Affleck Talks The Town

"The Town" follows a group of Boston bank robbers (including Jeremy Renner and director Ben Affleck in crisis as FBI man Jon Hamm steps up his pursuit and Affleck falls for the bank manager (Rebecca Hall) the crew take hostage on their last job. It's a rich, raw crime story with real excitement and true emotion, a film whose racing pulse beats in time with the character's wounded hearts. Talking about his second film as a director, Ben Affleck told me that at first, he wanted to act in "The Town" far more than he wanted to direct it. "I hadn't seen a part this good in a long time," he said. "It was interesting, complicated, nuanced, unusual. It was different from stuff I had done. And I said, 'Look, I'm going to direct this as well.' And my only trepidation was I didn't want to be pigeonholed as a Boston guy. But, ultimately, I thought I had an opportunity to put together a great cast and try to synthesize this love story with this character and drama into this really interesting, specific and new-seeming bank heist movie and so, while daunting, it's a challenge I wanted to take."

Affleck steps up his game in "The Town" as both a director and as an actor: Not only does his second directorial effort feature more -- and better -- action than "Gone Baby Gone," but he's also leading the cast. I asked Affleck if he knew he was putting those pressures on himself from the get-go. "I knew there was extra stuff I had to do for sure," he said. "And a lot of my 'director time' was taken up being an actor, so I was kind of squeezed. I felt like it was going to be scary -- but I also thought it was exciting, you know? Terror can actually make you work harder."

At the same time, Affleck also faced a challenge in making sure "The Town"'s mix of character-driven romance and drama didn't get drowned out by the vault-looting action -- or vice-versa -- and that the film worked as a whole. "Well, part of the trick is trying to make it not feel like two movies, right? To make it not feel like we're going to do 'Pretty Woman' and then we're going to do 'Heat,' or something."

I asked Affleck if his iconic status as a beloved son of Boston made it easier to lock down one of the film's locations, baseball shrine Fenway Park, the oldest major league baseball park in use. He laughed: "I don't know how beloved I am. I know that they wanted assurances that things were going to be done properly, things weren't going to be broken, we were going to be done on time, and we weren't going to make anybody look bad. And obviously they knew that I revered Fenway Park and the Boston Red Sox."

And since he brought it up, I asked Affleck how many times, exactly, he re-watched "Heat" to prepare for "The Town." He explained his own light-fingered approach to stealing from the best: "'Heat' is the diamond standard in terms of those movies. What can you say? You can try to duck it. You can try to get out of the way. You can say, 'I'm not going to watch it.' Or you can just embrace the fact that 'Heat''s the movie that people think of that's like this. Every bank robber I interviewed said, 'Have you seen 'Heat'?' I went to the FBI and the poster's on the wall. So 'Heat' is the 'Citizen Kane' of these movies. (Heat Director) Michael Mann is very gifted; those actors are very gifted. What they did was revolutionary. I tried to steal some stuff from them and from other movies, and I hope they didn't notice."