INTERVIEWS: Ben Affleck on Daredevil!!
20th Century Fox held a press junket for Daredevil this weekend at the Ritz Carlton in Pasadena, CA, and Superhero Hype! was there to get the scoop from the stars of the film. We've got the fully transcribed interview with Ben Affleck on playing The Man W
How does it feel to be in the eye of the hurricane with what Hollywood is calling the most celebrated love affair?
That's you that's calling it that. That's not Hollywood. It's a little weird, you know. That's a little strange. It's new for me…I've been in relationships, public relationships before, you know, with Gwyneth, and it wasn't quite the same thing. I don't know what's different about, I didn't anticipate that it would be different. I thought okay, there's a degree of publicity that kinda goes along with this. I was a little bit shocked, but I feel like I take a lot of comfort in the fact that there's only so much you can say about that stuff and then like there's somebody else, and then Colin Farrell's dating Britney Spears, and then you're off the hook entirely.
Can you clear up whatever current rumor of the week is, bring us up to speed.
I'm not even abreast of all the rumors in the way that you guys probably are. I can tell you that nothing's changed as far as I know. But I'm not up to date with the papers. I'm not getting married anytime in the near future. So don't worry.
In regards to Daredevil…
There we go. I like it, I like it.
…Playing a blind person, did that hinder you or free you in any way?
I'm glad to get to some of the questions that won't make any of the copy. But yes, we can all take a little break now. It was, Daredevil, yeah it was interesting playing a blind guy. What was interesting about it as opposed to like, when you look at like Red Dragon where Emily Watson I thought did a great job. I watched that…playing a blind character. Pacino did it famously and won the Oscar in "Scent of a Woman." There was a lot of, it was like a high bar for playing blind people out there. The interesting thing about this was that while he's blind kinda with his eyes, because of this superpower that he has in terms of advanced hearing that allows him to create this three-dimensional map using kinda sonar of his surroundings, that he's not in the way that we think of people blind, technically blind. So a lot of times, as Matt Murdock it's an act that he's having to play at being more helpless than he really is. But what I did was I worked with a guy named Tom Sullivan who's blind, who's extremely, you know, he's one of those guys who jumps out of airplanes and is a really good skier, and makes you feel really inadequate. He helped me in terms of talking about how one who's blind, who can't use their eyes uses their senses to navigate their surroundings. The big cheat for me was that I was able to use these contact lenses, which were completely opaque, which I couldn't see out of at all, which meant that I didn't have to consciously act blind, or try not to use my eyes. It sorta took that away. Then the challenge was really not walking into furniture.
Just to follow up, you're Daredevil. If you could cast, say Kevin or your brother, as a superhero…
See, my brother. That's hard to say. My brother, I feel, is a superhero. Incidently, my brother has a movie opening this weekend as well, which I think is one of the great movies of…American art movies ever made. It's a staggering movie, worth checking out. Really, really brilliant. Matt's in it, Gus Van Sant directed it, it's called Gerry. It's like playing arthouses and stuff, but really worth seeing. And Kevin's Internetboy. That would be his superhero. Talkback Man. Kevin manages to keep up with every person posted on the Internet world about movies, Kevin writes a reply! I don't know how he has the time to do it.
As a true fan of Daredevil, how did you feel about the character allowing the man on the train to die, and the prescription drugs?
That was a real controversial issue. The really hardcore fans, myself included, and I think probably even Marvel, felt that that was like stepping over a line in a way. We went back and forth on that many, many times. Ultimately what we decided, and that's the one way it kinds deviates from the heart of the book, where Daredevil never killed anybody. He does that Bullseye drop in the comic book, and in this one, we throw him out the window. It's very consistent with the comic. But he was not as vengeful as we portrayed him in the beginning. But for the sake of giving the character an arc, from letting him go from a guy whose seeking ultimately vengeance, to a guy who understands the difference between that and justice, and who understands about mercy and compassion largely through the love of this woman, we kept it in there. There's part of me that's ambivalent about it, that feels like, because it is the most significant departure from the tenor and tone of the comic book itself. But I think it works within the context of the movie, and I think ultimately, because he's not The Punisher, he's not a guy who just shoots bad guys or kills in the comic, and ultimately, that's not where he ends up. Where Daredevil ends up at the end of this movie is very, very consistent with who he is in the comics.
Oh, and the prescription drugs, that's much more, I thought that was emblematic of a way in which this has its own tone. It's a little grittier, a little bit more realistic. It represented the fact that in this comic book superhero universe, when the guy gets hit and stabbed, he bleeds and there's consequences to it. Still it's a comic book movie, you have to kinda suspend your disbelief if you kinda add up all the injuries the guy takes over the course of the movie, it's borderline right? But we did wanna make the point that there were, and I really think that speaks to the violence issue, that there are consequences to violence, that this is not a wanton, graphic, random violence without consequence. That it hurts, that people suffer and so I supported that and I liked that part of the movie.
What sense do you think you could do without and why?
Probably smell. I have a friend of mine, a guy named Chris Andrian, who I knew when I was a kid, who in fact introduced me to Daredevil when I was 9 years old, it bears mentioning. And I just ran into him again. He e-mailed me, and said, I can't believe…I haven't seen him in years…that you're doing Daredevil! It's amazing! He sorta couldn't fathom it. So he came down to visit me on the set, and when he came down and visited me, he said, "You know…," it turned out that he had had this very rare, little known condition and I was like, well what's the story with this condition, what do you mean? And he said, "Well one of the things is that I can't smell anything." I said, "You have no sense of smell?" And he was like, "No." I said, "I never knew that." I said, "Didn't you…" And he said, "Yeah, I would just