When “The Town” hit theaters in September, the quick take was that director, actor and co-writer Ben Affleck had made a modestly-budgeted crowd-pleaser that would likely have a good run at the boxoffice. But along the way, Affleck’s Boston-set ensemble crime drama also became an awards contender of sorts, drawing talk of a Best Picture nomination and prompting a fast move to DVD that’ll put the movie in stores in mid-December, the prime of two seasons: Christmas season, and Oscar season.
Affleck, whose previous work as a director was the Oscar-nominated (for Supporting Actress) “Gone Baby Gone,” is currently spending most of his time in Oklahoma co-starring with Javier Bardem and Rachel McAdams in the next Terrence Malick movie (after Malick’s “The Tree of Life,” which will be released next May). But on a recent trip back to Los Angeles, he sat down with theWrap to talk about the continuing buzz for “The Town.”
How'd you turn the trick of taking a mainstream, commercial crime film and turning it into a film with all this awards talk?
Well, the Warner Brothers people worked really hard, and they always saw this as more than a genre movie. I kept saying to them, “This is not just a heist movie. There’s a lot of other stuff in here thematically that I’m trying to do.” But I would have been a tree falling in the woods without them getting that and putting it out there in the world.
What was that “other stuff” that you were you trying to do with the film?
It’s not that I have anything against pure robbery, heist movies. I like them. But as a director and as an actor, that wasn’t what I wanted to give two years of my life to. What I liked about it, and what I thought was interesting about it, was that it was trying to use traditional genre conventions to let the audience in on these deeper themes: the way children pay for the sins of their parents, the way we’re shaped by the environment that we grow up in, and how difficult it is to change our lives. It’s a story about redemption, and that kind of stuff is a harder sell, both inside the studio and when you get out to the general marketplace. So I had a chance to try to wrap that inside a heist movie.
Were you approached about the project as a director, or an actor?
Director. There was another director who had just dropped out of the project [reportedly Adrian Lyne], and Warners came to me and said, “What do you think of this?” I was nervous, because I’d just directed a Boston movie that was sort of dark, with crime in it, so I thought maybe I’ll get pigeonholed.
That’s always a bad thing to do, worrying about how you’re perceived. But I said, “Let me just star in it.”
