"We're doing a Whitey Bulger movie," Damon says of the leader of South Boston's Winter Hill Gang, who had been on the lam for 16 years and was wanted for 19 murders, among other things, when he was apprehended in Santa Monica in June. "Warner's got it for us."
Damon will star as Bulger, Affleck will direct, and Terence Winter, of The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire fame, is writing the script. Last year, Damon and Affleck cemented a first-look deal with Warner Bros., where their production company is now based. Damon has made nine movies at the studio in the last decade, while Affleck has become one of Warner's go-to directors, making Gone Baby Gone, The Town and the soon-to-be-completed Argo, a comedy about the Iran hostage crisis. Warner's also recently tapped Affleck to adapt and direct Stephen King's mammoth apocalyptic novel The Stand.
There'd been talk that Damon and Affleck, who won Oscars in 1998 for their best original screenplay Good Will Hunting, would next reteam on The Trade, about two Yankees pitchers who swapped wives in the '70s. But legal challenges have slowed that project, Damon says.
"That might happen at some point," he says. But the Bulger picture will come first.
"There are a couple of competing movies and I don't think it's been announced yet that we're doing it," Damon says. "But the sooner it's announced the better, just because everyone else will back off, hopefully. I'm really excited about it."
Previously announced Bulger projects include one from producer Graham King, who won the Best Picture Oscar for another Damon film, Martin Scorsese's The Departed, which depicted a character based on Bulger (played by Jack Nicholson). King has reportedly acquired the rights of the Winter Hill Gang's chief enforcer, John Martorano. Another project, which borrows its title from the Bulger book Black Mass by Boston Globe reporters Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill, is reportedly in the works from producer Brian Oliver. And actor Peter Facinelli, perhaps best known for the Twilight Saga, is said to be producing an adaptation of Edward MacKenzie and Phyllis Karas's book Street Soldier: My Life as an Enforcer for Whitey Bulger and the Boston Irish Mob.
Bulger fled Boston, Affleck and Damon's hometown, just before his federal racketeering indictment in January 1995. It was later revealed in federal court that he was a longtime FBI informant who had been warned by his corrupt handler, former FBI agent John J. Connolly Jr.—the basis for Damon's character in The Departed—that he was about to be arrested. Bulger was eighty-one by the time the Feds finally caught up to him last summer, living by the beach with his girlfriend.
So will Damon play the young, vital Bulger or the aging fugitive? The actor says he doesn't yet know. "If it's a straight biopic, we'll do it over a period of time. But it's always a question of what part of the story do you tell, and biopics are always a little cumbersome," Damon says. "So do we find another way in? We're still figuring it out."
Last week, meanwhile, Damon confirmed that he will be directing his first film for Warner Bros.: a script he co-wrote with John Krasinski of The Office. He's keeping mum about the idea, which Krasinski originally developed with Dave Eggers, but to say, "It's about a salesman who goes to this small town and how the salesman is changed by his experience there." Reports last week that the movie resembles Erin Brockovich and involves a mass poisoning in the town are wrong, he says, shaking his head.
"Nobody gets poisoned," says Damon, who plans to direct the untitled film early next year. "I don't know where that came from."
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