Casey Affleck: he's casting aside the moniker "Ben's little brother" in favor of the title "new leading man"

Casey Affleck is thoughtful, reflective, and philosophical--about everything but his work. He is the only person I've ever interviewed who had as many questions for me as I had for him, and he'd done his homework, ready to quote my work back to me. With back-to-back releases set for this fall, Affleck offers the same opportunity. Those projects include the celebrity-culture action-drama The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (directed by Andrew Dominik) and the adaptation of Dennis Lehane's book Gone, Baby, Gone, directed by Affleck's brother, Ben Affleck, both of which provide him the chance to show his range as an actor. In fact, the quiet spaces in Affleck's career--which he jokingly attributes to not getting called--more convincingly suggest an unwillingness to jump on the first thing his agents toss him. And projects that range from Gerry (2002) to Affleck's current autumnal coupling make a big case for that decision to bide his time until something intriguing comes along.

ELVIS MITCHELL: You're doing a lot of comedies these days, huh?

CASEY AFFLECK: [laughs] No, I haven't done many comedies. Have you seen the movies we're supposed to talk about?

EM: Yeah, I've seen both of them. In fact, I just walked out of Gone Baby Gone.

CA: Well, now you're on the spot--give us a little film criticism.

EM: One thing I can say is that your real gift as an actor is that you're a great talker--there aren't many people who can handle a lot of dialogue. Do you feel that's a strength?

CA: Oh, I'm the wrong person to speak about my strengths. I've never felt intimidated by a lot of words, but I've also never felt it was something I needed to put to work. Frankly, in most of the movies I've been in and in most of the scripts I'm sent, I'm asked to bullshit for 95 pages, and then I talk, and then there's a little bit more bullshit. For example, did you ever write about any of the Ocean's movies?

EM: Yeah, I wrote about the first one. I thought that stuff with you and Scott [Caan] was really great.

CA: I don't think I was mentioned in that review. In fact, how many times do you think you've mentioned me in a review?

EM: Well, I didn't mention you in Drowning Mona [2000], about which you should be very happy.

CA: Wait a minute--you did mention me in Drowning Mona! I was curious if you knew who I was, so I looked up the review.

EM: First of all, why wouldn't I know who you were? I actually just had drinks with Harris [Savides, the director of photography for Gerry] last week, and I always tell him how great I thought Gerry was. You basically came up with the idea for and wrote that film, right?

CA: It was an idea that [the director] Gus Van Sant had, and we collaborated on the script. The scenes with dialogue are mostly scripted, but there was some improvisation.

EM: You've done a number of films with Gus now, and you were at very different points in your career when you did them. What did you feel in each case?

CA: That's a hard question to answer. To Die For [1995] was the first movie that I did, so I really just got lucky there. It was a special experience because--although I was probably, like, the fourth lead or something--Gus is very inclusive. I think that that movie is the reason I'm still trying to be an actor. The second movie I did with Gus was Good Will Hunting [1997].

EM: Was there improvisation on that?

CA: There was some, but most of it was from the script. And we were all friends, so everyone was very comfortable. Gerry was a unique experience, though. It was great being able to do a movie with just nine people in the crew. Things went very quickly--we could do whatever we wanted; we could change our minds; we could decide what scene we were doing. It was supposed to be a movie about two guys dying of dehydration in a desert climate, but when we showed up in Argentina to shoot, it was snowing. So we kept moving around until we decided that we would have to leave the Southern Hemisphere. In the end we decided to shoot in Death Valley [in California], where it was hot and dry.

EM: [Steven] Soderbergh is also kind of freewheeling, but he does it in the context of a much bigger enterprise.

CA: Yeah. There are people who could describe Steven's methods and Gus's methods better than I could--I don't feel like I would do either of them justice, because as an actor, you're kind of on the outside looking in. It can be difficult to get into the head of a director, and that may not always be the best thing to do anyway.

EM: Why do you say that?

CA: It's just that as an actor you've got your own job to do. And it's a complicated relationship between actors and directors. Having worked with both Gus and Steven [in the Ocean's movies], though, I feel like they got something out of me that was better than what I knew to give. I'm very grateful to both of them.

EM: Tell me about Jesse James. What made you think you might want to be in the film?

CA: Well, the script was just a stunningly beautiful, heartbreaking piece of writing that stands out in my mind as one of the better things I've read. It was very sad, very original, and sort of ornate in its structure. Sometimes scripts are just a kind of blueprint, and you hope that the movie will be a little better, but I couldn't imagine this being better than the screenplay.