: What is so interesting about you, anyway? What would you write about if you were writing the story yourself? He said: What&amp;#039;s the most radical twist \u2014 or the most surprising thing about myself \u2014 is that none of the stuff you read, none of it has anything to do with me, with my life, my work. I&amp;#039;m a very straightforward, pretty boring guy. And that&amp;#039;s just the fucking truth. I work harder now than I ever have in my life, because I got a family. I worry about that. Yeah, I worry about the world, but not all the time. Sometimes I&amp;#039;m just really selfish, just like anyone else. I&amp;#039;ve stopped looking at press coverage, Internet, any kind, because it kinda bothers me. It&amp;#039;s ugly, you know, where I show up, because it&amp;#039;s either kind of venal, or at least it&amp;#039;s, like, glib, and it&amp;#039;s kinda misleading. It&amp;#039;s about a construct. But the most, to me, the most, if I had to pick one thing that&amp;#039;s interesting about me, if I were writing a profile, it would be that I&amp;#039;m not really like any of those things. Because who I am, as a person, in my everyday life, wouldn&amp;#039;t sell any magazines. And even when I&amp;#039;ve been in circumstances like relationships ended, where that seemed like high drama, the truth was much more pedestrian when you got right down to it. And I think that&amp;#039;s more interesting, more interesting as a writer \u2014 it&amp;#039;s more interesting, you know, looking at it from a filmmaker&amp;#039;s perspective, the acting perspective, like, the more I \u2014 the truth, you know, the truth of the fact is that we&amp;#039;re kind of all much more connected and, you know, ordinary, in a way. I don&amp;#039;t mean ordinary as in plain. I mean ordinary as in real. I have been lucky, in acting. And that&amp;#039;s different than how I grew up. I didn&amp;#039;t have money when I grew up. I didn&amp;#039;t have these opportunities. You know, I have them now. I&amp;#039;ve had things happen to me that were, well, things that I&amp;#039;m grateful for, and I&amp;#039;ve had things happen for me that I resent. I won&amp;#039;t \u2014 no, I shouldn&amp;#039;t say resent. I&amp;#039;ve had things happen for me, and to me, and because of me, things that I wish were different, but not any more or less so, truly, than anybody else. I look at the pie chart of my emotional makeup: I think it&amp;#039;s pretty balanced in terms of, like, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And there, in the little tequilar\u00EDa, Affleck&amp;#039;s doing more than flooring the stream-of-consciousness accelerator. He&amp;#039;s not throwing a bunch of monkey shit against the actor wall to see what sticks. He&amp;#039;s taking a boilerplate, stupid, out-of-the-gate question on my part and road-mapping his psyche with the answer. And he isn&amp;#039;t using the question to make veiled references to the frustrations of fame; he&amp;#039;s just saying it. Affleck will tell you straight out that one thing he hates is that he can&amp;#039;t take his child to school without a bunch of sweatpants-wearing, camera-wielding, junior-college-dropout paparazzi poaching the schoolyard, yelling at the two of them, &amp;quot;Where&amp;#039;s Jen?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Where&amp;#039;s your mommy?&amp;quot; It scares him. It alarms him that there are idiots in the world who can make money by getting a rise out of a child who&amp;#039;s probably due some certainty that her mom is just where she&amp;#039;s supposed to be. He hates that shit. Simple as that.  And that fascination with the ordinary, with the real \u2014 he&amp;#039;s not making some actor&amp;#039;s pass at appreciating the common man. It&amp;#039;s evident in his work. Strength in the ordinary marks the best roles he&amp;#039;s played. What do you call the pack of mooks in Good Will Hunting if not ordinary? Affleck doesn&amp;#039;t just climb into the skin of these guys, he doesn&amp;#039;t simply inhabit them: He wrote them. He belched them up. This informs his choices as a director, too. The flaking porches, the overloose chain-link fences in Gone Baby Gone? Ordinary. Real. &amp;quot;Making it real, that was the touchstone of that movie for me,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;You know, you come to show me somebody wearing some piece of wardrobe, and if you can&amp;#039;t tell me the store he would have bought it in, or how the character would have been able to afford it, or where the store is, or if it&amp;#039;s too far away from where this person could shop, then we&amp;#039;re not putting it in the movie. Just like that. I saw it as a kind of radical realism. In some ways, it was a fallback \u2014 it allowed me to make fewer choices. Because I could let that make some of the decisions for me. It&amp;#039;s freeing.&amp;quot; Affleck sits hips half open to the room, not squared up in the least. There are occasional pulses from his BlackBerry. The food comes. He glances at the television into the choppy ocher light of ESPN, where the current New England quarterback is saying he&amp;#039;ll make room for the return of the old New England quarterback. Boston sports. &amp;quot;There go your boys,&amp;quot; I murmur.  Right then I realize that I can pretty much surmise what the inside of his real car looks like. I can dream up that car without rolling a mile on the odometer of my brain. I don&amp;#039;t need to sit in a pile of damp graham-cracker crumbs to know Ben Affleck has kids. His wife had a baby not two weeks ago. So two car seats. Probably an SUV. Kind of a dignified mess, punctuated by an expensive nav system and icy-lensed sunglasses on each visor. And right now that car is parked a lifetime from here, no more than ten miles as the crow flies, on the crescent of his driveway up a canyon he won&amp;#039;t tell me about. Like that. That&amp;#039;s Ben Affleck&amp;#039;s car. I just bet you. Still, it&amp;#039;s odd to be with a guy whose best art is born in the details of the mundane \u2014 of the real, as he says \u2014 who is so unwilling to reveal so many details about the way he lives now.  Affleck winces. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not a crazy, crazy pro-football guy. I mean, I like the Pats. I followed the Pats this year without Brady, yeah.&amp;quot; He shakes his head. &amp;quot;My father made a lot of money, he ran a little book, and in the end he just learned to bet heavy against New England when I was a kid. So Steve Grogan and his bad knees bought us our first VCR and first washer-dryer, before my mother threw him out. So that taught us from a young age to view pro football with disdain and was just an opportunity to view Patriots fans as fans who would bet with consistently broken hearts, no matter what.&amp;quot; We clank along, fork to plate, a little back-and-forth about the Yankees signing Teixeira, then through the movies rundown \u2014 Mickey Rourke&amp;#039;s turn in The Wrestler, for starters. Affleck has no trouble isolating Rourke&amp;#039;s character as something smaller and less profoundly public than a washed-up pro wrestler: To him, he&amp;#039;s simply a father. &amp;quot;All of us have a sense of what&amp;#039;s real in terms of the way we relate to our families. You know, people have damaged relationships with their parents. A lot of people do. And you go see these movies where they have this bad relationship and it all works out. On the one hand, it&amp;#039;s satisfying; it ameliorates some sense of the unfinished business in our own lives. But on the other hand, there&amp;#039;s a part of you that knows that it&amp;#039;s not really true. That&amp;#039;s the falseness of resolution. And there&amp;#039;s a tragedy in that movie, a mortal heartbreak, in the sense that it was something as mundane, as dumb, as sleeping all day that lost everything with his daughter.&amp;quot; He draws a breath then. He breathes it out. It&amp;#039;s a sigh or a grunt. Or he&amp;#039;s choked up. I pinch one eye shut and take a look. There is no telling. Maybe the fish has gone down the wrong pipe.   A couple of weeks later, I&amp;#039;m sitting in my home in Indiana, listening to this conversation, dimly staring at the mud of my own yard, at the stupid piles of rotting leaves I forgot to take care of, at some stupid plastic toy, flagrantly forgotten by my neighbor&amp;#039;s children, all of it to be buried under a coming snow, when Affleck calls \u2014 just like that \u2014 to see if I need anything else.  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m thinking of opening the story with that stupid car,&amp;quot; I say. &amp;quot;Which?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;The white one,&amp;quot; I say. &amp;quot;The loaner. That was strange. Better yet, I&amp;#039;m going to open with a description of your real car. The one I never saw. I&amp;#039;m going to act like I saw it. Describe it using the kind of detail I see in your movie.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yeah,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;You probably could.&amp;quot; So I start. The two car seats, the sunglasses, a little pile of bills, a cup of half-dried Jamba Juice in the cupholder, maybe a bottle of aspirin on the seat. Affleck laughs but doesn&amp;#039;t give away a thing. &amp;quot;The thing about the car is this,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I drive you in the car and you describe it. You notice something I haven&amp;#039;t \u2014 you pick up on something, some inelegant little smear, or get a glimpse of my daughter&amp;#039;s art from school, some little forgotten whatever. And maybe it hurts someone in my family, somewhere, somehow, and then it&amp;#039;s like, &amp;#039;Fuck it, the next guy doesn&amp;#039;t get in the car.&amp;#039; Then the question is, &amp;#039;Why don&amp;#039;t you let me see your car?&amp;#039; &amp;quot; &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s the circle of life. Anyway, I did try on your hat,&amp;quot; I say, which I&amp;#039;d done on the ride back to the hotel. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m sorry about that.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;How&amp;#039;d it feel?&amp;quot; he asks. &amp;quot;Your head may be bigger than mine,&amp;quot; I say, &amp;quot;which is really saying something. And I&amp;#039;m a Yankees fan.&amp;quot; He doesn&amp;#039;t bite. He suffers Yankees fans the same way he gimps by the paparazzi: head low, eyes down. He&amp;#039;s surrounded. I tell him I have lice. He replies that he has crabs. We hang up. In the two weeks since we met, he&amp;#039;s opened up with a part in the ensemble comedy He&amp;#039;s Just Not That Into You. Why? Why not get on with the business of being a director? Why waste your time with trifles, even if they bust open the box office? He offers up an unapologetic answer, conceding nothing about the choice or the movie. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s four days&amp;#039; work,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Four days, you know? Directing, that&amp;#039;s years. Years. But four days? You&amp;#039;re in, you&amp;#039;re out. You know, they asked, and I thought it was a funny script. And I wanted to work with Jennifer Aniston.  &amp;quot;There are fewer projects in the life of a director. Less room for small choices,&amp;quot; he says. The next film he&amp;#039;ll direct, an adaptation of Chuck Hogan&amp;#039;s novel Prince of Thieves, is in development. He wrote the screenplay, and he&amp;#039;s starring in this one, calling it The Town, after Charlestown, a rocky little neighborhood in Boston. Then he answers the question he&amp;#039;ll answer for the next four years of junkets and car rides, the one he&amp;#039;ll get to on the DVD commentary track and in the &amp;quot;Making of The Town&amp;quot; bonus feature, the question I don&amp;#039;t have to complete, the one about Boston: Is he worried about doing too much Boston?  &amp;quot;Yeah, I think there&amp;#039;s always a worry among directors that \u2014 unless you&amp;#039;re some genius like Paul Thomas Anderson \u2014 you&amp;#039;ll get pigeonholed, that maybe you can only tell stories about one city. It&amp;#039;s simple: I just respond to the story. I have since I first read it. That fact that it&amp;#039;s set in Boston may be part of that, but I&amp;#039;m not out there looking to document Boston. I want to tell good stories.&amp;quot; It was like that with Gone Baby Gone. He says it wasn&amp;#039;t the city so much as it was the choices the main character faced that drew him to it. Knowing Boston allowed Affleck to make fewer decisions, fewer assumptions about the place, and focus more on the story. He starts, he winds up. We&amp;#039;re on the phone, nineteen hundred miles apart, but I know he&amp;#039;s about to launch into a man-o-logue, which will tea-leaf a central dilemma in his own life, as a man, as a father, as a guy who left home to become a guy who tells stories about home. He tells three stories when he tells one. He&amp;#039;s good at it. &amp;quot;I thought Gone Baby Gone was provocative, not in an insulting way and not in some issue-based way. It&amp;#039;s just about a hard choice. My experience with becoming an adult is, you come to this place where you see that you have this set of beliefs. And you run up against things that kind of defy that. You get into a situation where there isn&amp;#039;t one simple answer and all the arrogance, all the surety of youth is either thrown back at you or it&amp;#039;s at least ineffective. And then the world is thorny, and the world is fucked up and very hard to manage, and it&amp;#039;s impossible to know whether you did the right thing or the wrong thing. It&amp;#039;s about being disabused of this idea that there&amp;#039;s a stone-cold right and wrong. The guy makes this choice, and he&amp;#039;s trying to correct himself from another choice he&amp;#039;s made, you know, the way we do, where we get reeled along, when it&amp;#039;s a little out of control, one thing you did piling on top of another. You have to reckon.&amp;quot; He goes on with his story \u2014 it is longer, and in some ways it is unfinished. He&amp;#039;s a writer; I figure he&amp;#039;ll get back to it somehow. We check a couple of things. We string out thank-yous to each other from here to there, then he hangs up, and I&amp;#039;m back to staring at the snow.  An hour later, an e-mail blonks into my computer. It&amp;#039;s from Affleck. The subject line is blank. Here is what he wrote:  The car has two car seats in the back. On the floor is a lightweight screen which, when raised, blocks a view of the rear seats. Photographers and video paparazzi will cut me and my wife off in traffic trying to look through the front window (the only one without a tint) to see if the kids are in back. The idea is, if they have no hope of seeing anything, they won&amp;#039;t drive recklessly trying to look in. The rest of what is in my car is neither private nor interesting. I&amp;#039;ve been listening to Tell Tale Signs by Bob Dylan, so that was on the iPod the day of the interview. I quit smoking, so there is only change in the ashtrays \u2014 but after three and a half years, I still think about it quite a bit, from time to time. The car is powered by an internal combustion engine \u2014 don&amp;#039;t suppose it makes any difference that I feel badly about that. My wife drives a hybrid, and my other car, as they say, is a motorcycle. So if you amortize the mpg over all the vehicles, it&amp;#039;s pretty good. Except, if I&amp;#039;m being honest, mostly the motorcycle sits in the driveway these days, like a specter from a past life. Hard to justify a Hayabusa with two kids, but I still feel the phantom pains some days. The tips of the index and middle finger on my left hand, feeling for the clutch, a faint brush across the tops of my toes, and the pull of a throttle rolling open. The memory of shifting gears gathers dust on the drive as I walk up, past the relic of an old life and into the next one. I hit reply: &amp;quot;Thanks for the look. Sounds pretty ordinary. Sounds real.&amp;quot; PLUS: Casey, Hollywood&amp;#039;s Other Affleck "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a5644/ben-affleck-0409/>