Ben Affleck is returning to the director’s chair for Animals, a crime thriller in which he also stars as a Los Angeles mayoral candidate whose son is kidnapped. The film is set to hit Netflix next month, but it actually came very close to not happening at all. In fact, Affleck told Entertainment Weekly that he actually pulled the plug just two weeks before shooting was scheduled to begin.
Originally, Animals was set to star Matt Damon and Jennifer Garner, but Affleck got cold feet when someone mentioned the plot was somewhat similar to Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest.
“We get very close to shooting, and then somebody said to me, ‘Hey, you know, there’s this other movie that Spike [Lee] and Denzel [Washington] are doing that’s about a kidnapping,” said Affleck. “And I was like, ‘Oh, s—.’“
He didn’t want to be seen as creating a “competing version,” joking that he’d “already been in one of the two asteroid movies.” He also confessed that he’d never seen Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, which Lee’s film is a remake of.
After discussing it with his cast and producers, he decided to call it quits. “We were two weeks from shooting, and I was like, ‘We’re not doing it,’” he said. “It’s hard enough to make a good movie. You don’t need those kinds of headwinds.”
“I just was so disappointed because I really had gotten interested as well in this idea of doing a movie about L.A.,” Affleck said. “I realized I’d lived here longer than I’ve lived in Boston.“
A couple of months later, he realized that he needed to resurrect the project. “I was like, ‘God, this is really sticking with me, and I actually wanna do this,’” he said.
But the bad news was that Damon was no longer available, as he was off shooting some low-budget movie with Christopher Nolan. Affleck decided to play the lead role himself, but that put him in an awkward position of having to act alongside his ex-wife, Jennifer Garner.
“I talked to Jen, and she was like, ‘We don’t wanna do that. You just get baggage,’” he said. “I would love to work with her, frankly. She’s fabulous, and we’re really good friends, and I’m profoundly grateful to her, and we have a great thing. I still would wanna work with her in the future, but what you don’t wanna do is take the audience’s baggage and have it work against you, you know?” At the end of the day, Kerry Washington stepped into the role.
Animals will debut on Netflix on October 9.