Q: WHAT ABOUT THE BOSTON ACCENT?
AFFLECK: These guys became experts. I think the accents are a big issue because if you don’t do them well, as Jeremy said, they can really upend your movie. You have to hire really good actors to do it. I mean you have to know that they can do it. When Blake came in and read the scenes for me, I asked her what part of Boston she was from. So that was handled.
And then with Renner who I knew was a good actor, a great actor, I wasn’t worried about his ability to do it. I was just worried would he do it, to what extent and what we need best. Who knows? So I sent him a lot of recordings. But more than the recordings I’ve found that it’s about the people you stand next to. So I put the right people around Jeremy without saying anything and Jeremy is so smart that immediately you could just see him, like, radiating towards the people without them knowing who would be helping him. It was really fun to watch. Then he’d show up on set and he’d have it dead to rights. Blake also went around and did her tour. Some of these girls in the projects, we took Blake around and she spent time with them because it’s not just an accent. It’s not just vowels and diphthongs. It’s a world that you carry. It’s vocabulary. It’s so many different things. Particularly, people in Boston are really hard on that kind of thing. That’s first thing that people say about Boston movies, like, ‘Yeah, I saw it. The accents were all right.’ ‘It’s a race car movie. What do you mean the accents?’ Rebecca [Hall] had a doubly challenging thing which was that she was from Marblehead which is a kind of suburb. So we recorded a bunch of dialect from Marblehead. It’s almost English and American. The pronunciation is a kind of flat dialect, not meant to standout as Charlestown or anything else, but she was reflecting kind of gentrification. Yet it was another kind of accent particularly if you were British. Then Hamm, we talked about it and he and I both had the same instinct that being from whatever it is, Missouri, Illinois, Rochester, something; being an outside kind of said more for him than being someone who had an accent.