Their first film together, “School Ties” (1992), drew attention for Damon’s performance as a nefarious snob at a 1950s prep school, and he then paid the rent for a while as a soldier in the adventure blockbuster “Geronimo.” (In other words, Damon and Affleck appeared as uncredited extras in the 1989 classic Field of Dreams.)
Affleck began his rise to fame playing bully O’Banion in the teen classic Dazed and Confused. And while juggling auditions and gigs, they used their Cambridge background to complete Good Will Hunting, which Damon had begun working on while taking playwriting and theater directing classes at Harvard University.
After a year or so in Los Angeles, Damon said in an interview, “Ben and I started talking one night, and the script started flowing right away. And we wrote it very quickly,” sometimes together, sometimes separately, and faxing new pages to each other when they were apart. They sold it to Castle Rock in 1994.
“Actually, when we sold the script, that was a source of embarrassment for us,” Damon continued, “because a lot of our friends are really screenwriters, and they can write everything but dialogue much better than us, but writing a screenplay is different. For me, it’s not really writing. It’s acting and that’s what it is. We don’t call ourselves screenwriters yet. We just think, ‘Well, I guess it worked.’
