Ben Affleck (The Town) The Town
Ben Affleck directed, co-wrote, and starred in The Town, his second feature as a director after Gone Baby Gone (2007). The film cemented a career pivot that would culminate in Argo winning Best Picture two years later. Affleck's challenge was threefold: adapt a 400-page novel into a shootable script, direct himself in the lead role, and shoot a heist film on location in Boston for under $40 million.
Affleck took the project after two previous directors failed to launch it
Chuck Hogan's novel Prince of Thieves had been optioned by Paramount before publication, then passed to director Adrian Lyne, who envisioned a three-and-a-half-hour film with Brad Pitt in the lead and a budget approaching $90 million. Warner Bros. balked at the scope. After Gone Baby Gone proved Affleck could direct a Boston crime film on a modest budget, the studio offered him the project. (wikipedia)
"I didn't know how to direct somebody else's movie. For better or worse, it had to be a movie that I personally researched and understood." — Ben Affleck, The Hollywood Reporter (2010)
He brought in high school classmate Aaron Stockard to co-write. They produced a new draft in three weeks, trimming the 170-page screenplay Peter Craig had written down to a shootable length.
He researched Charlestown from the ground up despite growing up nearby
Affleck grew up in Cambridge, a few miles from Charlestown, but the neighborhood's insular criminal culture was foreign to him.
"It was like a different world. When I was a kid, I was scared to go there." — Ben Affleck, The Ringer (2020)
He held mass auditions that doubled as ethnographic research, interviewing hundreds of Charlestown residents about their neighborhood's code, its relationship to crime, and its generational patterns.
"We'd get 1,000 people to come in, and out of that there'd be like 20 interesting people whom I'd then do follow-up interviews with." — Ben Affleck, The Ringer (2020)
The production consulted with the FBI Violent Crimes Task Force in Boston and worked directly with convicted bank robbers. Co-writer Stockard described the effect on the writing:
"These guys were really ballsy and brazen. It was exciting to know that we could write these characters big and ambitious." — Aaron Stockard, The Hollywood Reporter (2010)
He directed himself by treating the editing room as his director
Affleck consulted Warren Beatty and Kevin Costner about the challenge of directing and starring simultaneously. His solution was to shoot extensive coverage of his own performance and shape it in post-production.
"Because I was directing myself, I got to make my own determination about what was most interesting about my performance." — Ben Affleck, Deadline (2010)
"You gain much more perspective on yourself in the cold dark of the editing room than you do on the set." — Ben Affleck, Deadline (2010)
The result is a performance notable for restraint. Doug MacRay is watchful and contained, a man who keeps his face still and his plans to himself. The acting serves the directing rather than competing with it.
The film conceals a character study inside a genre thriller
Affleck described his structural ambition as hiding thematic weight inside crowd-pleasing mechanics.
"It was concealing a character-based drama centered around themes that I was interested in, particularly the theme of children paying for the sins of their parents." — Ben Affleck, The Ringer (2020)
The film's three-strand structure -- heist thriller, romance, FBI procedural -- keeps the audience engaged with genre pleasures while the thematic argument about inheritance, loyalty, and escape operates underneath. A. O. Scott identified the technique in his review, praising the heist sequences as "lean, brutal, and efficient, and evidence of Mr. Affleck's skill and self-confidence as a director."
The Town was the middle act of a three-film directorial arc
Gone Baby Gone (2007) established Affleck as a serious director with a $19 million Boston crime film that earned critical praise and a Best Directorial Debut award from the National Board of Review. The Town (2010) scaled up to $37 million, added action sequences and star power, and grossed $154 million worldwide. Argo (2012) completed the trajectory: a $44.5 million political thriller that won the Academy Award for Best Picture and the BAFTA for Best Director. (wikipedia)
Each film expanded Affleck's range while maintaining his core method: ground-level research, location shooting, ensemble casts anchored by character actors, and genre mechanics deployed in service of thematic ambition. The progression from neighborhood mystery to heist thriller to geopolitical rescue made the case that Affleck's directorial skills were not limited to Boston crime stories -- though Boston remained his most natural material.
"The one benefit of having done all kinds of movies as an actor is, you learn the pros and cons of being tempted to do a really big movie because it costs a lot of money... Story is what's important." — Ben Affleck, Deadline (2010)