What makes a marriage? Ben Affleck explores the big question in ‘Animals’
MANILA, Philippines — For someone whose real-life relationships have drawn so much public attention, Hollywood star Ben Affleck dared to explore the subject of marriage in his new film “Animals,” now streaming on Netflix.
What really makes a marriage? How much can two people truly know about each other? And how honest can one be with a spouse when opening up also means risking rejection?
These are among the questions Affleck examines in the new thriller he directed, co-wrote (with Connor O. McIntyre and Billy Ray) and starred in alongside Kerry Washington.
“Animals” follows Mark Kimball (Affleck), an L.A. mayoral candidate whose seemingly picture-perfect life with wife Abigail (Washington) starts to unravel when they receive a late-night call claiming their son has been kidnapped.
As the couple scrambles to deal with the family crisis, they find themselves making decisions that can affect not just Mark’s political ambitions, but also their marriage.
While “Animals” is built as a suspense thriller weaving in political intrigue, kidnapping twists, shadowy figures and moral dilemmas, Affleck told The Philippine STAR in an exclusive virtual interview that the story’s message is, at its core, about marriage.
“Really, deeply, truly, for me, the movie is about marriage,” he stressed.
“That’s at the heart of this. What is a marriage? Is it having a child? Is it sharing a house, sharing an economy, where we split things?
“I think more of marriage is actually rooted in that than we’re told in fairy tales or as kids. That’s not something that you can dismiss, and I think people do sometimes not think of it.”
A dimension of marriage that he was interested in exploring was spousal intimacy.
“Marriage is also something really deeper, like intimacy. And intimacy means honesty, and there’s a tension there because you don’t want to share the things that your spouse may not respond well to, right?” he continued.
“And so, the bravery of being open and saying something, I think the reward potentially is quite high. Which is to be loved for things you didn’t think you could even be loved for.
“And the risk is also quite high because if you’re not loved, it’s a deep rejection, right (of who you truly are).”
Affleck hopes audiences — whether married, in a relationship or imagining what a future partnership might look like — get to reflect on that.
“I want the audience to think about that and wonder about that with their partner or their spouse, with their future, you know, their imagined idea of what their relationship would be,” he said.
“I just think it’s, like, really endlessly fascinating. It’s the central thing we do, to kind of get together with each other and try to share a life with each other.
“And bond our everything with one another. Like, imagine how difficult a thing that really is when you think about it.”
For the two-time Oscar winner (1998 Best Original Screenplay for “Good Will Hunting” and 2013 Best Picture for “Argo”), however, “Animals” isn’t only about the complexities of marriage. It also examines the lengths people are willing to go for the sake of their loved ones, or as the director puts it, the universal instinct to protect them even when doing so might challenge their principles.
“I think that we all share a common sense of… that’s very powerful, of, like, protecting the things that are most important to us. That’s a very human thing, you know?” he said.
“And we also all subscribe to varying versions of a larger morality of some kind. But sometimes those things are in conflict, right? Like, that can happen.
“So, really, more of what I wanted to do was make that as authentically tense — that conflict — as possible and present a resolution … that I wanted the audience to feel was honest and telling about some of the details of life and maybe revealing, but not dictating exactly what to think.”
Affleck, likewise, wanted the film to work on two levels. That is, keeping audiences absorbed in what would happen next while also making them invested in the characters and their choices.
“I think you have to make it urgent to watch, you know, so that your front brain is watching just what’s going to happen next. And in the meanwhile, you’re kind of going, ‘How do I feel about this?’ Right?” he explained.
“Like that, or how would she — should he be doing — he should say, you know. But that works best when it’s not at the very front of the movie, I think. But it’s there.”
The intimate and complicated nature of the story also presented a different directorial challenge to Affleck, who has declared in a Netflix Tudum article that “Animals” is “probably the movie I’m the most proud of in my career.”
During the interview, The STAR asked how “Animals” tested him in ways his previous experiences of directing himself on screen had not.
“Oh, lots of ways. I mean, there are sort of the normal, kind of pedestrian ways. Like, it was a very heavy, single location, and to make that feel alive and not repetitive and claustrophobic was something that I worried about,” he said.
“There’s also… you need to feel the sort of real-time nature of it because if you let that slack, it sort of starts to feel like, well, maybe this isn’t as… important as the film I wanted to make.”
But what really made “Animals” “a big step” for the filmmaker was how it made him “invite everybody in as collaborators and authors,” especially Washington.
He recalled telling his co-star, “I need you to help me and write this with me. I need you to come up with the backstory with me. I need it to have your voice for this character.
“Not your Kerry voice, but your written voice of Abigail. And we need to come up with that together. I mean, I guess I’ve done that with Matt to a certain extent,” continued Affleck, referring to longtime friend and collaborator Matt Damon.
“But like in ‘Air,’ we kind of had the script pretty written. Whereas here, we kept working, and it was a different kind of — this is a much more intimate, much deeper, much more complicated story that was, like, stuff I was less sure about, frankly. Because, you know, part of what I want to say is, I guess, a story about marriage,” he reiterated.
“And every time I have a suggestion, it’s like, ‘What does Kerry think about it?’ You know? And it scared me.”
Meanwhile, in a separate interview for Tudum, Affleck hinted at what inspired this collaborative atmosphere on set.
“One of the first movies I ever did is called ‘Dazed and Confused,’ Richard Linklater’s second movie. He wrote this letter to everybody in the cast that said, ‘If this script is ultimately produced as written, it will be a massive underachievement.’ And I saw what that did to everybody in that movie. The actors changed from being actors to being participants — to being filmmakers. Not just ‘What’s my line and how do I say it?’ but ‘How do I live this character?’
“That lesson stayed with me. And when I have the opportunity to, I really want to invite people to have a sense of authorship. There were aspects of these characters that I just didn’t understand well enough to write, but I knew the actors would bring them out.”
Besides Affleck and Washington, the film also stars Steven Yeun as Mark’s campaign aide, Gillian Anderson as a mysterious fixer and Mexican actors Luis Gerardo Méndez and Adriana Paz as the couple who get entangled in the family crisis.
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