Good Will Hunting (1997)
Trivia
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Spoilers (3)
In 2014, after Robin Williams died, the bench in the Boston Public Garden where he and Matt Damon had their conversation scene became an impromptu memorial site. People left flowers, quotes, and various items at the bench. A petition has been passed around to erect a statue in Williams' memory near the bench.
On the first day of the shooting, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck started crying out of happiness, because it was a scene between Robin Williams and Stellan Skarsgård, accomplished actors, doing Damon's and Affleck's scene verbatim, and they had waited five years for it to happen.
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck found a clever way to choose the right studio for their script. The story goes that on page 60 of the script, they wrote a completely out-of-nowhere sex scene between Will and Chuckie. They took it to every major studio, and nobody even mentioned the scene. When they met with Harvey Weinstein at Miramax, he said, "I only have one really big note on the script. About page 60, the two leads, both straight men, have a sex scene. What the hell is that?" Damon and Affleck explained that they put that scene specifically in the script to show them who actually read the script and who didn't. As Weinstein was the only person who brought it up, Miramax was the studio chosen to produce the film.
The lines in the scene when Sean talks about his late wife's farting antics were ad-libbed by Robin Williams. That is why Matt Damon was laughing so hard. If you watch the scene carefully, you can notice the camera shaking a bit, possibly due to the cameraman laughing as well.
Casey Affleck ad-libbed most of his lines. Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Gus Van Sant later admitted that Casey's improvised lines were much funnier and better than what had been originally written for him.
When Matt Damon was in his fifth year at Harvard, he was in a playwriting class. The culmination of it was to write a one-act play. He started writing a movie, which with the help of Ben Affleck became this movie.
When Robin Williams won the Oscar for his supporting role, he sent Peer Augustinski, who dubbed his voice in German, a small replica of the Oscar statue with a note saying, "Thank you for making me famous in Germany."
According to Matt Damon, Robin Williams' best addition is the last line of the film.
When Robin Williams and Matt Damon were shooting the scene on the bench in the Public Garden, it seems like they're the only people in the park. However, due to Williams being a massive star, at one point, over 3000 people were at the location watching that scene.
When Robin Williams read the script via Francis Ford Coppola and really liked it, his one question for Coppola was, "Who are these guys?"
Matt Damon, a former Harvard student, originally intended to make the title character a physics prodigy. He discussed his idea with Sheldon L. Glashow, a Nobel laureate in physics and, at the time, a Harvard professor. Glashow told him that the premise did not ring true to him: he suggested that the main character be a math prodigy instead. He referred Damon to his brother-in-law, Daniel Kleitman, a professor of mathematics at M.I.T., who provided advice on the story. Glashow and Kleitman are thanked in the credits.
Ben Affleck was twenty-five when he won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for this film, making him the youngest person ever to win the award. And Matt Damon was twenty-seven and is the second youngest person to win the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Minnie Driver's character Skylar is named after Damon's girlfriend, Skylar Satenstein, who left Damon for Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich before filming began. Damon and Driver became romantically involved during production.
Initially, producer Harvey Weinstein did not want Minnie Driver at all for the role of Skylar, feeling she wasn't cute enough for the part. Because Gus Van Sant, Matt Damon, and Ben Affleck wanted her in the movie, Weinstein ultimately relented, and Driver went on to be nominated for a Best Actress in a Supporting Role Oscar.
The phone number printed on the sign for the construction company that they are working for is the actual phone number of a Woburn, Massachusetts construction company that Matt Damon worked for while going to high school in Cambridge.
Gus Van Sant painted the picture that hangs in Sean Maguire's (Robin Williams') office.
After Mel Gibson dropped out of directing, Michael Mann expressed interest in directing. However, he wanted to make two major changes: he wanted Will and his friends to be car thieves, and he did not want Matt Damon for the lead role since he was still relatively unknown then. The producers, who wanted Damon, suggested that Mann film some screen tests with Damon and Ben Affleck. After Mann filmed the screen tests, he went back to the producers and said he still did not want Damon in the lead. So the producers and Miramax parted ways with Mann since the film was Damon and Affleck's project from the start.
An earlier draft of the script had Will Hunting being recruited by the government to become a cryptanalyst (based on his mathematical ability). Rob Reiner reportedly reviewed the script and advised Matt Damon and Ben Affleck to eliminate this subplot. However, there is a reference to it in the final script: the scene where Will meets with NSA agents and explains why he doesn't want to work for them.
Many years after the fact, Ben Affleck admitted to having had concerns after the film's success that he would just be regarded as "Matt Damon's stupid friend. Yes, that stayed with me for a while.", from an appearance on The Graham Norton Show (2007).
Matt Damon was MIT's 2016 commencement speaker. He commented in his speech that it was the second time he fake-graduated from there.
In a Boston Magazine retrospective interview, Ben Affleck mentioned that he and Matt Damon wrote the part of Sean with Morgan Freeman or Robert De Niro in mind, and he and Damon would imitate their voices when reviewing the dialogue in the script.
When Will (Matt Damon) and Sean (Robin Williams) meet for the first time in Sean's office, Will recommends that Sean read Howard Zinn's "People's History of the United States". As a boy, Matt Damon was Zinn's neighbor, and provided the voice for the CD recording of that book. CORRECTION Jeff Zinn did audio recording of the book, not Matt Damon. However Damon executive-produced The History Channel special "The People Speak," a collaboration between Zinn and some of the biggest names in Hollywood, to put a new twist on some old history lessons. https://www.bostonherald.com/2009/12/07/howard-zinn-fan-matt-damon-speaks-up-at-last/
When Matt Damon and Ben Affleck met with Mel Gibson, Braveheart (1995) had just come out. But they hadn't seen Braveheart and Harvey Weinstein encouraged them to lie. So the first thing they said was, "We just want to tell you how much we loved Braveheart!"
After Matt Damon and Ben Affleck sold their script to Castle Rock Entertainment, it was printed in Daily Variety that they were going to get $600,000 for it. By using a copy of the Daily Variety, because Affleck and Damon had no credit at the time, they rented a house that was $3,000 a month.
In an interview, between Matt Damon and Kevin Smith at IMDb's 2016 San Diego Comic Con, Damon mentioned that Smith was instrumental in the movie being made. As it was Smith that brought the script directly to Harvey Weinstein, when the other studios were not showing interest.
Sean Maguire was based on Matt Damon's mother and Ben Affleck's father.
According to Gus Van Sant, the moment when Harvey Weinstein wanted to complete the film was partly due to Matt Damon being cast in The Rainmaker (1997) by Francis Ford Coppola which validated the fact that Damon was a leading man.
The job interview Will sends Chuckie on is for a company called Holden & McNeil. Ben Affleck's character in Chasing Amy (1997) is named Holden McNeil. Coincidentally, both films were released by Miramax.
While a guest on Late Show with David Letterman (1993), Robin Williams joked about his experience after winning an Oscar for his role in this film: "It's amazing. When you win the Academy Award, you have, like, about a week where everyone's like, 'Hey, Good Will Hunting--way to go! Good Will Hunting, Academy Award, way to go!' And two weeks later, it's like, "Hey, Mork!' How are ya?'"
The odd and perplexing line "I swallowed a bug", said by Morgan (Casey Affleck) in the Harvard bar scene, is a reference to the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991), as well as actor Marlon Brando. The behind-the-scenes documentary tells of the making and struggles Francis Ford Coppola had during the production of Apocalypse Now (1979). In a look at one of Marlon Brando's scenes, his line is interrupted when he accidentally swallows a real bug, and states to Francis Ford Coppola off-camera, "I swallowed a bug."
The script was originally developed by Castle Rock Entertainment, Rob Reiner's production company. When they didn't know what to do with it, Kevin Smith took the script to Miramax. It became the highest grossing film in Miramax history, until Chicago (2002) topped it.
According to Matt Damon, when the project was set up at Castle Rock Entertainment, all he and Ben Affleck had heard for the casting over them, was "Leo and Brad", referring to Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt.
In his first scene, Robin Williams is standing in front of a blackboard. Behind him, written on the blackboard in chalk, are the words "Susser 1969". In 1969, Williams graduated from Redwood High School, Larkspur, and then continued at College of Marin, Kentfield just a few blocks away from the high school. He became acquainted with the drama department there at the College of Marin, and performed in the production "Taming of the Shrew" by William Shakespeare. Robin Williams' first stage director was the late Harvey Susser. Thus, the blackboard "code words" seem to say: "Hey, Harvey! See this! Now I'm the teacher!"
At a WGA seminar in 2003, William Goldman denied the persistent rumor that he was the actual writer of Good Will Hunting: "I would love to say that I wrote it. Here is the truth. In my obit it will say that I wrote it. People don't want to think those two cute guys wrote it. What happened was, they had the script. It was their script. They gave it to Rob (Reiner) to read, and there was a great deal of stuff in the script dealing with the F.B.I. trying to use Matt Damon for spy work because he was so brilliant in math. Ron said, "Get rid of it." They then sent them in to see me for a day. I met with them in New York, and all I said to them was, "Rob's right. Get rid of the F.B.I. stuff. Go with the family, go with Boston, go with all that wonderful stuff.", and they did. I think people refuse to admit it because their careers have been so far from writing, and I think it's too bad. I'll tell you who wrote a marvelous script once, Sylvester Stallone. Rocky's a marvelous script. God, read it, it's wonderful. It's just got marvelous stuff, and then he stopped suddenly, because it's easier being a movie star and making all that money, than going in your pit and writing a script. But I did not write Good Will Hunting, alas. I would not have written the "It's not your fault" scene. I'm going to assume that 148 percent of the people in this room have seen a therapist. I certainly have, for a long time. Hollywood always has this idea that it's this shrink with only one patient. I mean, that scene with Robin Williams gushing and Matt Damon and they're hugging, "It's not your fault, it's not your fault." I thought, Oh God, Freud is so agonized over this scene. But Hollywood tends to do that with therapists." When Goldman died, his November 16, 2018, New York Times obituary did mention the rumor, but also debunked it, using Goldman's own words from the same WGA seminar: "Mr. Goldman was also a sought-after script doctor, well known for his uncredited work. He was widely believed to have written the script for "Good Will Hunting," the 1997 film that won Matt Damon and Ben Affleck the Oscar for best original screenplay. He denied it. 'I would love to say that I wrote "Good Will Hunting,"' Mr. Goldman said at a Writers Guild of America seminar in 2003. 'But I did not write it, alas.'"
The mathematical equations seen in the opening credits are part of a math technique called "Fourier Analysis" which approximates functions by sines and cosines. It's used a lot in physics and engineering.
Sean's office is set up like a baseball diamond, with four chairs representing the bases and a table in the middle like a pitcher's mound. This is most noticeable during the Carlton Fisk homerun reenactment.
Roger Ebert asked in his "Movie Answer Man" column for suggestions as to who Will's "brothers"--Marky, Ricky, Danny, Terry, Mikey, Davey, Timmy, Tommy, Joey, Robby, Johnny, and Brian--were named after. Gina Dante of Minneapolis suggested that they were "directors whom Ben Affleck and Matt Damon would like to work with": Marc Rocco, Sir Richard Attenborough, Danny Boyle, Terry Gilliam, Mikael Salomon, David Fincher, Tim Burton, Tom Hanks, Joel Schumacher, Robert Redford, John Woo, and Brian De Palma.
Ben Affleck's father and stepmother worked as janitors at Harvard University. In 2000, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon spoke at a rally at Harvard University in support of an increased living wage for all workers on campus. Ben Affleck narrates a documentary, Occupation (2002), about a sit-in organized by the Harvard Living Wage Campaign.
When Will is mopping the floor at the beginning of the movie, his name tag identifies him as "Bob" rather than "Will".
The lecture hall in the movie is actually a lecture hall in McLennan Physical Laboratories (MP); a building at the University of Toronto (St. George Campus) in Toronto, Ontario.
Kevin Smith was offered the chance to direct the movie, but he turned it down because he knew that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's first choice for director was Gus Van Sant.
First film in Kevin Smith's and Scott Mosier's filmography to receive Oscar recognition. Though they weren't nominated themselves, they were still instrumental in getting the films production even happening. Smith was friends with Ben Affleck after his casting in Mallrats (1995), then cast him as the lead in Chasing Amy (1997). Following Matt Damon's cameo role, along with Brian O'Halloran as television producers, was after Affleck introduced the pair, which led to them giving Smith the screenplay, ultimately landing with Harvey Weinstein of Miramax.
Mel Gibson was offered a chance to direct, even meeting with Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and executive producer Harvey Weinstein, but ultimately passed on directing.
Both Matt Damon being cast as the lead in The Rainmaker (1997), and Robin Williams signing onto the film had led to it getting fast tracked for production.
The subway car Will rides in is a model that was retired in 1994. The MBTA took one out of mothballs, and cleaned it up for the production.
The infamous "How do you like them apples?" line that Will (Matt Damon) says at the window was a common expression in the mid-twentieth century and going back for several generations. Among other examples in popular culture, the same line was used by private detective J.J. Gittes in Chinatown (1974).
Matt Damon became the fourth person to be nominated for both acting and writing in the same year, following Charles Chaplin for The Great Dictator (1940), Orson Welles for Citizen Kane (1941), and Sylvester Stallone for Rocky (1976)
Morgan O'Malley says that the crew has run into a "barney" at the Harvard bar. Barney is Boston slang for a Harvard student.
To date, this is the film with the highest U.S. box-office gross with Kevin Smith's name attached to it. All his own films that he has written and directed have not grossed more than $35 million at the U.S. box-office.
This is the first film in which the top billed actor (excluding films in which the cast is billed alphabetically) wins an Oscar for Best Actor in a Supporting Role.
The film cast includes four Oscar winners: Robin Williams, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Casey Affleck; and one Oscar nominee: Minnie Driver.
In the scene on the park bench, Robin Williams gives an example of love that Will hasn't experienced as "going to hell and back for it." In his next movie, What Dreams May Come (1998), Williams does just that for his love, played by Annabella Sciorra, after she commits suicide.
When the project was in turnaround at Castle Rock, Ben Affleck showed the script to Kevin Smith while working with him on Chasing Amy (1997), which led to Smith and Scott Mosier coming on board as producers. Chasing Amy (1997) also featured cameos by Casey Affleck and Matt Damon.
As of 2009, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck have both co-written one other script each, although not with each other; Damon co-wrote Gerry (2002) with Gus Van Sant and Ben's brother Casey Affleck, and Ben Affleck directed and co-wrote (with his childhood friend Aaron Stockard) the script for Gone Baby Gone (2007). In 2010, Ben Affleck directed The Town (2010), for which he had also co-written the screenplay.
The second problem Matt Damon solves on the chalkboard in the hallway, his answer was incomplete (due to him not finishing it before walking away when Lambeau tells him, a janitor, to stop doing "graffiti" on a chalkboard meant for students in his class). The problem of listing all irreducible trees of the size n=10 has ten different trees.....there were only seven on the chalkboard.
When Will and Dr. Maguire are having their test of will Robin Williams whistles "People Who Need People" before the tension breaks.
The Ontario Specialty Company, at 133 Church Street in Toronto, Ontario, was the setting for Matt Damon and Minnie Driver's date. The real-life manager of the store, Anna Zejn makes an appearance.
After Matt Damon and Ben Affleck removed the NSA stuff from the script, Castle Rock, by that time owning the rights to the script, gave them time to go out and find somebody who will buy their version of the movie, meaning a director. But there was a price tag: Castle Rock wanted to get their money back. So if they couldn't find anybody to buy it, when it came back to Castle Rock, they were not going to be the stars anymore.
While looking over some of Will's work, Lambeau remarks, "I see you used Maclaurin here," referring to a mathematical representation called the Maclaurin series. Coincidentally, McLaurin was Robin Williams' middle name.
The watercolor painting in Sean's office of a man in a rowboat amid turbulent waters was actually painted by the movie's director, Gus Van Sant.
Near the end of the movie, Sean Maguire (Robin Williams)'s office featured newspaper clippings of the Boston Red Sox's victory over the Oakland Athletics on April 14, 1997. April 14, 1997 was the first day of filming.
Skylar's door room number is 206. That is the number of bones in the human body. She is supposed to be majoring in pre-med.
The last scene of Will's car driving west on the Massachusetts Turnpike during the credits was filmed near Stockbridge MA, between mile markers 4 and 8. His car travels 3.16 mile at a speed of 44 mph.
In the film, Skylar talks about her father having died years prior. Skylar Satenstein's father, Frank Satenstein, a television director, died in 1982, years before Skylar and Matt Damon were dating at Harvard.
In one of the therapist scenes, Will is seen wearing a Shelby Cobra jacket. Matt Damon would later go in to play Carroll Shelby in the film Ford v. Ferrari.
Ben Stiller turned down an offer to direct this film, a decision he later regretted.
As of 2018, features Minnie Driver's only Oscar nominated performance.
In the café scene where Will announces to Skylar that he was hoping to "get laid", an extra walking past and peering into the window can be identified as Christian Stolte.
Included among the American Film Institute's 2004 list of 400 movies nominated for the top 100 America's Greatest Music in the Movies for the song "Miss Misery."
Anthony Minghella was offered the role of Henry Lipkin, but scheduling conflicts kept him from taking the role.
The painting in Sean's office that Will uses to evaluate Sean's state of mind very closely resembles the opening credits scene from the movie Popeye; Robin Williams' first starring movie debut.
Andrew Scheinman and Michael Mann were considered to direct.
Referenced in 2 Fast 2 Furious by Paul Walker in the freeway race, "How do you like them apples" - which also starred Cole Hauser.
Both Robin Williams and Minnie Driver have both been in Disney films: Williams was the voice of Genie in the Aladdin films, and Driver did the voice of Jane Porter in Tarzan (1999), Stellan Skarsgard's son Alexander played the title role in The Legend of Tarzan (2016).
Michael Winterbottom was approached to direct, but declined.
George Plimpton also played the role of a psychotherapist three years earlier on the TV series Wings in an episode titled "The Shrink" (S6 Ep3)
Stellan Skarsgård previously appeared in The Hunt for Red October (1990) based on a Tom Clancy Clancy novel and the Norwegian film Insomnia (1997). Ben Affleck appeared in The Sum of All Fears (2002) also based on a Tom Clancy novel, while Robin Williams appeared in the English-language remake Insomnia (2002).
In the hypnotherapy scene, Will sings "Afternoon Delight" by Starland Vocal Band, which is the last song to be played over the ending credits.
At 7:28 Chuckie tells Will that Casey is bouncin up a bar at Harvard the next week & says they should go up there. Casey is the bouncer at the door when the guys walk into the Harvard bar. The character Morgan is played by Casey Affleck.
Spoilers
Robin Williams' last line in the film--"Son of a bitch. He stole my line"--was ad-libbed.
Gus Van Sant, at one point, asked Matt Damon and Ben Affleck to re-write the script so that Chuckie is killed in a construction accident. Damon and Affleck protested but reluctantly wrote the scene in. After Van Sant read it, he agreed that it was a terrible idea.
In the scene where we are introduced to Sean he makes a joke to his class about Sigmund Freud while on the blackboard behind him the name, "Bowlby," is visible. This is a reference to British Psychologist John Bowlby who, like Freud, was one of the early pioneers of modern therapy and eventually created his own method called Attachment Theory which is very different from Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory. Later when Sean and Lambeau are arguing, Sean attempts to explain the reason behind Will's behavior to Lambeau who responds, "Don't give me that Freudian crap!" However, Sean's explanation that Will pushes people away as a defense mechanism to protect himself from what he sees as their inevitable abandonment of him (owing to the struggles he had growing up as an orphan) is actually much more in line with Bowlby's treatment methods than Freud's.
