Affleck happy to play ‘Reindeer Games’

Jeffrey K. Howard

Monday, March 6, 2000 | 9:16 a.m.

With a little help from his buddies Matt Damon, Kevin Smith and the planet-killing meteor from "Armageddon," Ben Affleck has quickly become one of Hollywood's A-list actors. The 28-year-old has at least five films scheduled for release this year alone.

In his latest outing, "Reindeer Games," co-starring Charlize Theron, Affleck is carrying a big-budget action flick by himself for the first time.

Under the lightning-paced direction of John Frankenheimer ("The Manchurian Candidate," "Ronin"), Affleck may have established himself as the first real action hero for the new century.

Question: For "Reindeer Games," which came first, the character, the script or director John Frankenheimer?

Answer: (Laughs) The script came first and I thought it was really fun. This was going to be a fun change of pace for me, but I didn't want to do it without John. Once you get to know John, you come to realize that there isn't anyone like John, nor will there ever be. Once he agreed to do the movie, I was really thrilled.

Q: How has your life been since your success with "Good Will Hunting" and winning an Academy Award?

A: Really good. It was crazy for a while, but now I'm settling in and I'm not freaked out as much. This actually happened during the course of shooting "Reindeer Games," because we were up shooting in Canada and I just decided to apprentice myself to John and I was able to separate all of the craziness that was going on in my life. This is what's so strange. You have no success in your life whatsoever and then you get some and you enjoy some success and it creates a thrilling and exciting atmosphere.

But you also get scared, because all of a sudden you have something to lose, where before, I didn't.

Q: What did you take away with you from working with Frankenheimer?

A: One of the best things I learned from John is just by looking at the span of his career and all of things he's done, and how he's reinvented himself and his career. One of the hardest things to do is to make a great movie. Even harder than that is to make several great movies and maybe even harder than that is to have a long career. John has done all three and is a good example of being in this business for the long haul.

He actually said something to me that Francis Ford Coppola told to Matt Damon, which is that they had worked just as hard on the movies that worked as the movies that didn't. You can drive yourself crazy. So, that was a good lesson to learn.

Now I've learned how to focus on the things that are important in my life. John is also a great film school. I learned a lot about the directing process and experienced the depth of knowledge he has about the process, the history of the medium itself. I admire his talent and perspective.

Q: How did instant success affect you?

A: Well, I wasn't used to anyone knowing who I was or being the focus of anyone's attention for the five seconds that it took to bump into them on the subway. From the inside out, it can seem really overwhelming, because it completely transforms the rest of the world as how it relates to you, even if it's just the five seconds that somebody sees you. There is a period of adjustment.

I don't think anyone would mind if they told you that you were great or that they loved a movie you were in, but then there is a side affecting your personal life and then there is a fear that how you conduct your personal life is going to be splashed around on newspapers.

You can become sensitive to criticism and ultimately you have to realize that who you are has nothing to do with that at all. I'm still pretty free. I can still go to a bookstore or stand in line for a movie. Sure, I'll take some pictures with some fans or sign some autographs, but that's nice too. It's not that crazy.

Q: Are there any particular stories that really make you laugh at how inaccurate they were?

A: Oh, that I was married (laughs) or stuff that has no basis in fact. I think that it's just a product of rumor, and people run the story because it's a tabloid. Why not? I tell you that the role of the Internet has changed everything, especially in the media. All of you folks in the traditional media all of sudden have this fierce competition from the Internet, but for this new medium the questions is, what is the standard for journalistic integrity? What are the standards for what stories you run when the access is immediate? Particularly when certain people, just to drum up interest, will run a wild story. Can you site the Internet as a source? These are the questions.

Q: Any fear of carrying the lead role for "Reindeer Games"?

A: Sure! In particular, the way I started out in this business with people near my age and my experience level. The independent film world is like, "Well, we're all young and we really don't know what we're doing, but we have this really great story we want to tell and we're going to strike out there and do it by hook or by crook." It's risky, fun and brave, novel and exciting, but it's not like working with an icon of cinema. You naturally defer to that person's judgment and you're not in a position to be so sternly judged.

You know, if I'm doing "Mallrats" or "Chasing Amy" with (director) Kevin Smith, it's not like he's going to turn to me and go, "You know, when I worked with James Dean or Burt Lancaster ... he never did that." (Laughs) I would be like, "Kevin ... you've worked with three other actors and they're guys from your hometown in New Jersey." He's not going to talk about "Birdman of Alcatraz" and how he did that movie.

Q: What appealed to you most about your character, Rudy Duncan, in "Reindeer Games"?

A: What I liked most about my character is that he is a kind of tough love, Rat Pack-'60's, film noir protagonist, much like Jack Nicholson's character in "Chinatown." He's never totally behind the curve of what's happening. It was in that spirit that I hooked into this character, because it's more interesting to me to play a guy who is suffering than a guy you know is going to win in the end.

Q: You've won the Academy Award for screenwriting, so what were you thinking while reading Ehren Kruger's script?

A: Ehren wrote a script that had all of the strengths that I feel that I really lack as a writer, like plot and the kind of different things that can happen. As a writer, both Matt Damon and I, honestly, actually have a difficult time constructing plot devices and twists ... things that happen in movies. We can write characters and people talking to each other, but rarely does anything happen.

For this film, I thought, "Wow, this guy really knows how to make things happen in his movies and how plot dictates the story, much more than the characters." I don't think that it was to the exclusion of character, but I didn't see the twists coming. I love the fact that this movie starts off with a voice-over about being in prison. In the old days, film noir were "B" movies, but now we have gotten away from that. They were really about having fun.

Q: How much fun was plunging through the ice into freezing waters?

A: That wasn't fun (Laughs). John is very conscious about taking care of his actors. Here we are in the middle of northern Canada, freezing, and he promised us wet suits. But when we get there, all they had was a Jacuzzi. We did the scene five or six times and you would get out of the water and into the hot tub. I did a lot less complaining than Charlize.

Jeff Howard, along with Dave Neil, writes the Movie Guys column, which appears Fridays in the Sun.

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