Good Will Hunting (1997) on Netflix
Will Hunting, a janitor at MIT, is a self-taught math genius. Charged with assaulting a police officer, he takes a deal from Professor Gerald Lambeau: study mathematics and attend therapy.
- Netflix4.2/5
- IMDb8.4/101,242,510 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes97%
Trailer
Plot summary
Will Hunting is twenty years old and works as a janitor at MIT, though he is a self-taught mathematician. He solves a problem that Professor Gerald Lambeau set on a blackboard for his graduate students, without anyone knowing who did it. After a fight with a gang, Will is charged with assaulting a police officer. Lambeau arranges for him to avoid jail if he studies math under Lambeau and attends therapy. Will mocks the therapists, so Lambeau turns to Sean Maguire, a psychology professor at Bunker Hill Community College.
Cast
- Rachel Majorowskias Krystyn
- Colleen McCauleyas Cathy
- Matt Mercieras Barbershop Quartet #1
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Good Will Hunting (1997)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Damon started writing Good Will Hunting as a final assignment for a playwriting class in his fifth year at Harvard, turning in a script of around 40 pages instead of the one-act play his professor had requested.
- After a year of rewrites for Castle Rock, Affleck and Damon began to suspect that studio executives had stopped reading the script attentively, so they tested them by inserting incongruous scenes of Will and Sean having oral sex; the executives never mentioned them in meetings.
- Weinstein asked Affleck and Damon to remove the fake scenes in which Will played chess and had sexual interactions with Sean, proving to them that he had thoroughly read the script; one day after reading it, in the fall of 1995, he bought the film from Castle Rock for $1 million.
- Williams' fee was around $20 million per movie at the time, but he lowered it to $5 million and had it written into his Miramax contract that he would take 20% of the earnings if the film's gross passed $60 million. Miramax did not believe it would earn that much, so they accepted.
- At the age of twenty-five, Affleck became the youngest person ever to have won an Academy Award for screenwriting, with Damon the second youngest at the age of twenty-seven.
- In an early version, inspired by Beverly Hills Cop and Midnight Run, the young man and his friends led NSA agents on chases around the city; Affleck and Damon improvised and taped some of those scenes imitating Freeman and Robert De Niro, who they envisioned as the therapist and the professor.
- Towards the end of the editing process, Van Sant contacted Smith through mutual friends to ask permission to use his music. Smith agreed after watching the film, which inspired him to write an original song, "Miss Misery", for Good Will Hunting.
- Damon said that only one scene survived verbatim from the first script through to the finished film: the first meeting between Will and Sean.
