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| Photo: Lesley Messer |
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| Ben Affleck and Matt Damon in "Good Will Hunting," 1997. |
A critical darling, "Good Will Hunting" won two of the nine Oscars for
which it was nominated, including one for Affleck and Damon and another
for supporting actor Robin Williams -- and proved to be lucrative to boot.
According to Box Office Mojo, "Good Will Hunting" earned $225,933,435
worldwide and was ranked as the seventh most lucrative film of 1997.
However, despite the film's tremendous success, there are still things
about its production that even the biggest "Good Will Hunting" fans
might not know.
1. The script began as a school project:
Damon told Boston Magazine in 2013
that he began writing "Good Will Hunting" for a playwriting class he
was taking at Harvard University. After the course ended, he asked his
childhood friend Affleck to help him flesh out the story. "We came up
with this idea of the brilliant kid and his townie friends, where he was
special and the government wanted to get their mitts on him. And it had
a very 'Beverly Hills Cop,' 'Midnight Run' sensibility, where the kids
from Boston were giving the NSA the slip all the time," Affleck told the
magazine. "We would improvise and drink like six or 12 beers or
whatever and record it with a tape recorder. At the time we imagined the
professor and the shrink would be Morgan Freeman
and [Robert] De Niro, so we’d do our imitations of Freeman and De Niro.
It was kind of hopelessly naive and probably really embarrassing in
that respect." Damon said that the only scene that survived from his
initial draft was the one in which his character, a math genius, meets
his psychologist, played by Williams...
2. Will Hunting was originally a physics genius: At the
suggestion of Harvard professor and Nobel Prize-winning physicist
Sheldon Glashow, Damon's character, Will Hunting, became a mathematics
genius instead. Glashow's brother-in-law, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology professor Daniel Kleitman, went on to work with Damon and
Affleck to ensure that the dialogue would be authentic. “When they asked
me, ‘Can you speak math to us?’ my mouth froze,” he told MIT's website.
“I felt silly mumbling random math so I found a postdoc, Tom Bohman. We
went down to the old math lounge in Bldg. 2 and I gave a quick lecture.
They took notes, but they didn’t really know what we were talking
about.”
Source: ABC News
