To promote Animals, Ben Affleck recently chatted with GQ about the film (which he directed, produced and stars in), his parents, AI and a lot of other stuff. Ben was in an especially chatty, reflective mood and some of it is interesting. Ben lost both of his parents within three months of each other this year, and he’s sort of aged out of being a daily tabloid staple. Months ago, he sold an AI company to Netflix for (reportedly) well over a half-billion dollars. He’s come into himself in a quiet way, although I’m sure the old agent of chaos is in there somewhere, lurking. Some highlights from GQ:

He’s now just a boring middle-aged dad: “I mean, I’ve been hoping that’d be the case for 20 years. It’s bound to be the case. We’re all moving inevitably toward irrelevance and death. The former doesn’t seem all that unappealing to me. The latter, I’d like to forestall a little bit. But the notion of relevance as an abstract thing to be desired strikes me as, I don’t know: Be careful what you wish for. Because relevant to what and in what way? What happens to things that are relevant is that they’re dissected and hotly debated. And unless you have something that you really care about, that you want to bring forward, that you really want to engage in that particular kind of debate around, I don’t think personally to your character or soul, there’s value to it. Obviously, we live in a world where there’s a lot of commercial value to commoditize. And for people [who are] like, “Hey, look, I want to pay the rent”—I get it. I understand it.

More on being a tabloid staple for many years: “Listen, I’m not some great victim. I mean, I’m in a unique position. I’ve seen some unusual and weird things in my life. The benefit of that is that eventually you sort of get sanguine about it. I’m 54 years old. I have three kids. A kid in college, senior in high school. I did not ever expect to be in tabloid equivalents anywhere close to this time. Certainly [when I was younger,] I thought, if you’re 50, you clearly don’t have sex anymore and your life’s about to end. So I assumed that would be the case.

Whether he believes the return-to-movie-theaters thing is real: “I think it’s definitely real. I think people want to go out of the home, as they say, and be entertained and have experiences together. I don’t think human beings are going to just become sort of insular and live in little caves and stare at screens because I think that’s counter to what people want to do. But I think that the bar has been raised sort of collectively, societally, culturally for what’s required to get people to want to make your movie or event that thing that they go to. And so there’s this shifting balance between what is a theatrical movie? What is a movie that’s better served in streaming? And I don’t associate any value judgments with that. I think it’s an interesting question.

He’s had a complicated year: “It’s a big year of life. My brother and I, our parents died just two months apart, beginning of April and June. That’s a lot, man. And it just brings up all these—I mean, your childhood, how you were raised, you see things differently, you appreciate your parents in different ways, and you think about your own mortality and your own life and your own children and what you want to do with it. And the bare fact of the very fleeting nature of all of our lives kind of stares you back in the face. And you realize, yeah, we only get so much time. And the kind of youthful illusions that at least I had around, well, “When you get older, there are these answers or the things that sort of resolve.” And maybe I’m so acculturated to the three-act structure that I kind of impose that on the human experience. It doesn’t really conform to it. Often the end of life isn’t full of wisdom and resolve. Stuff you haven’t fixed in life stays unfixed. And in the case of my mom, she was pretty extraordinary and brave. I mean, she’s an amazing woman and her death really did cause me to even more deeply and fully appreciate her and her life. But yeah, you face that stuff and it makes you think, “Okay, how do I want to spend the rest of this time? Because you realize there’s not all that much of it.” I mean, my parents are lucky. They lived long lives, longer than one’s expectation is, whatever, from an actuarial basis. That’s kind of what you get. That’s it. I mean, my mom said to me at one point, she said, “I had a great life and I have no regrets, but I thought 83 years would feel like longer.”

On ageing: “It’s that weird thing of whatever age you are, you think, “I can’t believe that many years have gone by.” And I was 30. I thought, “Well, that was quick.” And 40 and 50, you go, “Wait a minute. All of a sudden we’re into the third quarter here? How did this happen?” I look in the mirror and I still kind of expect to see some 30-year-old guy staring back at me. And the real thing for me is a couple of lessons. One was, at the end of life, what isn’t remembered or valued, it just doesn’t matter, is all that stupid little sh-t, whatever it is, the internecine thing, the work conflict, the petty dispute. The shit we get involved in with ourselves, the little resentments, like the time you spent being offended, that shit is just a waste of time. And so as much as you can sort of let it go, I just think that’s so clearly the way to try to live.

The ambivalence about AI as a technology. “Yeah. Ambivalence, a lot of terror and rage. And I understand why, but on the one hand, the only real voices that you’ve heard by and large are constantly sort of, whether they’re puffing up their chest or advertising their product or whatever they’re doing, they’re doing it in a way by saying, “And it’s so powerful. It’s going to wipe everything out, which is why we need to control it or which is why you need to download our model.” And there are dangers in AI to me, because you have to use it responsibly. And I wouldn’t just give an unpredictable stochastic technology the controls over something that had a life or death impact on people. Is it going to turn into Skynet and take over the world? No, that’s not the case. That’s not going to happen. But what might happen is somebody might say, “Oh, we want to let AI target all of the targets for our war machines or do security.” And if you come up, it’ll lock you in or shoot you or something. If you do that, you’re going to have accidents. Because it’s unpredictable by nature.”

Whether his AI company actually sold for $587 million. “Well, first of all, that number’s not right. Second of all, I didn’t own the whole company. One of the things that’s very important to me is that employees in the company all had equity and Artists Equity did as well. Am I surprised? I mean, I’m not surprised.

[From GQ]

He talks a lot more about his parents’ deaths and he indicates that he was mostly estranged from his father for the last years of his dad’s life. There’s a big section on unfinished business and just living with the fact that people’s lives are not neatly wrapped up in death. Which is very real. It’s clear that he was very close to his mom and it’s also clear that he’s determined to be a better father than his own. The AI talk is something else though – he’s basically like: stop saying AI is going to kill us all, the worst case scenario is that it only kills a lot of people but not everyone. Like… these Hollywood types either don’t get it or they’re being paid not to get it.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.