Good Will Hunting

Good Will Hunting

Theatrical release poster
Directed by Gus Van Sant
Produced by Lawrence Bender
Written by
Starring
Music by Danny Elfman
Cinematography Jean-Yves Escoffier
Edited by Pietro Scalia
Production
company
Lawrence Bender Productions
Distributed by Miramax Films
Release dates
  • December 2, 1997 (1997-12-02) (Bruin Theater)
  • December 5, 1997 (1997-12-05) (United States)
Running time
 126 minutes
Country United States
Language English
Budget $10 million[1]
Box office $225.9 million[2]

Good Will Hunting is a 1997 American drama film directed by Gus Van Sant, and starring Robin Williams, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Minnie Driver and Stellan Skarsgård. Written by Affleck and Damon, and with Damon in the title role, the film follows 20-year-old South Boston laborer Will Hunting, an unrecognized genius who, as part of a deferred prosecution agreement after assaulting a police officer, becomes a client of a therapist and studies advanced mathematics with a renowned professor. Through his therapy sessions, Will re-evaluates his relationships with his best friend, his girlfriend and himself, facing the significant task of confronting his past and thinking about his future.

The film received universal critical acclaim and was a financial success. It grossed over US$225 million during its theatrical run with only a modest $10 million budget. It was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including the Academy Award for Best Picture, and won two: Best Supporting Actor for Williams and Best Original Screenplay for Damon and Affleck.

After Williams' death in 2014, it was ranked at number 53 in The Hollywood Reporter's 100 Favorite Films list.[3]

Plot

Twenty-year-old Will Hunting (Matt Damon) of South Boston is a self-taught, genius-level intellect with an eidetic memory, though he works simply as a janitor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and spends his free time drinking with his friends, Chuckie (Ben Affleck), Billy (Cole Hauser) and Morgan (Casey Affleck). When Professor Gerald Lambeau (Stellan Skarsgård) posts a difficult problem taken from algebraic graph theory as a challenge for his graduate students, Will solves the problem anonymously, stunning both the graduate students and Lambeau himself. As a challenge to the unknown genius, Lambeau posts an even more difficult problem and chances upon Will solving it. Fearing that he will lose his sole means of a meager income, Will flees and skips going into work the next day. That night, he meets Skylar (Minnie Driver), a British orphan about to graduate from Harvard, who plans on attending medical school at Stanford.

Assaulting both a man who bullied him as a child and a police officer who attempts to break up the fight, Will faces incarceration, but Lambeau arranges for him to forgo jail time if he agrees to study mathematics under Lambeau's supervision while simultaneously seeking psychotherapy. Will tentatively agrees but treats his first few therapists with contempt; his refusal to open up is met with staunch defiance by the bourgeois mentality of the therapists, who each refuse to treat Will further. In desperation, Lambeau calls on Dr. Sean Maguire (Robin Williams), his estranged and much more grounded college roommate, who now teaches psychology at Bunker Hill Community College. Unlike other therapists, Sean actually challenges Will's weak defense mechanisms, and after a few unproductive sessions, Will begins to open up.

Will is particularly struck by Sean's story of how he met his wife by giving up his ticket to the historic sixth game of the 1975 World Series, after falling in love at first sight. Sean neither regrets his decision, nor does he regret the final years of his marriage, after which his wife died of cancer. This encourages Will to build a relationship with Skylar, though he lies to her about his past and is reluctant to introduce her to his friends or show her his rundown neighborhood. Will also challenges Sean to take an objective look at his own life, since Sean cannot move on from his wife's death.

Disregarding Lambeau's high expectations, Will makes a mockery of job interviews that Lambeau arranges for him. He turns down a position for the National Security Agency, offering a scathing critique of the agency's actions to his interviewer. When Skylar asks Will to move to California with her, he panics and pushes her away, revealing that he is an orphan and that his foster father physically abused him. Skylar tells Will that she loves him, but he refuses and leaves her room. Will next storms out on Lambeau, dismissing the mathematical research he has been doing. Sean points out that Will is so adept at anticipating future failure in his interpersonal relationships that he deliberately sabotages them in order to avoid emotional pain. When Will refuses to give an honest reply about what he wants to do with his life, Sean shows him the door. Will tells Chuckie he wants to be a laborer for the rest of his life, Chuckie responds that it would be an insult to his friends for Will to waste his potential and that his fondest wish is that Will should leave to pursue something greater.

Will walks in on a heated argument between Sean and Lambeau over his future. Sean and Will share that they were both victims of child abuse. Sean helps Will to see that he is a victim of his own inner demons and to accept that it is not his fault. Sean comforts Will as he cries over twenty years of trauma. Will decides to accept one of the job offers arranged by Lambeau. Having helped Will overcome his problems, Sean reconciles with Lambeau and decides to take a sabbatical to travel the world. When Will's friends present him with a rebuilt Chevrolet Nova for his twenty-first birthday, he decides to pass on his job offers and drive to California to reunite with Skylar. Sometime later, Chuckie goes to Will's house to pick him up, only to find that he is not there, much to his happiness. Sean comes out of his house and finds a letter from Will in his mailbox, which tells him he is going to see Skylar, much to his pleasure. During the ending credits, Will's car is seen driving on the highway.

Cast

Mathematics

Patrick O’Donnell, professor of physics at University of Toronto served as mathematical consultant for the film production.[4]

A turning point in the plot occurs when Will chalks up the adjacency matrix

\begin{pmatrix} 0 & 1 & 0& 1 \\ 1 & 0 & 2 & 1 \\ 0 & 2 & 0 & 0 \\ 1 & 1 & 0 & 0 \end{pmatrix} and its cube
\begin{pmatrix} 2 & 7 & 2 & 3 \\ 7 & 2 & 12 & 7 \\ 2 & 12 & 0 & 2 \\ 3 & 7 & 2 & 2 \end{pmatrix}

as the answer to a challenging problem based on a graph posted by Professor Lambeau.[5]

Production

Development

Originally, Matt Damon started writing the film as a final assignment for a playwriting class he was taking at Harvard University. He then approached Ben Affleck with what he wrote, and the two finished the screenplay together.[6] At first, it was written as a thriller about a young man in the rough-and-tumble streets of South Boston who possesses a superior intelligence and is targeted by the FBI to become a G-Man. Castle Rock Entertainment president Rob Reiner later urged them to drop the thriller aspect of the story and to focus on the relationship between Will Hunting (Damon) and his psychologist (Williams). At Reiner's request, screenwriter William Goldman read the script and further suggested that the film's climax ought to be Will's decision to follow his girlfriend Skylar to California. Goldman has consistently denied the persistent rumor that he wrote Good Will Hunting or acted as a script doctor.[7] In his book Which Lie Did I Tell?, Goldman jokingly writes, "I did not just doctor it. I wrote the whole thing from scratch," before dismissing the rumour as false.[8]

Castle Rock bought the script for $675,000 against $775,000, meaning that Damon and Affleck would stand to earn an additional $100,000 if the film was produced and they retained sole writing credit. However, studios balked at the idea of Affleck and Damon in the lead roles, with many studio executives stating that they wanted Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio. At the time Damon and Affleck were meeting at Castle Rock, Kevin Smith was working with Affleck on Mallrats and with both Damon and Affleck on Chasing Amy.[9] Castle Rock put the script in turnaround, and gave Damon and Affleck 30 days to find another buyer for the script who would reimburse Castle Rock the money paid, otherwise the script reverted to the studio, and Damon and Affleck would be out. All the studios that were involved in the original bidding war for the screenplay now each turned the pair down, taking meetings with Affleck and Damon only to tell them this to their face. As a last resort, Affleck passed the script to his Chasing Amy director Kevin Smith, who read it and promised to walk the script directly into Harvey Weinstein's office at Miramax. Weinstein read the script, loved it, and paid Castle Rock their due, while also agreeing to let Damon and Affleck star in the film. In his recollection of the meeting, Weinstein asked about an out-of-place, mid-script oral sex scene, which Damon and Affleck explained was a test to see which studio executives had actually read the script.[10]

After buying the rights from Castle Rock, Miramax gave the green light to put the film into production. Several well-known filmmakers were originally considered to direct, including Mel Gibson, Michael Mann, and Steven Soderbergh. Originally, Affleck asked Kevin Smith if he was interested in directing. He declined, saying they needed a "good director" and that he only directs things he writes and is not much of a visual director. Damon and Affleck later chose Gus Van Sant for the job, whose work on previous films like Drugstore Cowboy (1989) had left a favorable impression on the fledgling screenwriters. Miramax was persuaded and hired Van Sant to direct the film.

Filming

"How do ya like them apples?" The Baskin-Robbins / Dunkin' Donuts, in front of which Will mocked Harvard student Clark

Filming took place between April and June 1997. Although the story is set in Boston, and many of the scenes were done on location in the Greater Boston area, much of the filming was done at locations in Toronto, Canada, with the University of Toronto standing in for the interiors of MIT and Harvard University. The classroom scenes were filmed at McLennan Physical Laboratories (of the University of Toronto) and Central Technical School. Harvard normally disallows filming on its property, but permitted limited filming by the project after intervention by Harvard alumnus John Lithgow.[11][12] Likewise, only the exterior shots of Bunker Hill Community College were filmed in Boston; however, Sean's office was built in Toronto as an exact replica of one at the college.[13]

The restaurant to which Lambeau took Sean was Locke-Ober on Winter Place. It closed in 2012.[14]

The Au Bon Pain where Skylar asked Will to explain his "photographic memory" to her

The interior bar scenes set in "Southie" were shot on location at Woody's L St. Tavern.[15] Meanwhile, the homes of Will (fronting at 190 West 6th Street) and Sean (Joe Keating's three-decker apartment at 259 E Street, which was two-way at time of filming), while some distance apart in the movie, actually back up to each other on Bowen Street, the narrow street Chuckie drives down on a couple of occasions to walk up to Will's back door.[16][17]

The Bow and Arrow Pub, which was located at the corner of Bow Street and Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, doubled as the Harvard bar in which Will met Skylar for the first time. The Baskin-Robbins/Dunkin' Donuts featured in the "How'd you like them apples?" scene was next door to the pub (now Grafton Street) at the time of the film's release, but it later moved two doors down, after One Bow Street opened up between the two the following year.[17][18][19]

The Tasty, which is the present-day Citizens Bank at the corner of JFK and Brattle Streets, was the scene of Will and Skylar's first kiss.[20] The Au Bon Pain, where Will and Skylar discuss the former's photographic memory, is at the corner of Dunster Street and Mass Ave.[21]

The Boston Public Garden bench on which Will and Sean sat for a scene in the film became a temporary shrine after Williams' death in 2014.[22]

Director Gus Van Sant says in the DVD commentary that, had he known just how successful the film was going to be, he would have left at least a couple of edited scenes intact that were cut purely for considerations of length. One of these involves Skylar's visit to Chuckie in hopes of shedding light on some of Will's eccentricities that Will himself is unwilling to discuss.

The film is dedicated to the memory of poet Allen Ginsberg and writer William S. Burroughs, both of whom died in 1997.

Reception

Box office

In the film's opening weekend in limited release, it earned $272,912. In its January 1998 wide-release opening weekend, it earned $10,261,471. It went on to gross $138,433,435 in North America for a total worldwide gross of $225,900,000.

Critical response

Good Will Hunting received critical acclaim. Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a rating of 97%, based on 70 reviews, with an average rating of 8/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "It follows a predictable narrative arc, but Good Will Hunting adds enough quirks to the journey -- and is loaded with enough powerful performances -- that it remains an entertaining, emotionally rich drama."[23] At Metacritic, the film has a score of 70 out of 100, based on 28 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[24]

Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars, writing that while the story is "predictable", it is "the individual moments, not the payoff, that make it so effective."[25]

Several scholars have examined the film as a portrayal of residual Catholic–Protestant tensions in Boston, as Irish Catholics from Southie are aligned against ostensibly Protestant characters who are affiliated with Harvard and MIT.[26][27]

Awards and accolades

70th Academy Awards
55th Golden Globe Awards
Other Major Awards / Nominations

American Film Institute

Soundtrack

The musical score for Good Will Hunting was composed by Danny Elfman, who had previously collaborated with Gus Van Sant on To Die For and would go on to score many of the director's other films. The film also features many songs written and recorded by singer-songwriter Elliott Smith. His song "Miss Misery" was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song, but lost to "My Heart Will Go On" from Titanic. Elfman's score was also nominated for an Oscar, but lost to Titanic as well. On September 11, 2006, NBC's The Today Show used Elfman's song "Weepy Donuts" while Matt Lauer spoke during the opening credits.

Good Will Hunting: Music from the Miramax Motion Picture[29]
Soundtrack album by Various artists
Released December 2, 1997
Genre Soundtrack, indie rock, acoustic rock, indie folk
Label Capitol

A soundtrack album for the film was released by Capitol Records on November 18, 1997, though only two of Elfman's cues appear on the release.[30]

  1. Elliott Smith – "Between the Bars" (Orchestral)
  2. Jeb Loy Nichols – "As the Rain"
  3. Elliott Smith – "Angeles"
  4. Elliott Smith – "No Name #3"
  5. The Waterboys – "Fisherman's Blues"
  6. Luscious Jackson – "Why Do I Lie?"
  7. Danny Elfman – "Will Hunting" (Main Titles)
  8. Elliott Smith – "Between the Bars"
  9. Elliott Smith – "Say Yes"
  10. Gerry Rafferty – "Baker Street"
  11. Andru Donalds – "Somebody's Baby"
  12. The Dandy Warhols – "Boys Better"
  13. Al Green – "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?"
  14. Elliott Smith – "Miss Misery"
  15. Danny Elfman – "Weepy Donuts"

"Afternoon Delight" by the Starland Vocal Band was featured in the film, but did not appear on the soundtrack album.

Good Will Hunting: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Soundtrack album by Danny Elfman, Elliott Smith
Released March 3, 2014
Genre Soundtrack
Label Music Box Records

A limited edition soundtrack album featuring Elfman's complete score from the film was released by Music Box Records on March 3, 2014. The soundtrack, issued in 1500 copies, includes all of Elfman's cues (including music not featured on the rare Miramax Academy promo) and also contains the songs by Elliott Smith. One of the tracks is Smith's songs with Elfman's arrangements added into the mix.[31]

  1. Main Title (2:44)
  2. Genie Mopper (0:37)
  3. First Calculation (1:08)
  4. Theorem (0:42)
  5. Kick Ass Choir (0:59)
  6. Mystery Math (2:28)
  7. Them Apples (0:57)
  8. Jail (1:13)
  9. Second Shrink (1:14)
  10. Any Port (1:25)
  11. Times Up (1:14)
  12. Oliver Twist (1:58)
  13. Staring Contest (0:49)
  14. Secret Weapon (0:57)
  15. Retainer (Part A) (0:58)
  16. Retainer (Part B) (0:20)
  17. Tell You Something (0:48)
  18. No Love Me (0:47)
  19. Fire Music (1:11)
  20. Whose Fault (2:34)
  21. End Titles (3:50)
  22. Between the Bars (Orchestral) (1:09) - Performed by Elliott Smith / Arr. by Elfman
  23. No Name #3 (3:04) - Performed by Elliott Smith
  24. Say Yes (2:15) - Performed by Elliott Smith
  25. Between the Bars (2:21) - Performed by Elliott Smith
  26. Angeles (2:55) - Performed by Elliott Smith
  27. Miss Misery (3:12) - Performed by Elliott Smith

References

  1. ↑ "Good Will Hunting (1997) - Financial Information". The Numbers. Retrieved April 17, 2016.
  2. ↑ "Good Will Hunting (1997)". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved January 27, 2015.
  3. ↑ "Best Hollywood Movies of All Time - Hollywood Reporter". The Hollywood Reporter.
  4. ↑ O'Donnell relied on Graph Theory and Theoretical Physics by Frank Harary where at page 63 P.W. Kasteleyn wrote on "Graph theory and crystal physics".
  5. ↑ Burkard Polster & Marty Ross (2012) Math goes to the Movies, Johns Hopkins University Press, page 9, ISBN 1-4214-0483-4.
  6. ↑ "Good Will Hunting: An Oral History with Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and More | Boston Magazine". Boston Magazine. Retrieved 2016-03-21.
  7. ↑ see Goldman's memoir Which Lie Did I Tell?
  8. ↑ Goldman, William (2001). Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade. Vintage. pg. 333. ISBN 0-375-70319-5
  9. ↑ Smith's comments on the Mallrats DVD audio commentary
  10. ↑ "Harvey Weinstein - The Graham Norton Show".
  11. ↑ "Then and Now: Revisiting 'Good Will Hunting' – Boston.com
  12. ↑ "Then and Now: Revisiting 'Good Will Hunting' – Boston.com
  13. ↑ "Then and Now: Revisiting 'Good Will Hunting' – Boston.com
  14. ↑ "Locke-Ober restaurant is closed for business" - Boston Globe, October 21, 2012
  15. ↑ Dunn, Gabrielle (2010-06-03). "Famous Movie Locations: Woody's L Street Tavern in 'Good Will Hunting' (Boston) - The Moviefone Blog". Blog.moviefone.com. Retrieved 2013-05-23.
  16. ↑ "Then and Now: Revisiting 'Good Will Hunting' – Boston.com
  17. 1 2 'Behind the Scenery' - The Boston Globe, November 25, 2007
  18. ↑ "Then and Now: Revisiting 'Good Will Hunting' – Boston.com
  19. ↑ One Bow Street - Crosspoint Associates
  20. ↑ "Then and Now: Revisiting 'Good Will Hunting' – Boston.com
  21. ↑ "Then and Now: Revisiting 'Good Will Hunting' – Boston.com
  22. ↑ "‘Good Will Hunting’ Bench in Boston Public Garden Becomes Robin Williams Memorial" - Boston.com, August 12, 2014
  23. ↑ "Good Will Hunting – Rotten Tomatoes". Rotten Tomatoes. Flixster. Retrieved January 7, 2012.
  24. ↑ "Good Will Hunting Reviews, Ratings, Credits, and More at Metacritic". Metacritic. CBS Interactive. Retrieved January 7, 2012.
  25. ↑ Ebert, Roger (1997-12-25). "Good Will Hunting Movie Review (1997)". Roger Ebert. Retrieved 2013-09-01.
  26. ↑ Herlihy-Mera, Jeffrey. "Revisioning Migration: On the Stratifications of Irish Boston in Good Will Hunting." ALIF: Journal of Contemporary Poetics (32) 2012: 1-22.http://www.academia.edu/1548918/Revisioning_Migration_On_the_Stratifications_of_Irish_Boston_in_Good_Will_Hunting
  27. ↑ Herlihy, Jeffrey. "Revisioning Migration: On the Stratifications of Irish Boston in Good Will Hunting | Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera". Academia.edu. Retrieved 2013-09-01.
  28. ↑ "Berlinale: 1998 Prize Winners". Berlinale.de. Retrieved 2012-01-16.
  29. ↑ "Good Will Hunting: Music from the Miramax Motion". Amazon.com. Retrieved 2013-05-23.
  30. ↑ "Good Will Hunting – Original Soundtrack". AllMusic. All Media Network, LLC. Retrieved February 20, 2014.
  31. ↑ "Good Will Hunting – Danny Elfman". Music Box Records. Retrieved March 3, 2014.

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