Good Will Hunting (1997)
- To accurately portray their role in Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon spent weeks conducting hands-on research and rehearsing directly with director Gus Van Sant.
- Despite initial studio skepticism, Good Will Hunting went on to gross over $225,900,000 worldwide.
Good Will Hunting is a 1997 American drama film directed by Gus Van Sant, written by its stars Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. The film follows Will Hunting, played by Damon, a self-taught mathematical genius from South Boston who works as a janitor at MIT while wasting his extraordinary potential in bar fights, menial jobs, and emotional self-sabotage. When Will anonymously solves a complex mathematics problem left on a hallway blackboard by Professor Gerald Lambeau, played by Stellan SkarsgΓ₯rd, and is subsequently arrested for assault, the court mandates that Will work with Lambeau on mathematics and attend therapy sessions with Dr.
Sean Maguire, played by Robin Williams, a community college psychology professor dealing with his own grief and unfulfilled potential. Good Will Hunting became one of the defining films of 1990s independent cinema, largely because of the remarkable backstory of its creation β Damon and Affleck, then largely unknown actors in their mid-twenties, wrote the screenplay themselves and shopped it around Hollywood with the stipulation that they would star in it. Robin Williams's performance as Sean Maguire was the emotional cornerstone of the film, balancing humor and devastating honesty in a role that required him to be both therapist and patient, mentor and wounded man.
His improvised "your wife used to fart in her sleep" monologue and the repeated "It's not your fault" breakthrough scene are among the most emotionally powerful moments in 1990s cinema. Williams won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and Damon and Affleck won Best Original Screenplay. The film earned $225 million worldwide on a $10 million budget.
