Ben Affleck sets the record straight on 'Justice League'

Ben Affleck

Credit: Photo by John Shearer/Invision/AP

The internet was abuzz a few months back when what turned out to be an overzealous report put Ben Affleck in the driver's seat of the planned Warner Bros. team-up film "Justice League." The report was soon enough shot down and everyone went about their business, but in a recent interview about his work on "Argo," Affleck said he hated talking about it in the media at all because the eventual stories shed a negative light on the project.

"I just want to make it clear because it’s not like I had something to even pass on," he said. "Because someone will eventually do 'Justice League' and they'll go, like, 'Ben Affleck passed on it,' and it won't be true. So I don’t mind setting the record straight. It's one of those things where the closest I came was some people talked to me about it like at a meeting. They were like, 'Here's the stuff we’re doing,' you know? 'Here’s what we're looking at.' That kind of thing. And they suggested it. But I don’t think there’s a script. I don’t think there’s anything."

Nevertheless, he's excited about the potential for "Justice League," as he's said since the rumor hit. And he's equally impressed by what Marvel has accomplished with separate franchises leading into a successful team-up in "The Avengers," which became third-highest grossing film of all time this year.

"I think there’s a DC 'Avengers' that could be done because they have the characters for it," he said. "And there’s some stuff in the comics now that’s kind of interesting, and it’s cool. That's what Marvel does so well. They do a lot of things well, but one of the things that I’m really impressed by is how they coordinated all those movies. I mean, you never see somebody make a whole movie with the eye of, like, building it into new sequels, but that's because you're just hoping it’s a hit and you’ll do it again.

"But for shooting these kind of satellite movies with the notion that later on you’ll build the planet that they're orbiting around, and coordinating it all ahead of time, and imagining how the story's going to work and flow with Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, it’s a big deal. You don't see that level of organization much in movies. You know what I mean? It's like enough to just get one movie together and off the ground."

Affleck also said he wouldn't be averse to taking on such a daunting genre project in the future. He may have kept things dialed-down on adult dramas like "Gone Baby Gone," "The Town" and "Argo" so far in his career as a director, but he said he responds to the same things in all projects, whatever the scope. And if the right combination of that popped up in a genre film, he'd leap at the opportunity.

"I would love it," he said. "My interest is really just in, you know, if I like the characters and if the stories seem smart and surprise me. The things that people look for. So those things exist in the superhero genre. And when they do, I think it’s really exciting. I think they exist in the science-fiction genre. If you look at 'Blade Runner' to 'Alien' to 'Aliens' on down through today. So it’s just about finding a good script, honestly. I wouldn’t be into something or not based on the genre."

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Kristopher Tapley
Editor-at-Large

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Kristopher Tapley has covered the film awards landscape for over a decade. He founded In Contention in 2005. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Times of London and Variety. He begs you not to take any of this too seriously.