Ben Affleck says Netflix animals became a story about Los Angeles as much as a kidnapping thriller. As Animals debuts Friday on Netflix, he described channeling a lesson from Cambridge Rindge into a film he both directed and stars in.
Ben Affleck and Los Angeles
54 is the age at which Affleck is steering the project, and he told The Boston Globe last week, "I’ve lived here as long as, maybe longer, than I lived in Boston" and "I’ve gotten to know this city well." He added, "It’s kind of what I wanted to do with ‘Gone Baby Gone,’" and "Show a side of this that people don’t typically see," which puts the film in the lane of a Los Angeles political thriller rather than a straight hostage movie.
Animals follows Mark Kimball, a candidate running for mayor of Los Angeles, as the campaign pulls him away from Abigail and a caller says their son has been taken. The demand is a multimillion-dollar ransom, and the setup gives Affleck a vehicle for the moral questions he said interested him more than the kidnapping itself.
Artists Equity and the restart
Artists Equity produced Animals, and Affleck wrote on the film with Connor McIntyre and Billy Ray. That matters because the project was not simply handed off after a cast change; it was reworked, then restarted, with Affleck back in the lead.
Earlier in the year, Affleck halted production when he realized Highest 2 Lowest was in the works, calling it a reason to step back rather than overlap with Denzel Washington and Spike Lee. He said, "I didn’t particularly want to compete with them or be another version of a movie that was the same thing, so I just kind of put it away, and nobody disagreed with that."
Kerry Washington and Steven Yeun
Matt Damon was initially set to play Mark and Jennifer Garner was slated for Abigail, but Damon became unavailable and Affleck took over the role. Kerry Washington replaced Garner, while Steven Yeun joined as Mark’s campaign manager, Sam, and Gillian Anderson plays Dayle, a shadowy adviser enlisted to help with the hostage negotiations.
Affleck’s best read on the film is also the simplest one: the politics are not decoration. He said, "The themes that really were interesting to me were the questions around who are we" and "Are we fundamentally moral beings, or are we people who act in our self-interest and then create narratives around that to justify self-seeking behavior?"
Friday on Netflix
Friday gives viewers the first chance to see whether that rewrite paid off. For anyone choosing between another generic abduction plot and a film built around campaign pressure, a marriage strain and a ransom demand, Affleck is making the cleaner argument: the hook is not the crime, it is the compromise.
