Ben Affleck

I learned that as a director, you’re around all these talented people, so you have this window that all these really good ideas can come in to help your movie, so you’re crazy to close them. You need to be inspiring people, engaging people. There are lots of people who are really good at their jobs but might not know or feel like they want to come up to people and get them to participate and want to do their best.

We wanted to show people what it was like in one of those neighbourhoods that they would never have access to, in bars that they would be too scared to go into, and a world that they would never get to see. All of that is something really unusual and rare and kind of fascinating. And the only way to do that and to make it really worthwhile was that it had to be authentic. We dedicated a lot of time and energy to making that right and real. So we found basically the worst locations that we could.

It’s much nicer to be praised than to be damned. But you have to have a certain sense of your own priorities and ideas about what works and what doesn’t because otherwise, if you’re just looking for eternal validation all the time, you can be motivated by the wrong things and I don’t think it’s as personally satisfying in your own work.