The first line of my application here...
said, “For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be an actor.”
It was asking kind of who you were, and that was really who I was...
and I wanted them to know who I was...
and, whether they accepted me or not...
I wanted them to know who they were gonna let in or not.
Having grown up here, I think I had one way of looking at Harvard–
kind of a townie view of the school.
Suddenly walking through as a prospective student...
I just started to really take in how impressive it was.
I assumed if I could get into an Ivy League school–
That kind of touched every base for me.
And then I got into Harvard, and it’s a very tough place to turn down.
This great teacher named Anthony Kubiak– I took a number of his classes.
This was the final one that I took. It was the playwriting class.
I handed in the first act of a three-act movie–
what eventually became Good Will Hunting.
I apologized to him when I handed him this 40-some-odd page document.
I just said, “I don’t think I did what you wanted.
I was supposed to write a one-act play...
and this is clearly the first act of a three-act movie.”
He was unbelievably encouraging.
He gave me a flat “A” in the class, which was a big deal.
He wrote extensively in the margins–
or on a cover page that he put on it–
to “please keep up with this”–
that it was worthy, that it was good...
that it wasn’t anything close to a failure...
that it was something I had to pursue.
So I showed it to Ben Affleck, and the rest is history.