said, “For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be an actor.”

It was asking kind of who you were, and that was really who I was...

and I wanted them to know who I was...

and, whether they accepted me or not...

I wanted them to know who they were gonna let in or not.

Having grown up here, I think I had one way of looking at Harvard–

kind of a townie view of the school.

Suddenly walking through as a prospective student...

I just started to really take in how impressive it was.

I assumed if I could get into an Ivy League school–

That kind of touched every base for me.

And then I got into Harvard, and it’s a very tough place to turn down.

This great teacher named Anthony Kubiak– I took a number of his classes.

This was the final one that I took. It was the playwriting class.

I handed in the first act of a three-act movie–

what eventually became Good Will Hunting.

I apologized to him when I handed him this 40-some-odd page document.

I just said, “I don’t think I did what you wanted.

I was supposed to write a one-act play...

and this is clearly the first act of a three-act movie.”

He was unbelievably encouraging.

He gave me a flat “A” in the class, which was a big deal.

He wrote extensively in the margins–

or on a cover page that he put on it–

to “please keep up with this”–

that it was worthy, that it was good...

that it wasn’t anything close to a failure...

that it was something I had to pursue.

So I showed it to Ben Affleck, and the rest is history.