KARLOVY VARY — On Friday night Casey Affleck joined Uma Thurman and James Newton Howard in receiving lifetime honors during the opening ceremony of the 2017 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Affleck joked something along the lines of “If I am making films people don’t see I must be doing something right.” It was a light-hearted moment (and somewhat inaccurate compared to many of his peers), but during a press conference for his upcoming release “A Ghost Story,” Affleck indicated he thinks he’ll continue his recent indie streak for the foreseeable future.
“I try really hard not to think about whether people are going to see the movie or not and just to do things that are interesting to me,” Affleck says. “So, what I mean is the things that I tend to be interested in and where they overlap with the people who want me to be a part of them are not usually dead center mainstream movies. That said I don’t have anything against those movies. Some of those mainstream movies I love and I think there are very talented people in them. I’m not usually or ever one of those people.”
Kenneth Lonergan’s “Manchester by the Sea” was one of those indies that wasn’t supposed to be a hit, but thanks to word of mouth and six Academy Award nominations its box office swelled to an impressive $75 million globally. Of course, “Manchester” also gave Affleck the opportunity to win his first Oscar and he says he’s not sure all the attention he’s received because of the campaign is something he’ll “ever by comfortable with.”
“It doesn’t feel like a big change has happened in my life,” Affleck says. “The truth is there is my life and who I am and the part of me that goes out to promote movies and when I do that I just try to talk about the movies and sometimes it’s comfortable and sometimes it’s not comfortable because there’s always the difference between the person you actually are, and the strangers who think they know you based on what they know about you. So, my life hasn’t changed that much.”
In “A Ghost Story,” Affleck plays a musician who, after passing away in a car accident, ends up becoming a ghost that haunts the home he’d lived in with his partner (Rooney Mara). It meant that for a good chunk of the movie Affleck found himself acting under an elaborate ghost costume designed to evoke a drawing of a sheet ghost (as opposed to an actual simple sheet which director David Lowery says didn’t work in screen tests). While Affleck wasn’t the only person under the sheet when he was the role became completely non-verbal. Some actors would have taken that part to method acting extremes, but that’s simply not Affleck’s current style.
READ MORE: Rooney Mara & Casey Affleck Tell ‘A Ghost Story’ In Trailer For David Lowery’s New Film
“There has been a lot said about actors who take their characters home at night and have to be called by the character’s name and there are things famous actors have chosen methods,” Affleck says. “I’m not really like that. You can’t spend so much time with a character and not have it sort of affect you a little bit. I feel like I have to stave off that bit of insanity than try to welcome it and try to be that person day and night. When you do a part like ‘Manchester’ it’s the same as doing a part in this in some way. You’re just there every day doing the scenes with people and it brings out certain parts of you for a minute while you are working and those are the parts you’re paying the most attention to and who you are in the same way when you’re not working and you’re mostly with your kids you start to behave and think like a parent. And then when you are on set with David [and the film’s producers] and you have a sheet on your head you start to behave and think and talk like a dead person.”
Affleck’s reunites with Lowery and stars alongside Robert Redford and Elisabeth Moss in “The Old Man and the Gun.” He also recently returned behind the camera directing himself in the new drama “Light of My Life.” He notes, “I am starting to understand that the movies are picking me in a way I totally don’t understand. There is something that people are trying to say by the movies they choose to do that they are not so aware of. All the things they are trying to say isn’t really coming out of them and the more you can let the movies you are doing be a way of learning about yourself instead of making as statement the more you are in touch with what is really happening.”
He continues, “The movies I reject are things that I find very violent because it just seems more and more upsetting and the movies I am drawn to more and more are sort of poetic in the way they look and the dialogue and they have a more positive message without being so heavy handed with it. I find that David’s movies whether they are a bit sad or a little bit funny or a little bit suspenseful they are by and large are about good people who are trying to do good things even if they are making mistakes.”
There is a reason why Affleck has now shot three different films with Lowery; he likes his “sensibility.”
“As an actor when you show up on the set these decisions are made by the director well in advance and you’re walking into a world they have created and if you feel at home and you can live in that world it makes your job that much easier,” Affleck says. “I really love the worlds that he creates. Also I feel like any good movie is an experiment and just like an experiment in the laboratory that movies success should be judged not whether or not the results o the experiments add up to what you thought you were making but rather sort of by how much you have learned by the experiment. Any time that I work with David I feel like I’ve learned a lot from the experiment and he’s a very experimental director. He both has a vision and a great collaborator. There is a lot of room to try things and make mistakes and fail and also to succeed and also be surprised by what other people are doing. It’s a process I like as much as I like the results.”
“A Ghost Story” opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday.