Ben Affleck says he’s proud of his famed DVD commentary track for Michael Bay’s Armageddon – and adds that nobody ever tried to stop him from being so honest.
There’s a big new interview with Ben Affleck that’s gone up over at GQ, and much of the reporting around it has, understandably, focused on comments Affleck has made about playing Batman. But the gold in the long chat is surely when he’s asked about his one-of-a-kind DVD commentary for Michael Bay’s Armageddon.
Affleck was on the ensemble for the movie, which saw a bunch of drillers train in a week to be astronauts, to head off and save the world from a killer space rock. I love Armageddon (I explained this to a degree here) but trying to pretend it makes sense and you’re onto a loser. It was stark, then, to hear Affleck rip the piss out of the film on an officially-sanctioned commentary track on its DVD.
“That is one of the achievements of my career for which I’m willing to pat myself on the back. I believe that may be at least in the top five all-time DVD commentaries”, he told the outlet. Again, he’s not wrong.
“I don’t think any of the other people listened to it or gave a ‘cluck’ until years later when it was played. And I was kind of shocked and appalled that I went on there and started being like… I mean, that’s all true. Everything I said was a hundred per cent true, but that’s the point. You’re not supposed to go on there and tell all of the truth.”
At the root of his honesty was his thought going into the production: “I thought, I’m going to go do a big Hollywood action movie and I love it. And yes, during the movie, I was kind of surprised to find that sometimes they weren’t all that interested in making sense.”
Thus, the eventual DVD commentary track. Zingers include Affleck observing that “this is where you just have a random helicopter in the background for no real reason, just because you’re a big movie and you’re expensive and you can.”
Or what about, “I asked Michael why it was easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts than it was to train astronauts to become oil drillers and he told me to shut the fuck up. So that was the end of that talk.”
And, of course, “I mean, this is a little bit of a logic stretch, let’s face it. They don’t know jack about drilling? How hard can it be? Aim the drill at the ground and turn it on.”
The GQ interview is here.
And finally, here’s some snippets of Affleck’s piece de resistance…
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