My father has positional vertigo, and if he flies he gets really dizzy, so he has to drive out to California, which he does a couple times a year. We talk, but we e-mail mostly. – Ben Affleck
Making movies has become such a golden ring, and it’s all such a big business, that the rewards system has gotten totally out of whack. Suddenly, you’re treated in a manner befitting someone who is actually an important person. – Ben Affleck
Rumors about me? Calista Flockhart, Pam Anderson, and Matt Damon. That’s who I’m dating. – Ben Affleck
The trap for an actor is that you become too successful at what you’re trying to do, and you can find yourself stuck there. – Ben Affleck
There is nothing worse that a thirteen-year-old boy. You’re embarrassed by your parents, and you’re trying to find your independance because, deep inside, you are so dependent on your mom. – Ben Affleck
My kids aren’t celebrities. They never made that bargain. We were offered a lot of money to sell pictures of our kids when they were born. You’ll notice there aren’t any. I make no judgment about people who decide differently; a lot of them give the money to charity. For me, it was a matter of principle. – Ben Affleck
I’ve never held myself up particularly high when I had movies that worked, and I never held myself all that low when I had failures. – Ben Affleck
I’ve finally learnt how to say, ‘No comment’. To appear in the tabloids is a real learning curve and a steep one at that. You had better learn quick or you get burnt. – Ben Affleck
To answer the question, though: I didn’t always want to direct. I just liked the idea of it. If a friend was making a short and needed someone who knew screen direction, I would jump in. It would be horrible, but it led to a short, then another, and another. It was like student films. – Ben Affleck
I’ve consciously taken on material that’s a bit too much for me but not an overreach. The first movie, just about performances. ‘The Town,’ I learned how to work broader material, develop tension, direct bigger scenes, action sequences. ‘Argo,’ I experimented with film stock, widened the scope of my geography. – Ben Affleck
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. – Ben Affleck
My mother gets all mad at me if I stay in a hotel. I’m 31-years-old, and I don’t want to sleep on a sleeping bag down in the basement. It’s humiliating. – Ben Affleck
I didn’t do anything for two years but work on ‘Gone Baby Gone,’ and it was miserable and hard, but at the end? It is a good movie. I liked it very much. If it had been dismissed and deemed worthless, it would been definitely devastating. But that didn’t happen. – Ben Affleck
Everyone’s entitled to express their political beliefs. I don’t presume to tell anybody who to vote for. I am comfortable telling people what my opinions are. – Ben Affleck
I’m much more interested in what an actor has to say about something substantial and important than who they’re dating or what clothes they’re wearing or some other asinine, insignificant aspect of their life. – Ben Affleck
I have a lot of influences. I like to sit down with the cinematographer a month before, and we’ll watch pieces of 20 or 30 movies. You’re basically the sum of all the experiences you’ve ever had, and they’re sort of shaken up in you and reproduced in the things you create, and that includes seeing movies. – Ben Affleck
Not that it entirely matters: There is a perception that all actors make their movies. A lot of people assume you’re responsible. George Clooney told me actors get all of the blame and all the credit. – Ben Affleck
What happens is this sort of bleed-over from the tabloids across your movie work. You go to a movie, you only go once. But the tabloids and Internet are everywhere. You can really subsume the public image of somebody. – Ben Affleck
Sure, I suffered a lot. But it’s not like the end of the world and it’s not who I am. I lead quite a pleasant life and I’m able to divorce a perceived reality from my actual experience of life. – Ben Affleck
I like acting for myself as a director. I act and I know that I’ll have a chance to have some say in what gets used and that I’ll be able to give myself enough takes and be on the same page as myself about how the scene should play. – Ben Affleck
I’m not the type of guy who enjoys one-night stands. It leaves me feeling very empty and cynical. It’s not even fun sexually. I need to feel something for the woman and entertain the vain hope that it may lead to a relationship. – Ben Affleck
My mother taught public school, went to Harvard and then got her master’s there and taught fifth and sixth grade in a public school. My dad had a more working-class lifestyle. He didn’t go to college. He was an auto mechanic and a bartender and a janitor at Harvard. – Ben Affleck
But when I felt like I had something to prove? Then I got up early every morning and worked all day long. I didn’t know if I had any more talent than anyone else directing, but I knew I could work hard at it, and so I did. – Ben Affleck
You can say what you want about me. You can yell at me with a video camera and be TMZ. You can follow me around and take pictures all you want. I don’t care. – Ben Affleck
