These are some cute photos of Ben Affleck out with his daughters Violet, 6, and Seraphina, 3, in Santa Monica on Saturday. The hot dad and his daughters hit up McDonalds for lunch and then went to a Barnes and Noble together. Check out little Seraphina rocking those motorcycle boots! I love her style.

Ben has been all over the place lately promoting Argo. I heard a great interview with him on NPR Saturday discussing the film and his work as a director. He was so interesting and focused. Ben didn’t talk about his personal life at all, and I think he was relieved to not have to field questions about it for once. Here’s some of what he said, with more at the source including audio (He sounded tired!):

On what drew him to the story, which was declassified 15 years ago
“It’s sort of too incredible to be believed, you know. You have this thriller, you have a comedy, you have a story about how the CIA used a cover of, you know, basically being a movie crew to get these hostages out of Iran. It would be a terrible movie if it weren’t true.”

On balancing comedy with the drama in a film based on true events
“When I approached the movie I thought, ‘I won’t do anything, comically, that upends the sort of seriousness of the rest of the movie, that chews away at the fabric of that reality.’ Because if you kind of feel like, oh, we’re winking at the audience and we’re kind of mugging, you won’t be concerned about these people’s safety when we cut back to Tehran. I was ready to do all kind of directorial surgery — as it turned out, I really just needed John Goodman and Alan Arkin because they were so good at playing real, even when it was comic.”

On what it takes to be a good director
“I wish I knew. I think for me it takes just hard work. I wouldn’t have been able to be a director at a really young, at a younger point in my life because I didn’t know how to work this hard. And it eats up the rest of your life, but I truly feel that that’s what’s necessary, for me anyway, and I marvel at guys who can do it more deftly and who can work eight hours a day. And also it just, it comes down, I guess, to taste. I learned to be really, really, really critical and that’s served me well.

“Frankly, I had something to prove when I got older. Down the road in my life. So I had something fueling that desire to work twice as hard, and I also had a little bit more maturity and perspective on it.”

On the kinds of films he’s been offered since his directorial debut
“My movies still exist within a sort of a limited range. … I kind of exist in a certain — a certain zone. And that’s fine. I don’t have any great ambitions to do $300 million movies.

“What I’ve found — because I got a kind of second go on a career in Hollywood by directing — I got to apply some of the lessons I learned from this business that I learned from my acting career. And one of which, perhaps the most important, was that you have to sort of forget about all the other criteria when it comes to the movies you’re gonna do, except whether or not you think it can be a good movie.”

[From NPR]

I love what he said about how it takes hard work to be a director. People sometimes ask me how to be a blogger and I tell them that there’s no secret to it, that you just have to sit down and write every day for several hours at least. (Although ask Kaiser about it if you’re interested, she’s phenomenally productive.) If you want to do something, just try and start doing it if possible, or take courses if that’s what it takes. Of course it helps that Ben had success when he was relatively young, but his recent career turnaround is still so impressive. It could have gone the other way for him easily, but he hunkered down and focused and he’s making incredible films. Who would have expected this from the dude from Armageddon?

Oh and I have to mention this little accident Ben got into. He knocked the mirror off the side of a parked car and left a note to the owner with his contact information. His face was kind of priceless after he did it, like “Oops, what can I do?”

Photo credit: WENN.com and FameFlynet