Good Will Hunting

Matt Damon started writing the film as a final assignment for a playwriting class he was taking at Harvard University.[5] Instead of writing a one-act play, Damon submitted a 40-page script.[5] He wrote his then-girlfriend, medical student Skylar Satenstein (credited in the closing credits of the film), into his script.[6] Damon said the only scene from that script that survived – "it survived verbatim" – was when Will Hunting (Damon) meets his therapist, Sean Maguire (Robin Williams), for the first time.[5] Damon asked Ben Affleck to develop the screenplay together. They completed the script in 1994.[5] At first, it was written as a thriller about a young man in the rough-and-tumble streets of South Boston who possesses a superior intelligence and is targeted by the government with heavy-handed recruitment.[5]

Castle Rock Entertainment bought the script for $675,000 against $775,000, meaning that Damon and Affleck would stand to earn an additional $100,000 if the film was produced and they retained sole writing credit. Castle Rock president Rob Reiner urged them to drop the thriller aspect of the story and to focus on the relationship between Will and his therapist. Terrence Malick told Affleck and Damon over dinner that the film ought to end with Will's decision to follow his girlfriend Skylar to California, not them leaving together.[7]

At Reiner's request, screenwriter William Goldman read the script. Goldman consistently denied the persistent rumor that he wrote Good Will Hunting or acted as a script doctor. In his book Which Lie Did I Tell? Goldman jokingly writes, "I did not just doctor it. I wrote the whole thing from scratch," before dismissing the rumor as false and saying his only advice was agreeing with Reiner's suggestion.[8]

Affleck and Damon proposed to act in the lead roles, but many studio executives said they wanted Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio.[9] Meanwhile, Kevin Smith was working with Affleck on Mallrats and with both Damon and Affleck on Chasing Amy.[10] Castle Rock put the script in turnaround, and gave Damon and Affleck 30 days to find another buyer for the script who would reimburse Castle Rock the money paid, otherwise the script reverted to the studio, and Damon and Affleck would be out. All the studios that were involved in the original bidding war for the screenplay now turned the pair down, taking meetings with Affleck and Damon only to tell them this to their face. As a last resort, Affleck passed the script to his Chasing Amy director Kevin Smith, who read it and promised to walk the script directly into Harvey Weinstein's office at Miramax. Weinstein read the script, loved it, and paid Castle Rock their due, while also agreeing to let Damon and Affleck star in the film. Weinstein asked that a few scenes be removed, including an out-of-place, mid-script oral sex scene that Damon and Affleck added to trick executives who were not looking closely.[5]

The Baskin-Robbins/Dunkin' Donuts, in front of which Will mocked Harvard student Clark

After buying the rights from Castle Rock, Miramax put the film into production. Several well-known filmmakers were originally considered to direct, including Mel Gibson and Michael Mann.[11] Originally, Affleck asked Kevin Smith whether he was interested in directing. He declined, saying they needed a "good director,"[12] that he only directed projects he wrote, and that he was not much of a visual director, but he still served as one of the film's executive producers. Damon and Affleck later chose Gus Van Sant for the job, whose work on previous films like Drugstore Cowboy (1989) had left a favorable impression on the fledgling screenwriters. Miramax was persuaded and hired Van Sant to direct the film.[13][14][15]

The Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square where Skylar asked Will to explain his "photographic memory" to her (as seen in 2013; it has since been redeveloped by Harvard).

Filming took place between April and June 1997. Although the story is set in Boston, and many of the scenes were shot on location in the Greater Boston area, many of the interior shots were filmed at locations in Toronto, with the University of Toronto standing in for MIT and Harvard University. The classroom scenes were filmed at McLennan Physical Laboratories (of the University of Toronto) and Central Technical School. Harvard normally disallows filming on its property, but permitted limited filming by the project after intervention by Harvard alumnus John Lithgow.[16] Likewise, only the exterior shots of Bunker Hill Community College were filmed in Boston; however, Sean's office was built in Toronto as an exact replica of one at the college.[17]

The interior bar scenes set in "Southie" were shot on location at Woody's L St. Tavern.[18] Meanwhile, the homes of Will (190 West 6th Street) and Sean (259 E Street), while some distance apart in the movie, actually back up to each other on Bowen Street, the narrow street Chuckie drives down to walk up to Will's back door.[19][20]

The Bow and Arrow Pub, which was located at the corner of Bow Street and Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, doubled as the exterior of the Harvard bar in which Will met Skylar for the first time.[21] The Baskin-Robbins/Dunkin' Donuts featured in the "How do you like them apples?" scene was next door to the pub at the time of the film's release.[20] The Harvard Bar interior scenes were filmed at the Upfront Bar and Grill on Front St. E. in Toronto.[22]

The Tasty, at the corner of JFK and Brattle Streets, was the scene of Will and Skylar's first kiss.[23] The Au Bon Pain, where Will and Skylar discuss the former's photographic memory, was at the corner of Dunster Street and Mass Ave.[24]

The Boston Public Garden bench on which Will and Sean sat for a scene in the film became a temporary shrine after Williams's death in 2014.[25]

Near the start of the film, Will sets aside his mop to study a difficult problem posed by Lambeau on the blackboard.[35] The problem has to do with intermediate-level graph theory, but Lambeau describes it as an advanced "Fourier system."

To answer the first part of the question, Will chalks up an adjacency matrix:

${\displaystyle A={\begin{pmatrix}0&1&0&1\\1&0&2&1\\0&2&0&0\\1&1&0&0\end{pmatrix}}.}$

To answer the second part, he determines the number of 3-step walks in the graph, and finds the third power matrix:

${\displaystyle A^{3}={\begin{pmatrix}2&7&2&3\\7&2&12&7\\2&12&0&2\\3&7&2&2\end{pmatrix}}.}$

The third and fourth parts of the question concern generating functions. The other characters are astounded that a janitor shows such facility with matrices.

Lambeau subsequently poses a new challenge on the blackboard: state Cayley's formula and "draw all the homeomorphically irreducible trees with ${\displaystyle n=10}$." Will writes eight of the ten trees correctly before Lambeau interrupts.[36]

In the film's opening weekend in limited release, it earned $272,912. In its January 1998 wide-release opening weekend, it earned $10,261,471. It went on to gross $138,433,435 in North America and a total worldwide gross of $225,933,435.[3]

The film was met with highly positive reviews. On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 96% based on 83 reviews, with an average rating of 8.10/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "It follows a predictable narrative arc, but Good Will Hunting adds enough quirks to the journey – and is loaded with enough powerful performances – that it remains an entertaining, emotionally rich drama."[37] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 70 out of 100, based on 28 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[38] Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.[39]

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three stars out of four, writing that while the story is "predictable", it is "the individual moments, not the payoff, that make it so effective".[40] Duane Byrge of The Hollywood Reporter praised the performances of the cast, writing "The acting is brilliant overall, with special praise to Matt Damon for his ragingly tender portrayal of the boy cursed with genius".[41] Peter Stack of the San Francisco Chronicle was equally positive, writing "The glow goes well beyond a radiant performance by Matt Damon ... Intimate, heartfelt and wickedly funny, it's a movie whose impact lingers".[42] Owen Gleiberman, writing for Entertainment Weekly, gave the film a "B", stating "Good Will Hunting is stuffed – indeed, overstuffed – with heart, soul, audacity, and blarney. You may not believe a minute of it, but you don't necessarily want to stop watching". He also noted Damon's and Williams' chemistry, describing it as "a quicksilver intercepting each other's thoughts".[43] Janet Maslin of The New York Times, called the screenplay "smart and touching", and praised Van Sant for directing with "style, shrewdness and clarity". She also complimented the production design and cinematography, which were able to effortlessly move the viewer from "classroom to dorm room to neighborhood bar", in a small setting.[44]

Quentin Curtis of The Daily Telegraph opined Williams' performance brought "sharpness and tenderness", calling the film a "crowd-pleaser, with bags of charm to spare. It doesn't bear thinking too much about its message ... Damon and Affleck's writing has real wit and vigour, and some depth".[45] Andrew O'Hehir of Salon stated that despite the "enjoyable characters", he thought the film was somewhat superficial, writing "there isn't a whole lot of movie to take home with you ... many will wake the next morning wondering why, with all that talent on hand, it amounts to so little in the end".[46] Writing for the BBC, Nev Pierce gave the film four stars out of five, describing the film as "touching, without being sentimental", although he felt some scenes were "odd lapses into self-help speak".[47] Emanuel Levy of Variety called the film a "beautifully realized tale ... engaging and often quite touching". He felt that the film's visual style showcased Van Sant's talent, but the plot was "quite predictable".[48]

Several scholars have examined the film as a portrayal of residual Catholic–Protestant tensions in Boston, as Irish Catholics from Southie are aligned against ostensibly Protestant characters who are affiliated with Harvard and MIT.[49]