Following the success of Chasing Amy and Good Will Hunting in his early career, Ben Affleck was all set to forge his stellar career in Hollywood. The actor has appeared in several remarkable and acclaimed movies but life is not a piece of cake, not even for Affleck.
Affleck’s directorial venture was also successful and has produced celebrated gems like Argo and Gone Baby Gone. But as an actor, the Batman star has received some harsh criticism while somewhere down the line experiencing the worst possible scenario.
Ben Affleck’s Incredibly Agonizing Training in Pearl Harbor
Ben Affleck collaborated with Michael Bay more than once. After having a life-threatening experience while being in the special space suit that nearly suffocated the actor in Armageddon, Affleck hopped in lead Bay’s next film Pearl Harbor. Based on a historical event of December 7, 1941, the fictionalized version of the war narrative went on to earn over $450 million against the astounding budget of $140 million.
Affleck put his soul in while training for the movie. “I took flying lessons,” Affleck told GQ. “So, I basically learned how to fly and that was really interesting and fun,” he added. The actor also had to overcome his fear of flying so high as he did in the training.
“And you know flying like a little Marchetti Aerobatic airplane not a Santa Monica Airport and I had been kind of afraid to fly up to that point and it really helps my fear of flying to realize the sort of physics behind flight and how it worked.”
The producers put the actors in actual boot camps of the US Army. “So we did this, it was Fort Lightning where was the name of it,” Affleck continued. “And it was this pre-ranger training course that basically you did if you before you went to Ranger school to sort of prepare you for the rigors of that,” he added. Adding on the training experiences, the actor said that it was “horrible, it was that incredibly agonizing, painful miserable experience” and he would have quit the very first day if he had known any of it.
Ben Affleck Defended Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor
Affleck admitted that it was one of the hardest things he had ever done and it was so satisfying after finishing the training. It was really “personally satisfying to get through it and to like after it was over have the drill sergeants like treat me like a normal human being,” Affleck revealed to GQ. It’s hard to think about “that movie without like thinking about how like slammed we got for it, you know? Because I really thought we were gonna do something kind of different and ended up sort of being Armageddon in World War II,” he added.
The movie, however, faced severe criticism, it was rated only 24% on Rotten Tomatoes. But Affleck has defended the movie. “I learned a lot about professionalism and the crew was really excellent. It was a lot of fun,” he said. “But I knew that we weren’t making an art movie. I knew enough to know that this isn’t really an Oscar-type of movie, this is a fun movie,” the actor added.
“It also wasn’t a bomb people always say, ‘Oh Pearl Harbor bombed.’ We don’t have a billion dollars turns out that’s the way it goes. Sometimes you win sometimes you lose sometimes you kind of win but they say you lost,” Affleck concluded.
Despite Affleck’s defense, Pearl Harbor remained a pretty forgettable movie, many critics and fans have even dubbed the movie as Bay’s worst movie.
Source: GQ.
