Ben Affleck & Matt Damon Explain Why Their Artists Equity Is Hollywood’s Most Disruptive Company As They Release ‘Small Things Like These’

EXCLUSIVE: We’ve seen efforts to share risk and upside in success, and many times they come and go. Artists Equity, hatched by pals Ben Affleck and Matt Damon and backed by a long term financial commitment from RedBird Capital billionaire Gerry Cardinale, has a real chance to reshape the tenuous pay landscape in a talent-friendly way. Since Deadline first broke their plans, Affleck and Damon have used their personal relationships and the hard knock lessons from over 30 years of their Oscar careers to create a sound equity participation formula for those involved in their projects. It’s a formula they believe provides more transparency in profit sharing than is available from the studios and streamers that will release the films Artists Equity bankrolls.

Housed in Los Angeles offices with a staff that has swelled past 70 employees working on film, TV, a full scale ad agency, and a lean-in on documentaries, Artists Equity is growing quickly. Affleck is CEO and treats that like a full time job, running it all with Damon’s wife, Luciana Damon. Matt Damon serves as Chief Content Officer and pitches in, between starring in films like Oppenheimer.

Their output began with Air, the superb drama about how Nike transformed the sneaker market making a disruptive shoe deal with Michael Jordan before he played a minute of NBA ball. Affleck directed and played Nike chief Phil Knight and Damon played Sonny Vaccaro, who convinced Jordan’s mom (Viola Davis) to trust Nike over better established sneaker-makers, capped by a speech that is the corporate equivalent of the William Wallace battle cry in Braveheart.

They’ve followed with the Dunkin’ Donuts ad campaign featuring the two of them, the Doug Liman-directed The Instigators with Matt and Casey Affleck, the U2 documentary feature Kiss The Future, the sports drama Unstoppable that stars Jennifer Lopez, the Gavin O’Connor-directed The Accountant 2  with Affleck and Jon Bernthal reprising their brother assassin roles. Today, Lionsgate opens in the US Small Things Like These, an Irish drama that stars Damon’s Oppenheimer cohort Cillian Murphy  in his first big film since winning the Oscar for playing the father of the atom bomb. It’s the first production from Murphy and Alan Moloney’s Big Things Films label, and the period drama chronicles how the Catholic Church shamelessly used its unquestioned power in small Irish towns to turn pregnant unwed Catholic girls into indentured servants, ripping away their newborns right after they were born.

I’d seen Damon just recently, when he and Casey Affleck threw out the first ball at Fenway Park for a celebration of the Apple TV+ hit The Instigators. Damon, all wiry and aerobicized for an upcoming job this summer, came on the Zoom call with Affleck this week, sporting a long grey beard and longish graying hair. Since the basis of any relationship between Boston actors and a New Yorker like myself is antagonistic based on the sports rivalries, we begin in that spirit as they talk about the incredibly disruptive venture they are determined to make a success.

DEADLINE: Matt, I’m trying to be kind here, but after seeing you at Fenway Park impressively filling out that Red Sox jersey, how to explain this guy I am looking at now, with the long grey beard? Man, you got old.

MATT DAMON: I did, man. I did. Well, we’re shooting a movie, and I’m starring in it with Ben. That’s why he’s got the beard, too.

DEADLINE: That’s quite a growth Ben. So we’re finally getting a movie about those brothers on the cough drop box?

AFFLECK: Damn, you busted us. It’s actually a movie called Rip, about undercover cops. So for me and Matt, this is our undercover look. By the way, I didn’t see much of the World Series, but I recall it made me happy…

DEADLINE: Ouch. It’s always hard for a New Yorker to compliment two Boston guys, but you made one of the great recent sports movies, about a shoe deal with Air. Now you have Small Things Like These, which couldn’t be more different. Matt, is it too much to imagine Cillian with his Oppenheimer hat pitching that movie to you between takes, while you were wearing that mustache and the clothes of General Leslie Groves Jr?

DAMON: That’s not too far off. I had the privilege of sitting across the table from Cillian while that performance was happening, and I was talking to Ben throughout, telling him how it was going and seeing what I was seeing and how great everybody was. And particularly what Cillian was doing. We struck up a conversation in the desert in New Mexico in between takes, probably a series of conversations because there’s not a lot of sitting around on Chris Nolan’s films. But through the course of a day, I was pitching Cillian on what Ben and I were trying to do with Artists Equity and asking him what he had coming up. He said he had this little movie based on a Claire Keegan novella and a script by Enda Walsh. It sounded exactly like what we were looking for, and Alan Moloney was already attached to produce it. We had just done the U2 documentary Kiss the Future together.

This was exactly what we were looking for, a great first movie after Air and one that didn’t have Ben and I onscreen. It didn’t have anything to do with us really, but it was a great way to prove this model. It was  an incredibly frictionless process. We read the script and we fell in love with it, and we figured out how much money they needed. We explained the whole system to them. They were on board with it because it gave them full creative freedom to make the movie that they wanted to make, and we were available to give notes, ideas, anything they needed from us. But to tell you the truth, it was very little.

Those guys knew exactly the movie they wanted to make. They came back with this beautiful movie and we watched a number of cuts and gave feedback. But we’re not a prescriptive studio. We’re filmmakers too. We all watch each other’s films usually in rough stages, and that’s the moment when the hood is up on the car and you’re giving the best advice you can. Terry Malick once described it to Ben, when Ben showed him a rough cut of one of his films. Terry said, ‘Ben, I’m going to talk to you, surgeon to surgeon, and there’s a body on the table.’ That’s really what it is unless you’re invited to a premiere, and you put your suit on and you go and you say, great, I loved every part of it. But until the picture is locked, we’re all here to help each other and make sure that the best film emerges. In this case, that team was just phenomenal and it was proof of concept for us. We’ve been doing this a long time, both of us, and we felt that this would work. It was definitely gratifying to see it work this well the first time out.

DEADLINE: Ben, explain why this fit the Artists Equity model and how it worked favorably for Cillian?

AFFLECK: Well, some of the basic ways this movie fits our model and is really consistent with the other stuff we’ve done and what we hope to do is that it really stemmed from a really passionate artist who cared very much about a story. We feel the best way to make that happen is to give as much latitude and creative freedom to the filmmakers as possible. They would have a sense of authorship and the voice we wanted them to have. And they cared enough about it that they were willing to effectively be investors themselves and take on the added responsibility that comes with that.

Part of what we’ve proposed to artists when they take on a greater responsibility around the movie is that you then get afforded a broader latitude and freedom to tell your story, but it only works when you have people that are really dedicated to it and bring real passion. When you have that, our belief is you’re going to get the best possible results creatively. You’ll have people that, from both a commercial and creative standpoint, care about what an audience experiences. From a promotional standpoint, they want to get behind the movie, they want to talk about it. We’ve all seen how effective that is, particularly in a day and age where a theatrical has become more difficult. A movie like Deadpool & Wolverine, you’ve got to have Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman out there doing what they did to blow a movie open.

This is a different scale, a different genre, but nonetheless, it’s one that Cillian cares just as much about. The results in the UK and Ireland are really telling; it is or is close to being the most successful Irish film in Ireland. That’s a really big deal, a credit to Cillian’s commitment to it. We look for that whether it’s the documentaries we’ve made, or Air, movies like The Instigators or The Accountant 2. Or all the stuff we’ve done that might not otherwise on the face of it have any kind of connective tissue. Same with the movie we’re doing now, Riff; the ethos underlying all the stuff we want to do is rooted in all of it.

DEADLINE: How does Cillian Murphy and others benefit? Are they shareholders as opposed to the traditional practice of selling the script to a financier?

AFFLECK: You become effectively like an investor in the sense that their contribution is treated equally with a financial investment. What Cillian and the filmmaking team bring to it is treated by our company and valued in the same way as a co-financier that brings money. They help manage the risk downward and they reap the rewards of that. That’s something that like common sense. But one of the problems with the way deals have evolved in Hollywood is that I think intentionally or not, people have been taught that the participation in projects isn’t real. We’ve gotten into this game of, okay, sure, well, it’s not gross, it’s net participation, and then these costs are going to build against it and it’s going to come after these fees. There’s this dance of, well, you’ll audit us, we’ll give a little, you’ll audit us again. And that has become this enshrined ritual in Hollywood. It may have been appropriate for a different economic climate in the movie business, but we don’t feel it’s appropriate when you’re asking people to commit their time and effort and artistry in the way that these filmmakers have committed theirs. They did so because they cared so much about movie being made but that doesn’t mean they should be taken advantage of. They are investors and we wanted to treat them that way.

DEADLINE: When you do a bigger movie like Rip or The Accountant 2; is it the same formula? Based on track record, you are going to hit one out of the park that will make a fortune.  inevitable, and then there’s going to be a ton of money. And stories about, can you believe how much money they paid so and so? There is every possibility you will have to pay out big winnings.

AFFLECK: Each project has the same underlying philosophy, but because each movie in terms of scale and participants and cost is different, we’ve had to approach them somewhat differently. Being flexible is part of the DNA of what we’re trying to do. But you talk about streaming, for example, we’ve worked really hard with Netflix, our partners in the movie Rip, to get performance-based incentives both for the actors and for the crew. We value the artistry of the crew members in the same way that we value the filmmakers and the performers. And we really feel that there needs to be, even in the case where you say, okay, effectively the economics are going to be such that even if we sell a movie before we start shooting, we’re going to distribute the money in similar economic ways, but we still want to have people incentivized to invest themselves and care about performance because it’s got to work for our partners. Whether it’s theatrical exhibitors like Lionsgate on Small Things or streamers like Netflix on Rip, or with Amazon on Air where you have both the theatrical and the streaming side. They need to find success out of it, otherwise our model’s not going to work and we’re going to be out of jobs. So we work to fashion the same philosophical deal in different ways each time. That has required some innovating and reexamining of traditional models. It’s no secret there’s a retraction in spending. I suspect this year it will be 20 to 25% overall, relative to pre-strike spending.

You’ve got this retrenchment, and this desire to spend less. We’ve tried to find solutions to pay, for there to be meaningful performance incentives. To answer your question, we broadly apply the principles of the same model. We’ve made movies and unscripted stuff that’s $2 million to $4 million, to traditional movies with big budgets. We apply the same principles. The ways in which they’re executed vary, but that’s something we learned from Hollywood. Which is that yes, you’ve got precedent and also every deal is a function of the respective party’s needs and what the economy looks like in the moment.

DEADLINE: What was it like standing side by side with Terrence Malick looking at the body on the table?

AFFLECK: Matt said it really so well, it’s really about the best notes or contributions. When we show our movies to other filmmakers that we admire and respect, what we find is that we tend to get exactly what Matt said. Not prescriptive notes, but genuine reactions. ‘I didn’t understand this’ or ‘this didn’t seem very funny to me,’ or ‘I wasn’t moved by this.’ And that’s the sort of worst case. ‘I don’t think this is working.’ Typically that’s what you want when you’re working with other creative people who are often in the position of not just identifying problems, but coming up with solutions. And so we tend to try restrict ourselves to, well, what if he were angrier here?

Might that help us understand something? The kind of notes that historically we’ve gotten from our peers and our elders we’ve looked up and from whom we’ve learned a great deal, whether it’s Terry or others…I think Matt has learned so much about this business by listening. I don’t know an actor in his age range who has worked with a better, more impressive roster of directors. And I believe more and more that everything I’ve learned comes through humility and listening to people who are smarter and better at it than I am. It’s a gift to work with the directors that I’ve worked with, not to mention the staggering roster of directors, including Chris Nolan, who Matt has worked with.

What it teaches you is in part how to respond to a filmmaker while a film is in process. Often, it’s hard. I think people assume, well, we’re financing movies and there’s a tendency to either get scared or to want to dictate things. We’ve all been on the downside of bad notes around movies, and one of the things we try to do is, not do that. We learned as much by negative example as positive. Movies are iterative. Speaking for myself, I want to hang myself when I see the first cut, and then slowly I become less suicidal as I work on it and iterate. You learn to understand that going in, you’re not going to see a rough cut and think it’s a masterpiece.

That part of the process is probably more meaningful than the production phase. What we want to be is supportive, additive. We’re not going to dictate. We say, you’re a grownup. Here’s the budget. We agree on that. You stay within those lines. You’re going to make the movie you want to make. That’s a promise we make to people and that we feel really comfortable making because we are going to bet on the people that we believe in, and therefore they ought to have the latitude they’ve taken on the responsibility they have, in my view, more than earned the freedom to make their film their way. Whether a person has their face on the poster or their name where it says directed by, no matter how much a financier has in a movie, those people care even more about results and about what happens. There’s something more important than money at stake, which is one’s personal reputation and integrity and artistry so forth.

DEADLINE: You both started out with Good Will Hunting. That put you on the map, and soon you were first dollar gross movie stars. And then studio people would say to me and others, they’ve gotten millions upfront and they’re collecting gross backends before we recoup. That changed to break even and box office bonuses, and we don’t know where it will end with streaming. Your program of making shareholders of your participants is different from a mindset where one might say, they’re paying me a fortune, I’ll let the studio do what it pleases. Talk about how compensation evolved that led the two of you to feel this way is best.

AFFLECK: The way you describe gross is fair. We’ve all heard anecdotes of the studio that lost money while the stars made $90 million. That’s not fair in anybody’s mind, or it’s certainly not in mine. But the correction to that was to define profits differently. And in so doing, I think there’s a strong temptation to add on fees and overhead, and there are real margins within a lot of legacy studios where you’re starting to sit behind definition of net profits that became absurd too. You’d hear, ‘We made the movie for $10 million and it has made a hundred million and I haven’t made any money yet.’ There are plenty of those stories too. So we’ve tried to distill and make more clear how people are compensated. I think it’s fair to say that talent got taught that if you can’t really believe in the definition of upside success when gross was taken away, the motivation then becomes, okay, just grab what you can. It’s sort of a cash grab in the moment.

We’re all subject to this sort of insecurity in this business. Whether we’re actors or directors or writers, the phone could stop ringing for us. This is the time to take the money. But what that does is puts people at cross purposes. The people invested in the movie are not aligned exactly with the people who are doing it. And it’s not because they’re trying to just be extractive, it’s because they’ve learned, well, this is the only thing I can count on, this upfront money. I don’t know when this might go away. I’m one errant remark away from being canceled, or I’m one movie bomb away from never working again, and I’ve got a family and so forth. Naturally, people seek to do what’s in their best interest.

And so that’s part of what you have to account for. It’s trying to straddle that divide and say, look, we’re going to tell you upfront, you have to invest something into the movie. Look, I’ve been in movies like Gigli, that’s a famous example. I got a big cash payday for that. Well, it doesn’t feel right in retrospect because they lost money. It wasn’t the biggest money losing movie in history even though it was the most famous bomb in history, perhaps. Nonetheless, that doesn’t sit right with me. But it also doesn’t sit right with people when they go, wait a minute, we all sacrificed to be committed to this. And then the old story about the 10 million movie that’s made 200 million and nobody’s seen a nickel.

The answer is, fairness. That’s a basic fundamental principle that Matt and I are really drawn to, to create a fair deal for everybody that they can live with in success, in failure, or anywhere along the spectrum. The ancillary benefit of that, for a lot of us who care about and do this, the dirty little secret is a lot of us would do it for free. But we also don’t want to be taken advantage of for that. It’s a beautiful, wonderful, fortunate way to make a living. And yes, you’re asking investors to make an investment in movies that oftentimes it’s hard for people who are used to looking at PowerPoint presentations and graphs that go up and to the right and whose instinct is to sort of take success and scale it.

They often see the same thing, reapplied multiple times. But that doesn’t really work for movies because they require new original content and ideas in order to build a new franchise, to attract new people to it. You can’t just rely on what’s worked before. So there is some nature of risk and we seek to balance those two extremes. We don’t want to do something that’s unfair for one party or the other. We want to create an ecosystem that works for everybody here, exhibitors, partners, streamers, talent and our business. I think that’s one of the things that define this company and makes it different from a classic actors production company shingle where you pay a little money for overhead, and you get a first look.

We went and really generated significant outside investment to create what we hope will be a kind of mini independent studio where we can cashflow movies. Because that really is the only way, and one of the really meaningful things we do is say, okay, if you’re going to buy a movie from us, this is all it’s ever going to cost you. There are no overages, ever. And so then we then take on that responsibility and we ask that the filmmakers share that with us. We’re a company that’s built for those kind of entrepreneurial artists who really care about what they’re doing and are willing to take some risk but also want to be fairly compensated, don’t want to be the only people that don’t succeed because there’s the old adage, ah, you’ll get paid on the next one. That’s true to a certain extent if it’s your first movie or it’s early on, but at a certain point…that’s why we chose Air in some ways as a model. Because Michael Jordan made all that money, and I don’t think anyone would argue he doesn’t deserve it, or that it wasn’t a great thing for Nike. But it was Deloris and Michael Jordan and their family making that deal really changed compensation for athletes and sports in a really meaningful way, a way that wasn’t easy to do. That, in fact, ultimately generated a lot of growth for that athletic shoe business for athletes in general, and for brands in general. That’s what we’re trying to emulate.

DEADLINE: Matt, you guys started out closely intertwined you’re your Oscar winning Good Will Hunting script, and then you branched into separate paths. You with the Bourne Identity franchise and many others, Ben starring but also writing and directing films like The Town and Argo. Why was it important for you to reconnect in such a disruptive long-term way like Artists Equity?

DAMON: We had this experience on The Last Duel. Ben and I hadn’t written together in so long, and I watched that Peter Jackson Beatles documentary, the one that ends with that performance on the roof. These guys are playing, and it’s The Beatles, and they’re live and you can see the joy that they’re playing with. They’re so excited and then Peter Jackson puts a Chiron up that says, this is the last live performance that the Beatles ever gave. I was watching it with my youngest daughter and she turned and looked at me. She said, ‘dad, why are you crying?’ I had tears running down my face because of the  missed opportunity that these four incredible musicians who clearly loved each other never got. That was the impetus behind putting this company together. I was like, what are we doing, man? Both of us, this is what we love to do more than anything. The only thing better is doing it together, in any capacity, whether he’s directing or whether we’re acting together or whether we’re producing together, or whether we’re just facilitating for other filmmakers. How much life do we have left and what are we going to do with it?

DEADLINE: That is a lovely sentiment, but Ben, you not only work as a director, a writer, an actor and a producer. It’s like when people say George Clooney or Oprah Winfrey should run for president. That is the most demanding job, and they have jobs. But Matt has told me that you have been a fulltime CEO, running a staff of over 70 from the Los Angeles offices. Aren’t there moments when you pine for a simpler life of learning your lines on a movie set?

AFFLECK: Well, it’s definitely true. I remember sitting down with my agent Patrick Whitesell and lawyer Sam Fischer, who are old and valued friends. They said look, we just want you to know this is going to be a lot of work. I really underestimated that. I had no idea, and now have a much better appreciation or what it takes to manage people, build a business. Some of the more onerous or less sexy, more mundane concerns aren’t typically what you encounter as an actor or writer or even as a director where you might you go,  ok, I manage 150 people on a movie set. There’s a greater responsibility and there’s definitely more headaches. But what I get out of it is, it’s also fun and I don’t know why it is but I’ve always an ambition to do this.

I think part of it is the sense of kind of powerlessness that you have as an actor, even on things that had good writing. I was like, okay, this is a device that’s going to allow us the opportunity to do the job we want to do, but that we don’t have the opportunity to do. Creating opportunities for ourselves and then creating opportunities for other people has been part of what has motivated and driven us from the Project Greenlight days. If I knew how much time it would take and how much stress and how little sleep and how you carry these worries and responsibilities, I might’ve been more daunted. But I’m kind of glad I didn’t know. And now I have really learned another valuable lesson in humility and respect, which is at the root of all valuable lessons.

DEADLINE: How about you, Matt? You told me at Fenway the disposition of duties was in no way equal…

DAMON: I told you hands down it was Ben and that’s all true. Ben’s our CEO, and then it’s my wife. Nobody spends more time at this than my wife. But Ben’s there day to day behind the big desk with the suit on.

AFFLECK: I’m exclusive to this company so I can only work for Artists Equity. Matt needed the opportunity to star in big films, and it’s not a secret he’ll be doing a movie with an exciting filmmaker in the near future. That opportunity is great for you, Matt, but also great for the company. I can’t tell you how meaningful that is. Small Things is a great example, with Matt’s relationship with Cillian. Telling me, this guy’s an incredible actor. We should be doing this movie. These relationships, Matt’s integrity, his reputation built over 30 years of working alongside people and getting to know them and people knowing and understanding that Matt’s somebody who’s good for his word, and is such an incredibly meaningful, powerful asset to our business. Because particularly in cases like this, we’re asking people to do things that haven’t been done. We’re asking people to commit to do something that they care enormously about, with us and which we benefit from. The enormous integrity and respect that Matt has among his peers, that’s probably been the most meaningful driver of our business.

DAMON: But it’s also just our relationships in general, right? We’ve been on the other side of the camera our whole lives, and suddenly have this little studio. Something like The Instigators comes up, Casey sends the script to me, I put it to the side [laughs] and don’t read it. Lucy reads it and tells me you got to read this one.

So I read it and Casey and I start talking about it. Well, who would be the best person to direct this? Hey, what about Doug Liman?

DEADLINE: Who directed you in The Bourne Identity…

DAMON: And that’s just a phone call, with no intermediaries because we all know each other. I just called Doug up and I say, Hey, I’m going to text you this script, take a look. I think it’s really good. Casey wrote it and we want to do it with you. And the next day Doug’s calling back going, yeah, I want to do it. Things came together just as quickly with Small Things Like These. We said yes, basically we figured out what the budget was, we all agreed on the model and we just pressed the button and the movie went right into production. There doesn’t have to be that normal lag that takes place in the movie business. When it’s all filmmakers just talking to each other and one party has enough money to green light it and you can go right into pre-production.

AFFLECK: It is thrilling to see Cillian, Tim [Mielants] and Alan [Moloney] believe so much in this movie, and have it come back and be so beautiful. It’s personally rewarding. Billy Goldenberg, an editor on my movies as a director who worked with Matt and I very closely on Air where we had the editing room on set and Matt and I were in and out of the editing room, it was a no-brainer for us to go, this guy is a director. He did a spectacular job with Unstoppable, which premiered at Toronto and comes out early next year. Those relationships are both our advantage and they’re also the most personally gratifying because it’s just so exciting to watch really talented people that you want to support and have the ability to go through it with them, to watch them grapple with it…Listen, there’s good days and hard days. I don’t care who you are. That’s part of what makes it exciting and fun and really at the root of this company was Matt and my realization that your life is defined so much by the people that you spend time with every day. On The Last Duel, we agreed we ought to do more stuff together. Life is just a lot more fun and rewarding when we’re spending time together, and working together. If we can choose who we want to be around, let’s make that a really rewarding part of our lives. And that was as much a guiding principle of this, going forward. Who do we want to be partners and making movies just in terms of who do we want to spend time with, who do we want to be partners with? What do we want? It was incredibly rewarding to see Billy get his standing ovation at Toronto. You see the Rotten Tomatoes for Small Things and the reviews are so rapturous. It is more rewarding than any of the personal kind of gratification from my own career, honestly. I love this company and what we’re doing. An advertising agency, working with major brands. An unscripted division, we’re going to deliver four movies this year and six next year. We’re doing data and data analytics, trying to find ways to sort of look at innovative ways of digital marketing and mitigating the cost, disintermediate the cost and the difficulty around advertising, particularly theatrically.

I love every bit of it. Did you know we have Eric Roth running a feature writer’s room?

DEADLINE: The Eric Roth, the Oscar winner for Forrest Gump who scripted Here, and worked with Matt on The Good Shepherd? That Eric Roth?

AFFLECK: Eric runs a feature writer’s room that functions with the same ethos that the rest of the company does, which is you get a salary, you come in, you work collaboratively with other writers. We have these salons where directors, filmmakers, actors come in and talk and then the writers work. It was taken as an idea from Mank. I saw that movie and how those feature writers’ rooms used to work, and I said, Eric, why don’t we do this? I was lucky this is a place where, when we get movies made, the writers own a piece of them. So it’s a little different.

DAMON: We don’t have the actors under contract and we’re not going to. We added to that, okay, if you write this then you’re going to be paid effectively as an equity holder in the negative of the film itself. It’s compensation that’s driven based on how successful the movie is. And also you get your pretty good weekly rates. We had to work with the WGA and others to come up with creative ways to build these deals that had to be rooted in both real meaningful conversation and success. But what we found is that in so many cases, the writers didn’t come in obsessed with money. They came in really interested in working with other artists, being able to work directly for directors, filmmakers, and in collaboration and concert with them. Because there’s a lot of frustration around the way in which the development process has been created at various places.

I’m not the first one to tell you, you talk to a writer, they’ll have a lot of nightmare stories about development and feeling stymied, suffocated and neglected. And people’s passion to have that level of connection and interactivity and authorship over these movies and also to share their work with other writers in a group format for features, which is common practice in television but not in features, was really attractive to people. Then there’s a lot of thrill in being able to actually see that come to life.

AFFLECK: Eric comes into the office and they meet with the writers and they go down and sit with them and listen to everybody’s ideas. That’s the best part of my day, just listening to these various ideas and kind of spit balling with people; being around exciting, vibrant, creative people with a lot of passion and enthusiasm to do this and to tell stories that are rooted in their experience or their imagination.

It’s thrilling and yeah, part of my job then is the headaches around that.  Yep, we’ve got production, we’ve got business affairs, got legal, we’ve got production accounting, we’ve got advertising, we’ve got post-production, we we’ve sort of soup to nuts from equipment, cameras, lenses, all the way to effects. I want this to be a sort of soup to nuts entity that could do anything up to essentially distribution. Because I feel like, okay, that’s what a lot of these larger companies have proven quite good at. They’ve got these pipes, they’ve built this elaborate, sophisticated distribution network. When Matt and I sat down and looked at the landscape, there was room and space for reliable independent providers of material who could guarantee and protect your downside in terms of cost. And what we were trying to do, and the reason why we didn’t do this interview a year or two years ago is because we know and understand that ultimately it’s the movies and the audience’s experience with those movies that’s going to speak to the overall perception of quality that we create.

So far, I’m really proud of everything we’ve done. Small Things, Air, Accountant 2, The Instigators. Unstoppable, which Jennifer Lopez is terrific in. Working with our old friend Joe Carnahan on Rip for Netflix. I don’t think it’s an accident. We’re not getting lucky. I really believe that the reason why I at least am really proud of the work that’s being done is because of the freedom and the latitude and the support that we’re trying to provide to everybody. When we say artists, that’s the cast and the crew, the filmmakers, that’s the whole entity responsible for this collaborative bizarre art form that is filming.

DAMON: It all starts with quality, right? Quality films, we make good movies, all of our problems are solved. And one of the things that’s really interesting, this incredible ancillary benefit to the way we’ve structured this is say, on a movie like Air and its crew. Ben turned to me about three weeks in. He is directing the picture and he goes, I haven’t heard the word no yet. That is esprit de corps that when you treat everybody like a grownup and they have more responsibility and they have more creative freedom, this is what you get. I’m on my third movie for Artists Equity and it’s a different feeling on set.

We have the added benefit of knowing certain things, having just lived in production for 30 years ourselves, 30 years each. We went over budget in one category on Air, which was food trucks. We had five food trucks a day sitting out in the base camp parking lot. That kind of stuff matters for people who live in production, being able to get a special coffee or go like, holy shit, they have Korean barbecue today out in the parking lot. It’s this great feeling when you get everybody rowing in the same direction, when everybody is invested in it, the the cast and the crew, it makes the set feels different.

DEADLINE: Gotta ask a last question on behalf of Casey Affleck, who was kind enough to invite me to invite me and my grandson to Fenway when we did the Deadline video feature The Film That Lit My Fuse. Casey said the two of you begged him to take your Good Will Hunting script to director Gus Van Sant, whom he knew from making To Die For together. Gus commits, making the movie happen. Then, he said, you invited him to audition to play that third guy in the car. My question: were you just fucking with him?

DAMON: That is a bold face lie. Everything about that story is untrue…

AFFLECK: Really? When you hear a story like that, usually you go, oh, I see what he’s saying, but there’s nothing about that story that’s rooted in truth. I don’t know where to start. First of all, we wrote the part for Casey. He knew it the whole time. There was no audition. Oh my God. Yeah. I don’t know why he says what he says sometimes. I think he’s just an inveterate prankster.