Trivia / Good Will Hunting

• California Doubling: Toronto stands in for Boston in a handful of scenes.
• Cast the Expert: John Mighton, who plays the assistant math professor to Lambeau, is himself a mathematician.
• Cast the Runner-Up: Originally, Ben Affleck was going to play Will and Matt Damon would be Chuckie. If rumors are to be believed, they apparently flipped a coin to decide who got to play which part.
• Channel Hop: According to Kevin Smith's DVD Commentary for Mallrats, the movie was to initially be produced by Castle Rock Entertainment, but this fell through and Smith was crucial in bringing it to Miramax.
• Dawson Casting: Will is twenty and turns twenty-one during the film. Matt Damon was twenty-six. In fact, he and Ben Affleck were motivated to properly get the film made because they knew soon they'd be too old to play Will and Chuckie.
• Mid-Development Genre Shift: It was originally conceived of by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as a thriller before the Weinsteins encouraged them to instead emphasize the relationship between Will and his psychologist. There is a remnant of this in the final script, where Will has a meeting with the NSA.
• Playing Against Type: When writing the script for themselves, Ben Affleck said that he wrote Chuckie to be the Plucky Comic Relief character because he was always being cast as the high school bully and wanted to play the funny best friend.
• Real-Life Relative: Brothers Ben and Casey Affleck as Chuckie and Morgan.
• Referenced by...: In Family Guy's "Chick Cancer", Brian tells Stewie "it's not your fault" after Stewie and Olivia break up.
• Romance on the Set: Matt Damon and Minnie Driver dated briefly. Unbeknownst to Driver, Damon famously announced the relationship was over during a TV interview with Oprah Winfrey.
• Spared by the Cut: Gus Van Sant wanted a scene where Chuckie to be killed in an on-the-job construction accident. When he read the new draft of the script, which incorporated the accident, he realized it was a terrible idea.
• Star-Making Role: For both Affleck and Damon.
• Stunt Casting: Robin Williams playing Sean was primarily what satisfied Miramax that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck could star as the leads.
• Testing the Editors: The original script pitched to studio executives included an out-of-nowhere homoerotic sex scene between two characters who were never identified as gay. When Harvey Weinstein questioned why it was there, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon answered:
  "That's the scene that we wrote to find out whether guys in your job actually read the script, because every studio executive we went to ... no one brought that scene up, or maybe people thought it was a mistake or maybe nobody read it themselves... You're the only guy that brought it up. You get the movie."
• Throw It In!:
  • Maguire's final line, "Son of a bitch...he stole my line," was ad-libbed by Robin Williams, and was kept as the second-last shot of the film.
  • Williams improvised the entire routine about his wife farting in her sleep, causing both Matt Damon and the cameraman to totally crack up, which is why Damon briefly goes out of focus.
  • Ben Affleck's brother Casey ad-libbed most of his lines. This frustrated Damon, Ben, and Van Sant during filming, but they later admitted that Casey's improvised lines were much funnier and better than what had been originally written for him.
• Trolling Creator: Ben Affleck and Matt Damon intentionally wrote a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment in the script where Chuckie and Will randomly have sex. This was to see which studio heads would be worth selling their script to, knowing that any executive who didn't mention the scene had not actually read the whole script. Harvey Weinstein was the only one who mentioned the scene in meetings, so they went with him.
• Tuckerization: Skylar was named after Matt Damon's girlfriend Skylar Satenstein, who left him shortly before filming began.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Ben Affleck and Matt Damon first asked Kevin Smith to direct. He declined because he felt the script deserved a better director and served as a producer instead (Smith had been instrumental in bringing the script to Miramax after development at Castle Rock Entertainment didn't progress). Michael Mann, Steven Soderbergh and Mel Gibson were also considered before Gus Van Sant was hired on.
  • Van Sant wanted Kate Winslet for Skylar. She declined, as she was wiped out from making Titanic (1997). Claire Danes was considered but was deemed too young for the role. Other candidates were Helena Bonham Carter, Nicole Kidman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Liv Tyler and Naomi Watts.
  • Will was initially going to be a physics genius. Upon discussing this with professor Sheldon L Glashow, Matt Damon was persuaded to make him a math prodigy instead.
  • The original screenplay was about a brilliant math prodigy who gets recruited by the CIA and gets involved in a conspiracy. Remnants of this could be seen in Will's interview with the NSA, and him refusing to participate in military code cracking.
• Word of God: Rumors persisted for years that William Goldman wrote the script. He publicly denied it at a WGA seminar in 2003, saying he suggested to emphasise the bond between Sean and Will but that was it. He states if he had written it, the "it's not your fault" scene wouldn't have been there.
• Write What You Know: Ben Affleck's father had been a janitor at Harvard for a time, inspiring Will Hunting's job.
• Write Who You Know: Sean Maguire was based on Matt Damon's mother and Ben Affleck's father, kind of a synthesis of the two.
• Written by Cast Member: Damon and Affleck's Oscar-winning screenplay.

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