In the fall of 2022, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon started an independent production company called Artists Equity. The idea and ethos behind the company were instead of continuing to work for hire, they would generate their own films and their own projects and agreed to work exclusively for Artists Equity. They also obtained a minimum of $100 million in financing from the investment firm RedBird Capital Partners.
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“I know what kind of freedoms artists long for and how they can be empowered — treated like grown-ups,” Mr. Affleck said in an interview with the New York Times at the time (they recently announced their first big project, “Small Things Like These,” a project that Cillian Murphy would star in and produce).
Affleck and Damon were on Bill Simmons’s The Ringer podcast recently to promote Affleck’s new movie “Air,” which co-stars Damon (read our review), and in discussing their motivations for the project—independence, creative freedom, financial equity for all involved, controlling the narrative of their destiny and not working for hire among other aspirations—they revealed one of the filmmakers they are talking to about working together with.
“We were talking to Steven Soderbergh about potentially working with him,” Affleck explained. “And this a guy where you’re talking about a very low lift. It’s basically like, ‘go ahead,’ you know what I mean? There’s a real joy in that; you don’t have to manage that.”
“Here’s your financing,” Damon added, further suggesting how working with Soderbergh is hands-off, easy, and autonomous.
Now, this could easily mean Artists Equity would just finance and produce any old Steven Soderbergh project, and given the fast clip he works, there would be no shortage of projects he could take there and get off the ground super fast if he wanted. But as Affleck noted, some of the Artists Equity projects are things he’ll also direct, some they’ll star in and or support, so you never know. Damon’s worked with Soderbergh a ton of times (“The Informant!,” all the ‘Ocean’s’ films, “Behind The Candelabra,” “Contagion,” and more), but it would be super cool to see Affleck jump into that mix (a Soderbergh movie starring Affleck would be a super intriguing idea too).
Asked about how big Artists Equity can get by Simmons, Affleck said that wasn’t really the point and launched into a talk about the ethos behind what they are trying to achieve. “That’s not really the ambition,” he said. “A lot of people think the ambition is always scale; they’re synonymous. And with our business, part of what we want to try and do is— in terms of generating the ability to have the autonomy and the confidence of our partners— is that we’re going to make something good, which is the only brand we can aspire to, really, let’s do our best to really make it [a good movie]. It can’t just be about making movies to make movies, we really want to do movies that we can focus on, but we also want to give opportunities to those that are friends of ours.”
Part of the drive for Artists Equity was also Affleck and Damon having the realization that they hadn’t worked together in a long while and wanted to stay in each other’s lives in a meaningful way. “I love working with this guy; I love hanging out with him,” Affleck said. “And then you get older, and you have kids, and you have a life, and it’s like, you’ve got to find a reason. You just don’t get to hang out on the couch with your buddies every day, like you take that for granted…there’s gotta be a reason to leave the house and do something, and it’s your job.”
Damon added that the idea of Artists Equity also came from a very “sober conversation” the two friends had about perspective and clarity and seeing what “the rest of the road” of their lives looked like. Damon’s dad died in 2017, and he was very close with Affleck, and his death was a very “big perspective shift. This doesn’t go on forever, and if we don’t get very proactive about working together, we’re not going to work together.”
And actually, if you want to hear the TL;DR version of Affleck’s motivations around Artists Equity, this little clip down below does a lot of good lifting for evincing the new perspective.
But check out the Ringer podcast conversation below. It’s a good one and a long one with Affleck and Damon really expounding on this new outlook change in their lives.