How Matt Damon and Ben Affleck conquered Hollywood

The power players used to sleep on each other’s sofas and couldn’t land a decent role between them. As they launch their own new $100m production company, Geoffrey Macnab looks at their meteoric rise, and says their indie credibility withered long ago

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck with their Oscars for ‘Good Will Hunting’ in 1998 (Hal Garb/Getty)

At the 70th Academy Awards in March 1998, craggy Hollywood old-timers Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau announced that a brand new double act, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, had won the Best Screenplay Oscar. Affleck and Damon looked delighted but utterly terrified. “I just said to Matt that losing would suck but that winning would be really scary – and it’s really, really scary,” a bashful Affleck confessed on stage.

They were “just two young guys” who came from nowhere and had, all of a sudden, landed on top of the world. Even as Hollywood embraced them, they remained keen, though, to burnish their independent credentials.

“The mainstream sucks, and it always will, is the bottom line. Because they don’t understand how to make movies,” Damon is quoted as saying in Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures, his 2004 book about Miramax, Sundance, and the rise of US independent cinema.