Good Will Hunting is a 1997 American drama film directed by Gus Van Sant and written by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. It stars Damon, Affleck, Robin Williams, Stellan Skarsgård, and Minnie Driver, with Casey Affleck and Cole Hauser in supporting roles. Set in Boston, the film follows Will Hunting (Damon), a troubled but self-taught genius working as a janitor at MIT, whose talent is discovered by professor Gerald Lambeau (Skarsgård). To avoid jail, Will agrees to study under Lambeau while attending therapy with psychologist Sean Maguire (Williams), which forces him to confront his past and his relationships, including with Harvard student Skylar (Driver).
Released by Miramax Films, Good Will Hunting premiered on December 2, 1997, and opened in the United States on December 5. Produced on a budget of about $10–16 million, it became a commercial success, grossing $225.9 million worldwide.
The film received widespread critical acclaim, particularly for Williams' performance and Affleck and Damon's screenplay. At the 70th Academy Awards, it received nine nominations and won Best Supporting Actor (Williams) and Best Original Screenplay (Affleck and Damon). The soundtrack features a score by Danny Elfman and songs by singer-songwriter Elliott Smith, including the Oscar-nominated "Miss Misery".
Plot
After being paroled, self-taught polymath Will Hunting, a rebellious 20-year-old man from South Boston, works as a janitor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and spends his free time drinking with his friends Chuckie, Billy and Morgan. At work, he anonymously solves a complex mathematical problem posted on a blackboard by Professor Gerald Lambeau as a challenge for his graduate students. Later, Will and his friends start a fight with a gang that includes one of Will's childhood bullies. When police intervene, Will is charged with assaulting an officer. Lambeau posts a more difficult problem to test the mysterious stranger and later catches Will writing the solution. Mistaking Will for a vandal, Lambeau chases him off but quickly realizes that he was solving the problem. At a bar, Will meets Skylar, a student about to graduate from Harvard University, with plans to attend medical school at Stanford. Skylar approaches Will and flirts with him, before giving him her phone number.
Lambeau asks the campus maintenance staff about Will's whereabouts, but learns that he did not come to work. He discovers that Will was placed at MIT through a program for parolees and obtains his parole officer's details. At Will's court appearance, Lambeau watches as Will argues in favor of pro se legal representation and later arranges for him to avoid jail time, on the condition that he study math under Lambeau's supervision and attend therapy. Will agrees but treats his therapists with mockery. A desperate Lambeau contacts Dr. Sean Maguire, his college roommate, who teaches psychology at Bunker Hill Community College. Unlike the previous therapists, Sean challenges Will's defense mechanisms. In the first session, Sean threatens Will after he insults his deceased wife. In the next sessions, Sean encourages Will to open up and Will invites Sean to move on from his wife's death. Will starts dating Skylar but lies to her about his background.
Sean recounts to Will his first meeting with his wife: he saw her at a bar and fell in love at first sight, giving up his ticket to the famous sixth game of the 1975 World Series to his friends by saying he had to go "see about a girl". Sean tells Will that he never regretted that decision, despite the hardships that followed. Will decides to introduce Skylar to his friends. Lambeau sets up several job interviews for Will, but he scorns them. In particular, he turns down a position at the National Security Agency (NSA) with a scathing critique of the agency's moral position.
Skylar tells Will she loves him and asks him to move to California with her, but he coldly refuses. She calls him out for being scared, and he tells her about his past as an orphan and the abuse he suffered in foster homes. Will breaks up with Skylar and ridicules the research Lambeau had been doing. Sean confronts Will on his fear of abandonment and failure, and invites him to be honest about what he wants from life. Chuckie encourages Will to take the opportunities offered to him, telling him that every day he hopes that Will will not answer the door, having gone away to pursue a better life. A heartbroken Skylar leaves for San Francisco alone.
Will hears Sean and Lambeau argue about his potential, with Sean saying that Lambeau risks ruining Will's future by pushing him too hard. Lambeau leaves, and Sean and Will talk about their shared experience as victims of child abuse. Sean helps Will accept that the abuse he received was not because of anything he had done, repeatedly stating "It's not your fault." This causes Will to break down in tears while the two embrace.
Will accepts one of the job offers arranged by Lambeau. Sean reconciles with Lambeau and decides to take a sabbatical, promising Will that he will remain in contact. For Will's birthday, his friends gift him a car to allow him to commute to work. Chuckie goes to Will's house to pick him up, but happily finds that he left. Will leaves a note for Sean, asking him to tell Lambeau that he had to go "see about a girl". The films ends with Will driving his new car to California to reunite with Skylar.
Cast
Matt Damon as Will Hunting, a rebellious 20-year-old self-taught mathematics genius and janitor at MIT from South Boston Robin Williams as Dr. Sean Maguire, a therapist and professor of psychology at Bunker Hill Community College from South Boston Ben Affleck as Chuckie Sullivan, a construction worker and Will's loyal childhood friend Stellan Skarsgård as Professor Gerald Lambeau, a Fields Medal-winning professor of mathematics at MIT Minnie Driver as Skylar, a wealthy British student at Harvard and Will's love interest
The cast includes Casey Affleck and Cole Hauser as Will's friends Morgan O'Mally and Billy McBride respectively; real-life mathematician John Mighton as Lambeau's assistant Tom; Scott William Winters as Clark, a Harvard student with whom Will argues; George Plimpton as Will's court-ordered therapist Henry Lipkin; Jimmy Flynn as Judge Malone; Christopher Britton and David Eisner as two of the company executives that interview Will; Alison Folland as a MIT student; and Bruce Hunter as a NSA agent that interviews Will. Film director Harmony Korine and visual artist Francesco Clemente make cameo appearances as Herve, a prisoner that Will sees in jail, and as a hypnotherapist respectively.
Production Writing Actors and screenwriters Ben Affleck and Matt Damon met in their hometown of Cambridge, Massachusetts, becoming friends at a young age. Years later, Damon started writing Good Will Hunting as a final assignment for a playwriting class that he attended in his fifth year at Harvard, turning in a script of around 40 pages instead of the one-act play requested by his professor.
Damon said that only the scene of Will and Sean's first meeting survived verbatim from the first script. He left university after getting a role in the 1993 film Geronimo: An American Legend and joined Affleck in Los Angeles, bringing the script with him. Damon asked for Affleck's input, leading to the beginning of their long-standing creative collaboration with Good Will Hunting. Affleck and Damon were inspired to work on the script by director Quentin Tarantino's success story with the production of his 1992 film Reservoir Dogs, which had been picked up despite his being a store clerk due to word of mouth: Tarantino had talked about the film with producer Lawrence Bender, who brought the script to film star Harvey Keitel, whose interest in starring in it led to Tarantino's being able to find funding for the film. In Los Angeles, the duo secured small roles in films and commercials, sharing their earnings to sustain themselves while trying to break into the film industry without much success.
Affleck and Damon were inspired by the resentful feelings experienced in their childhood toward students who came to Cambridge to attend Harvard and MIT, taking over the city and not respecting its residents. However, Damon became conflicted after attending Harvard himself, seeing that the students were good-willed and witnessing first-hand the dichotomy between local and college life in Cambridge. Affleck and Damon drew on their families' and friends' life experiences for inspiration: Affleck's father and his then-girlfriend worked as janitors at Harvard, Affleck and Damon had worked in construction in the summers, and some of Affleck's father's and Damon's mother's past experiences informed Sean's background story. The duo purposefully wrote Sean's part as one with flexible characteristics, devising it as "the Harvey Keitel part"—meaning a role that suited a Hollywood star, giving the character their best lines but little screen time so it could easily fit in a busy schedule. Damon said: "It could have gone to Meryl Streep, you know what I mean? We could have done some rewrites and it becomes more of a mother/son relationship. It could have gone to Morgan Freeman... and then you bring in elements of racial tension around Boston."
Initially, the script dealt with the life of a young self-taught physics genius from South Boston sought after by the NSA for his extraordinary abilities. In scenes inspired by Martin Brest's Beverly Hills Cop (1984) and Midnight Run (1988), the young man and his friends lead the NSA agents in chases around the city, as Affleck and Damon felt they had to include an action subplot to make the film commercially appealing. The duo improvised some of the scenes and recorded them on tape while imitating Freeman and Robert De Niro, who they envisioned playing the roles of the therapist and the professor. Affleck and Damon shared the script with film producer Chris Moore, who liked it and decided to help them find a studio to produce it.
Financing The duo completed the script in 1994 and brought it to their talent agent, Patrick Whitesell, who liked it. However, Whitesell thought it would be almost impossible to find a studio who would produce a film written by and starring two unknown actors, with the only precedent known to him being the 1976 film Rocky, in which previously unknown actor Sylvester Stallone wrote the script and starred in the lead role. At that point, Affleck and Damon had not yet agreed either on the title or on the main character's name, which Damon thought should be Nate. The duo then read a script named Good Will Hunting written by their high school friend Derrick Bridgeman, to whom they promised $10,000 in exchange for using the title if they managed to sell the script. Bridgeman later appeared in the film as a student in one of Lambeau's classes. Whitesell brought Good Will Hunting to the attention of several studio executives by initially promoting it as a Shane Black-style film like The Last Boy Scout (1991). Information about the script spread to other Hollywood creative executives in the span of four days, initiating a bidding war. Affleck and Damon accepted Castle Rock Entertainment's offer of $600,000 in November 1994 at the suggestion of director Richard Linklater, with whom Affleck had worked on the 1993 film Dazed and Confused. After splitting it evenly, both of them spent all of the money in six months, between paying taxes, giving their agents a fee, buying a Jeep Cherokee, and renting a party house by the Hollywood Bowl for months.