JLo's not the only one Ben Affleck's reunited with lately.
The boys from Boston are writing together again! But why were they ever apart? Ben Affleck and Matt Damon met as college students and ended up being the youngest ever screenwriting Oscar winners in the '90s. Both (obvs) went on to have successful acting careers of their own, but you'd expect their humble beginnings (which involved couch surfing together) to have led to more collabs than just one film, right?
Matt just explained their long co-creating hiatus at a recent press event for their new film 'The Last Duo':
Their Teamwork Style Was 'Inefficient'
"One of the things that had kept us from writing for so many years was the way we wrote back in the '90s when we were 22 and 20 years old was really inefficient. We really understood the characters but we didn't understand the structure," Matt told reporters in Venice.
"We ended up taking these characters and putting them in these vastly different scenarios, and trying to then kind of jam them into something that looked like a movie, and so we ended up writing thousands of pages we never used. There are all kinds of scenes with the characters of 'Good Will Hunting' doing all kinds of things that just wouldn't make sense in the movie that eventually came out."
Anybody else want a copy of those scenes?!
Creative as that technique might have been, it made Matt wary of teaming up with Ben again.
"I think we both kind of looked at it as something that was so inefficient that we would never really have the time to do it again cause we were working so much and had busy lives."
Matt Thought Ben Would Slow Him Down
While Matt said they were surprised at the "entirely different process this time," Ben told him to speak for himself.
"I wasn't surprised," Ben interjected. "I had written myself in the interim and I understood that you had to make an outline. That was something of a shock to Matt."
It's true that Ben's written three films and seven TV episodes since 'Good Will Hunting'- but Matt wouldn't admit that Ben improved (even jokingly referring to him as dead weight).
"I also had written in the interim and it had been terribly efficient but I was afraid that with this albatross, this millstone around my neck..." Matt grinned, gesturing to Ben without finishing his sentence.
They Can Both Take a Joke
The men laughed off Matt's comments and it's no surprise: both of them have been publicly shading each other for decades now.
This year alone, Ben shared those embarrassing headshots of Matt to IG and Matt said he wished him "nothing but hardship."
Click below for a full run-down of their iconic friendship.