Ben Affleck on GQ: Grief, Selling His AI Startup to Netflix, Animals

Ben Affleck tells GQ’s Zach Baron how losing both parents in 2026, selling his AI company to Netflix and directing Animals changed what he is willing to care about. The 59-minute One More Question interview, recorded at Soho House in West Hollywood above the Artists Equity offices, covers the return of moviegoing, Quentin Tarantino’s review of The Rip, why Affleck works a nine-to-five in Los Angeles, and a long, technical explanation of what he thinks AI video models get wrong about filmmaking.

TLDW

Affleck, 54, says his mother and father died two months apart this year, and that the experience stripped away his belief that life resolves itself the way a screenplay does. He has built his work around staying in Los Angeles while his children are at home, and says he would be at peace turning down a film as large as The Odyssey to keep it that way. He explains why he started the AI company he sold to Netflix, why he thinks no one will ever simply type out a movie, and why he distrusts the loudest predictions about AI. Along the way he discusses Artists Equity’s profit-sharing model, his new kidnapping drama Animals, and why being a “tarnished leading man” is useful to him.

Thoughts

Affleck’s case against the AI video labs is that brilliant researchers built the technology without knowing how a film image is made, and that is a more specific claim than actors usually offer on the subject. He describes seeing early text-to-video demos, calling Matt Damon to say they were finished, and then spending time with engineering teams looking at how the training data was captioned. The models could not be controlled, were not consistent, and when asked to move the camera they drew a camera in the picture. His explanation is that they were trained on compressed clips scraped from the internet, while a real film set already records ordered, structured data in its raw format. The researchers told him the models would learn all that with enough data. He built his own dataset anyway, over months, with cameras, lidar and volume stages, so that nothing in it came from another filmmaker’s work. That is the standard playbook for vertical AI: domain knowledge and clean data beat a general model inside one industry. We only have his account of it, but a studio that must pay everyone who appears in its films is exactly the buyer that would value rights-clean training data most.

The hardest idea in the interview is that the end of a life does not arrive with wisdom or resolution attached. Affleck says he is so used to three-act structure that he had imposed it on real life, expecting the late reconciliation and the earned ending. His grandmother, an alcoholic, never quit and never reconciled with her children. She had a stroke, lost her speech and died. His mother told him she had a great life and no regrets, but that she thought 83 years would feel longer. His conclusion is plain: what you do not fix stays unfixed, and time is not a mechanism that repairs anything. Most advice about regret is sentimental. This is closer to an engineering observation, and it comes with behavior attached. He describes putting the phone down when his son wants to play basketball and accepting that a message goes unanswered.

Asked whether he would have turned down The Odyssey, Affleck says it would be a very difficult question and then more or less says yes. What makes this credible is that he has already paid a version of the price. He says he was due to direct a film this year and dropped it because it meant going to New Jersey while his middle child is a senior in high school. He also does not dress it up as renunciation. In four or five years, he says, he will happily go to Bulgaria to shoot. That is sequencing, and it is a better frame than balance: some windows close for good and some jobs come around again. He is careful to say this is a choice available to the lucky, and that someone deployed overseas or working to cover rent does not get to make it.

His rule for AI forecasts deserves wider use: judge a person’s predictions by how their earlier predictions turned out. He argues that the people warning AI will wipe out half of white-collar work have a record of being wildly off, and that both sellers and media have reasons to keep saying it, because people are built to click on threats. He is not dismissive of risk. He would not hand an unpredictable system control over anything with life-or-death stakes, and he names corporate liability as the best brake on a reckless race. Remember that he has just sold an AI company, so he has his own reasons to sound calm. But his line about subsidized token spending, that it is like heating a convenience store by burning the cash in the register, is a business criticism and not a mood.

Affleck’s most practical career idea is that you cannot fly straight into what an audience already believes about you, so you use it. The Rip leans on viewers knowing that he and Damon are real friends and wondering which one will betray the other. Animals was meant to star Damon and Jennifer Garner, and when Affleck took the lead himself, Garner pointed out that the two of them playing a married couple would bring the wrong baggage, so Kerry Washington took the part. He accepts the “tarnished leading man” label for the same reason. A public record of imperfection lets him play people who are not virtuous, and those are the only roles he finds interesting.

Key Takeaways

Affleck says his parents died two months apart in 2026, in early April and early June, and that it was “really sad and not a tragedy” because this is the order life is supposed to go in.
His main lesson from their deaths: the small resentments, work conflicts and internet noise are not remembered at the end, and anything left unresolved stays that way.
He works a regular day at Artists Equity in Los Angeles by design. As a divorced father with shared custody, he stopped taking jobs that would keep him away for months.
Artists Equity’s philosophy in one word is fairness. Actors, directors and crew are treated like investors who share in a film’s success instead of taking a large fee up front.
He believes the return to theaters is real, but the bar for getting people out of the house has risen. He cites The Odyssey, Backrooms and Obsession as films that earned it in different ways.
Animals is being released in theaters and on Netflix on the same day. Affleck says the reach of Netflix (he puts it at 330 million subscribers) let him take risks that would have been scarier in a theatrical-only release.
He judges careers by batting average. Anyone can make a film that fails, and the only way to avoid going stale is to take risks, some of which will not work.
Animals was shelved when Affleck learned Spike Lee and Denzel Washington were making Highest 2 Lowest with a similar plot. He came back to it after rewriting it around marriage and moral compromise.
He started his AI company, InterPositive, after concluding that video models were trained on scraped clips by people with no filmmaking expertise, and that the tools should be built inside Hollywood, not outside it.
He says generating video costs far more compute than language models, and that a movie will be the last thing AI replaces. In his words, you are never just going to type your movie out.
Baron cites a reported sale price of $587 million. Affleck says that number is not right, that he did not own the whole company, and that employees and Artists Equity held equity.
He wanted Netflix as the buyer because it is a studio and a guild signatory that cannot put a performer in a film without paying them.
On acting careers: there is no tenure and no gold watch. The fear that the phone will stop ringing never leaves, and the healthy response is to have a life that does not depend on it.

Chapters

0:00 Tabloid Amnesia and Why Relevance Is Overrated

Baron reminds Affleck that when they last met there were rumors that his house had burned down and that the FBI had raided it. Affleck had forgotten both, and says that is the point: the outrage passes, nobody follows up, and knowing that keeps him on an even keel. He does not want relevance for its own sake, since relevant things get dissected and fought over. He says he comes to the Artists Equity office every day because building a company requires being present, and because it keeps him near his children.

7:48 Artists Equity and Why Movies Are Back

Affleck explains the company’s model as aligned incentives. People who commit to a riskier film are treated as investors, and crew below the line share in a hit, which he says the company has already delivered on through its Netflix performance deals. On theaters, he thinks people will always want to go out together, but each film now has to justify the trip. He does not rank theatrical above streaming, and says Animals fits what the Netflix audience tends to watch.

14:09 Tarantino’s Review of The Rip

Baron reads Quentin Tarantino’s praise of Affleck and Damon in The Rip, including the line that audiences have taken them for granted. Affleck calls the review generous and says familiarity simply makes anything seem less special over a long career. He admired Harrison Ford as a child partly because every Ford film seemed to be good, a streak he calls extremely hard to keep. He agrees he is especially good opposite Damon, because a real relationship gives a scene more to draw on, and he compares it to how Marlon Brando always seemed to be showing the real Brando.

19:40 Losing Both Parents in One Year

Affleck talks about his mother with open admiration and says her death made him appreciate her life more fully. He says his relationship with his father was complicated and not close in the last years, and declines to go further. The loss made him think about his own mortality and how he wants to spend the time left. He took the summer off, traveled with his children, and says whatever you make most important is what you will spend your days on. That thinking is also why he and Damon decided to work together more.

27:38 Animals: A Kidnapping, a Mayoral Race and a Marriage

Affleck plays a wealthy Los Angeles mayoral candidate whose child is kidnapped. He nearly abandoned the project when he heard about Highest 2 Lowest, the Spike Lee film based on Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, which was adapted from the Ed McBain novel King's Ransom. What brought him back was the question of whether people are moral or self-interested once their beliefs stand between them and their child. He describes it as a film about a marriage in which two people only become honest when they think they have nothing left to lose. The timing with the real Los Angeles mayoral election and an immigration raid near the MacArthur Park shoot was coincidence.

35:16 The Tarnished Leading Man

Baron reminds him of a review he once quoted, which said Affleck works as a tarnished leading man. Affleck says those are the only characters worth playing, since nobody good wants to play someone who is simply virtuous or the best there ever was. Baron brings up the famous photo of him smoking behind his house, which people looked at and recognized themselves in. If his life, or the public’s idea of it, frees him from being told what his character would never say, he calls that a silver lining.

37:27 How Affleck Thinks About AI in Hollywood

Affleck says he has been into computers since childhood, ran a small visual effects company before Artists Equity, and can write rough Python. He walks through tensors, convolutional neural networks and edge detection as they were used in visual effects before transformers. After visiting the labs he decided the technology should not be developed by companies outside Hollywood that do not care about rights and likeness. He calls the idea of AI making up whole movies and replacing everyone nonsense, and says the creative community’s fear is the predictable result of being told a product will take your job.

47:35 Selling the Company to Netflix

Affleck disputes the reported price and stresses that staff shared in the deal, which he describes as technically a merger and in fact an acquisition. He admits to feeling a little vindicated toward the engineers he argued with, as someone who did not finish college. He jokes that the baffled texts he got after winning a million dollars on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire had the same tone. Selling to a studio mattered to him because it keeps the technology inside a system where producers, artists and crew depend on each other.

50:20 Would He Turn Down The Odyssey?

Damon told Baron he knew The Odyssey was the last film of its kind he would get to make. Affleck agrees that the David Lean style of production, with hundreds of people and everything shot in camera, has been disappearing for decades. He says Damon will not be thinking about it on his deathbed, and that he has watched his friend walk away from plenty of big offers. Actors are shaped young by auditioning for parts they cannot control, he says, and maturity is knowing the calls will stop and being fine. He closes on the audience: you cannot lose their attention, and you cannot lecture an empty house for not understanding your play.

Notable Quotes

“We’re all, you know, moving inevitably toward irrelevance and death. The former doesn’t seem all that unappealing to me.”
Ben Affleck, on whether he has aged out of tabloid attention

“You got to take big risks. You got to try stuff. And risks mean that some of them aren’t going to work.”
Ben Affleck, on why a long career includes films that fail

“I thought 83 years would feel like longer.”
Ben Affleck’s mother, as he recalls her saying near the end of her life

“Whatever you make the most important is going to be the thing you spend most of your time on. And then that’s your life.”
Ben Affleck, on choosing to stay near his children

“You’re never just going to type your movie out. That’s just never going to happen.”
Ben Affleck, on what AI will not do to filmmaking

“That as a business strategy is the equivalent of deciding that you’re going to heat your convenience store by lighting the cash in the register on fire.”
Ben Affleck, on companies told to maximize their AI token spending

“This is a hard business. There’s no like tenure. There’s no gold watch.”
Ben Affleck, on being at the mercy of the audience

Watch the full conversation between Ben Affleck and Zach Baron here.