The first 15 minutes of The Instigators is like Boston bingo. There’s a photo of Bobby Orr going airborne after his Stanley Cup–winning goal, a cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, and a scene in the bowels of Fenway Park. But no hyper-specific local reference made my latent degenerate Masshole pride bubble up like the sight of people in a bar playing keno.
For those of you who don’t drop your r’s, keno is a legal numbers game that pops up in convenience stores and dives all over my home state. Growing up in Massachusetts, Casey Affleck saw it everywhere. “Keno was in most of the bars that I remember when we were young,” he says. “Especially the bar where my dad worked.”
Sure, it’s a small detail. But it’s the kind of thing that separates a movie set in Boston from a Boston Movie. These days, no one named Affleck or Damon would allow themselves to be lured back to New England for a film that doesn’t try to get the minutiae right. Director Doug Liman’s action-comedy does, while also slightly changing up the formula.
And that’s why Casey and Matt from Cambridge decided to go home again: They wanted to do something a little bit different. Good Will Hunting was heartfelt, The Departed was pulpy, Gone Baby Gone was bleak, and Manchester by the Sea was devastating. The Instigators is a much lighter, looser take on a region that in the years since Damon suited up as a genius MIT janitor has turned into a true Hollywood outpost.
“It’s kind of become a more mainstream, more expected place to set a movie,” says Damon, whose old buddy—and Casey’s older brother—Ben Affleck is one of the producers of The Instigators. “So it raises the bar in terms of what you can go back and make there. And that’s why this is so tonally different from anything that we’ve ever done there. It’s like this very heightened reality, but it’s grounded. It’s a straight comedy. And that was why it felt like a new page.”
Casey Affleck also cowrote The Instigators, which hits theaters today and Apple TV+ on August 9. I’d call it an anti-heist flick. Two hard-up friends from Quincy, ex-con Cobby (Affleck) and Marine veteran Rory (Damon), agree to take part in a very poorly planned robbery. It goes sideways, and they have to lam it. Then they rope in the latter’s by-the-book psychiatrist (Hong Chau).
The fact that a key story point is a therapist treating an emotionally closed-off character played by Damon proves one thing: When it comes to Boston Movies, some things never change.
I wanted to start with this: What’s something about Boston that you’ve had to explain to people in your lives who aren’t from there?
Matt Damon: Probably our rabid sports fandom, because it’s not normal and I didn’t realize that until I started traveling around the country. People don’t live or die by their team necessarily in other cities, unless you’re in Philly. That would probably be something I have to explain, certainly, to my family constantly when we’re in the playoffs in any sport.
Casey Affleck: That the tone of an exchange like, “Hi, how are ya?” is not an indication of how they feel about you. Because they’ll go, like, “God, everyone is so unfriendly,” and you’re like, “No.” “How are ya?”—it sounds aggressive, but actually, you are exchanging pleasantries, as they say. [To Hong Chau] What did you find unique about Boston?
Hong Chau: The accent. The first time I ever heard a New England accent, I thought she was speaking another language. I did not understand what she was saying. I grew up in New Orleans.
Hong, what was it like working on that accent? And guys, how did she do?
Damon: Well, she didn’t really have one in the movie.
Chau: It kind of unconsciously slipped in because my driver had such a great accent, and whenever I would wrap at the end of the day, I ended up taking on her accent in the car whenever we would drive together.
For you guys, what was it like dusting those accents off again? There are [Boston] people who don’t have an accent at all, and there are people who you think are faking it because it’s so fucking strong.
Damon: The key is always like, “Where do you calibrate it?” We’ve worked there a bunch, and in Manchester by the Sea, Casey toned it way down. It’s just kind of what each movie needs or what each role needs, but there is a familiarity with it. I mean, when you start to speak in it, it just feels so natural. You just kind of roll right into it.
Is it like a dog whistle for you guys like it is for me, where I’ll hear somebody speak and they’ll have the faintest hint of a Boston accent, and I kind of look at them with this weird recognition?
Affleck: Yeah, totally. Especially out in California, you don’t hear that many of them. Sometimes I’ll find I’m driving and there’s someone wildly waving next to me or doing something. I’m like, “What the fuck are they doing? What is going on?” And then I realize they’re wearing a Red Sox hat or something, or that they have Massachusetts plates on their car. And I’m like, “Oh, I see.” When you find each other, it’s like, “Yeah.”
Damon: It’s the funniest thing when you’re in another part of the world and you find someone from Boston, you hear the accent or whatever, you see them wearing a hat, and you just go up and you guys start talking. Whereas, when you live in Boston, it’s not like you just go up to strangers and start talking to them. But for some reason, I think it’s so rare to leave that place that when you see a fellow person who’s out, you feel like they’re an old friend.
What do you think people get wrong about a Boston accent?
Damon: The one that I noticed, I think having thought about this a bit, the vowel that people miss most is “talk, rock, clock, shock,” and they go “clahk, wahk, tahk,” and they kind of do a weird Kennedy thing. And I think the Kennedys, that was such a specific accent to that family and to those people that people kind of mistakenly study that and think that that’s a Boston accent. I mean, there’s other little things, like adding an r. “Idear,” things like that. But “tawk, rawk, sawk,” that one is hard for people.
In the time between Good Will Hunting and The Instigators, how have you guys seen Boston change as a place to set a movie?
Affleck: When I was in high school and Matt was in college, they got rid of rent control, which was something that sounded like everyone was making a big to-do out of nothing. But over the next two decades, the whole face of the city really changed. A lot of families that had been there for three generations were gone, and just because the rents went way up. And then the people who own those places were offered a lot of money—by MIT mostly and other developers—to sell, and they all moved out to the suburbs and Cambridge was gentrified. It wasn’t like that when we were kids.
So it has changed enormously, just culturally. And then just the layout of the city, it really got an infusion of a ton of money, and the infrastructure changed and the Big Dig put everything underground. So it looks different. It’s always been diverse, but it’s much younger. Also in the ’90s around the time of Good Will Hunting, they started to realize that bringing movies there was good for the state. And so they had a tax incentive. And then people resisted that at a certain point because there were a lot of big studio movies that came there that took advantage of the tax incentive. So they rejiggered it, and instead of getting rid of it, they very smartly rejiggered it and then made it permanent. It brings jobs there, but it also puts Boston kind of in pop culture.
I was 14 when Good Will Hunting came out, and I saw it in the theater. Seeing Boston on film back then felt exotic. But could you guys have imagined that it would become so common?
Affleck: I mean, when we were young, my mom’s best friend was a local casting director, and so sometimes we’d get a day off from school and we’d go and get to be an extra in the background. But those movies weren’t always set in Boston. It just wasn’t that much of it back in the day. A few in the ’70s. The Friends of Eddie Coyle. The Verdict was filmed in Boston. Not nearly as many as there are now. And then suddenly there were a lot.
Damon: I think it was ’05 when we did The Departed, and we shot a lot of it in New York because the tax deal didn’t exist. And I think it was [then–Massachusetts governor] Mitt Romney who put the first one through. But then Ben went the next year and did Gone Baby Gone with Casey, and then he went back and did The Town a couple of years after that. And movies just seemed to start kind of pouring in, and some really good ones were made there. And I think it just became kind of—what’s the word I’m looking for?—like, a virtuous circle, basically, where people started seeing [Boston]. It started to gain kind of a big profile. So they want to go shoot there.
Affleck: It becomes a destination.
It was really funny hearing the poem about Lynn, Massachusetts, in a big movie. Were there Boston references that you guys wanted to make that were a little too specific for the movie that ended up getting cut? How do you sort of calibrate that, where you want to be specific but you want to be broad, too?
Affleck: Good question. Sometimes there’s stuff that’s just too inside. On the other hand, it feels like when you make those jokes and you’re specific and you don’t worry about “Is everyone going to understand this?” it tends to have a universal appeal just because it rings true. It feels authentic, and that’s kind of what people respond to. And it’s a slippery slope once you start trying to explain everything for an audience who you don’t even have yet. And then you’re suddenly doing and saying unnatural lines just so that some audience that doesn’t exist yet is going to understand, and that’s just stupid. So more or less, we would just sort of say the things that we thought we would say and not worry too much about if people got it. [I’m not thinking] “One guy from Lynnfield* is really going to get that ‘Lynn, Lynn, city of sin’ joke.” [*Editor’s note: That’s my hometown.]
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I’m curious, what attracted all three of you to this film?
Damon: For me it was the script that Casey sent and the chance to work with Casey. And as we started talking about it, we thought of Doug Liman immediately as the best person to direct it. And so we said, “Well, let’s give it a shot.” We sent it to Doug and Doug responded to it, and then we got Hong, and then we had really all of the main pieces that we needed.
Chau: I just wanted to work with Matt again because I had such a great time on Downsizing working with him. And then the script was really funny. It was an opportunity to shoot in Boston. I went to college in Boston. And then of course Doug, so it just checked too many boxes. And then Casey.
Affleck: I was the last box.
What is it about Boston that makes it an interesting place to film?
Affleck: A lot of history. Right? If you’re looking for a generic city, it’s not that, because there’s so many identifiable characteristics to a place like this that has so much history.
Damon: There’s also such a specific mentality there and sense of humor that if we shot this and these guys were from Seattle, it would’ve been a very different movie. And the way that they talk to each other is Boston humor, which is very specific.
Affleck: Also, [cowriter] Chuck MacLean is from Quincy, and he really has a great ear for that. He really writes Boston well, and so he laid a strong foundation for the movie.
Hong, what was it like for you filming with these two guys in town? Did it feel like you were with the pope?
Chau: They’re Boston royalty. Cars were honking and people were shouting at you like, “Hi!” It was just funny because one day I was looking at this truck that had a dog in the truck bed, and the driver just happened to be a guy that Matt grew up with.
Damon: I thought, “Oh, it’s just somebody who’s saying hi because it’s a movie set and they’re driving by.” And I looked over, and he shouted out his name. He’s a guy that I played Little League with. So he was like, “It’s Matt West.” I was like, “Oh, hey! What’s up, man?” I did get the occasional actual people from our past.
How much Dunkin’ Donuts coffee did you guys drink during the production?
Damon: We went through quite a bit. Yeah, I remember on The Departed, I had a driver who would, every morning, drop me off and he’d turn to me and go, “Matt, Bawx O’ Joe?” And he would come back with a Box O’ Joe and that would be in my trailer all day, and I’d just kind of work on it throughout the course of the day.
Excluding the ones you are in, do you have favorite Boston movies?
Damon: I mean, I would definitely put Ben’s two movies there, Gone Baby Gone with Casey, and then The Town. I love those two.
Affleck: The Town is great. Mystic River, The Verdict.
Damon: You want to hear a good Mystic River story?
Of course.
Damon: I love this story. There’s that amazing scene in Mystic River where Sean Penn realizes that his daughter is the body behind the police tape. And he starts screaming, “Is that my daughter in there?” And the cops come and they converge on him and he’s freaking out and they grab him, and it is just this really, really powerful scene.
And so when I was working with Clint [Eastwood], I asked him about it. I was like, “Hey, how’d you shoot that?” Because he does one take of everything. I go, “Did you do one take of that?” And he goes, “Yeah, I did one take.” And I’m like, “You’re kidding. How did you do one take of that?” And I said, “What did you say to Sean?” He goes, “Oh, I didn’t say anything to Sean.” He said, “But I got real police officers. Those cops in the scene are real.” And he goes, “And I just went up to those guys before we rolled and I said, ‘Hey, you better grab a good hold of him because he’s not going to be faking it.’”
That was the only thing he said to the real cops, and real cops do know how to brace you and hold you, and they’re very good at that. And that’s what that scene is, and he shot it in one. A great director knew not to say anything to Sean Penn because he doesn’t need it. He’s going to be right where he needs to be.
What are some Boston stories that you guys think would be interesting to tell? Anything come to mind?
Affleck: There’s some sports stories that haven’t been told. People have been circling a Ted Williams movie. Whitey [Bulger] got done.
Damon: Ben and I had a whole take on the Whitey story that I really liked, but we abandoned it when they did Black Mass. Because it was so romanticized at the time and sensationalized by the media, and it was like the bogeyman that everybody grew up with. And what was it really? In aggregate, when you look at what he did …
Affleck: A gross thug. A murderer.
Damon: So really kind of demystify that.
Affleck: I got one that I really want to do. I want to try to get Matt to do it. It’s a true story about a kind of Forrest Gump–like figure. It’s an amazing true story that for years I’ve had my eye on. I’m not telling you. No.
Fair enough. So were there periods in your careers where you sort of were like, “OK, I’ve done Boston. I need to move on from Boston,” and how does it feel to come back to it? Is it just something you’re always going to be receptive to?
Damon: I love going back and shooting there. I really do. But yeah, you don’t want to repeat yourself or anybody else. And I think when we started with Good Will Hunting, it was a much more unexpected place to shoot. Now, other people who aren’t from Boston can actually do the accent. And when we were young, there was nobody who could do it convincingly, as far as we were concerned.
Affleck: When we were starting out, there were stories in Boston that felt like no one else knew them or could tell them. The Fighter is a great movie, and [Christian] Bale and Mark [Wahlberg] do a really great job. Melissa Leo is amazing in that movie. And that was a story that we knew about, we heard about, and we thought only we could do that. Or the rest of the world didn’t care. And now that’s changed.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.