Affleck showed a new side of himself in 2007 when he directed the critically acclaimed Gone Baby Gone.

At age 38, Ben Affleck might be a little young for a career reinvention.

Yet the Hollywood star is experiencing just that.

Since winning an Oscar in 1998 for co-writing Good Will Hunting, the actor has covered the map - from box-office disasters ( Gigli) to tabloid fodder ("Bennifer").


He cements his status as a serious filmmaker with his new directorial effort, The Town - which finds him back in the blue-collar Boston neighborhoods that have become his holy grail for good material.

The modestly budgeted heist thriller is based in Charlestown, a 1-square-mile section of Boston notorious for producing an exorbitant number of bank robbers.

Affleck - who directed himself along with a heavyweight cast that includes Jeremy Renner ( The Hurt Locker), Jon Hamm ( Mad Men) and Chris Cooper ( Adaptation) - spoke recently by phone about his life and career.

Q: You grew up in Cambridge, near Charlestown, right?

A: It's close by. In fact, it was next to Charlestown - but worlds apart in other ways.

My life wasn't anything like the lives of the guys in the movie. Charlestown was incredibly tough and kind of scary. They had this code of silence where - I think over 15 years - only 25percent of the murders were solved.

Q: So was Charlestown the type of neighborhood where you would have been beaten up?

A: Yeah, probably. Everyone where I grew up knew that the Townie kids were really tough.

I knew a lot of kids from Charlestown because they played hockey. They were tough by tough-neighborhood standards.

Q: In creating an authentic Charlestown, were you deathly afraid of getting a specific element wrong?

A: I was deathly afraid of getting it all wrong. Every single thing scared me. I was worried that people would just say, "This seems bogus." So that was my central preoccupation.

I did all this research; met all these people; went to prisons, the FBI, the neighborhoods, bars, restaurants, AA meetings. That's a real AA meeting in the movie.

Q: What's the worst part about directing fellow actors?

A: The worst part about directing other actors is they don't automatically know where you're coming from.

It's a different thing when you're peers with everybody and one of the peers decides, "Let me be the coach." There's this period of adjustment where everybody has to recalibrate their relationships. You're much more inclined to confer authority and trust on a guy with a gray beard who's done 20 movies than a guy like me who's in his mid- 30s.

Q: Are you a demanding director like, say, James Cameron or Werner Herzog?

A: I love Herzog. He's a genius. I don't know. I'm demanding in the sense that I want the movie to be good and I'll do whatever it takes to give it its best shot to be good.

So we work a lot. We shoot a lot of film. I don't scream and yell and ask unrealistic things of people.

Q: How did you get Blake Lively of Gossip Girl and Jon Hamm of Mad Men - two actors known for playing incredibly beautiful people - to shed their well-manicured images?

A: They were totally into it. They wanted to do it. Blake and Jon are both really good actors, and both don't just want to do Gossip Girl and Mad Men.

Q: You've made so many different kinds of movies, from blockbusters to romantic comedies, such as Armageddon and Gigli. Do you ever look back and have regrets for any of those choices?

A: No. Part of making movies, ... in some ways, they're bets. You have all these elements: script, director, cast, and then there is the intangible movie gods. You want to have the best of the best. You want to go into it feeling like there is a 60 percent chance that this movie is going to work.

And movies where you can't have the best, you can still win, even if you go in with a 35 percent shot. (Or) you can still lose. There are movies that I loved that no one's seen. There are movies that I didn't like that everyone saw. I've had all kinds of different experiences in this business and I'm really happy where I am now. So I wouldn't change any of them because then I'd be worried that I wouldn't have wound up right back here today.