BLAST: How are you enjoying Sundance?

John Wells: The Sundance experience has been wonderful. I’ve been here before, but not for seven or eight years. And I didn’t really realize how big the theater (The Eccles Theater, where “The Company Men” premiered) was going to be last night. I thought it was going to be 400 or 500 seats, tops. We made a small, intimate movie, and I figured the most people we would ever show it to would be maybe 250 people. So I was waiting in the wings and getting ready to walk in after John Cooper (festival director) said he was going to introduce me, and I heard the noise and I said, “Coop, how many people are out there?” He said, “About 1800,” and then walked out on stage and introduced me and I am back stage thinking, “1800?!”

BLAST: What was your experience as a first time director?

JW: I have directed a lot in television, of course, over the years, but the biggest problem I had at the beginning was that I was kind of…worrying about the producing…I was falling back on what I already knew and what I was comfortable with. And around the third day, Roger Deakins, who was the DP (Director of Photography) and Barbara Hall, who line-produced the movie, came over and said,”You know, we’re here so you don’t have to do that. You just have to direct.” It was a great thing, because I got to go back and just focus and not worry about when the meal penalty was and just get to direct. I was trained as a director in college in the theater, and so it was a wonderful feeling to be back and work with the actors and the DP and to be able to worry about the individual details in a scene and not have to worry about everything else that was happening.

BLAST: What brought you to this story? Why this story about men being laid off?

JW: I got interested in it about 10 years ago. A member of my family who was an MBA and had an electrical engineering degree was laid off. He had been approached many times to take jobs with other companies and it was just a situation where his company was taken over by a big European firm and they fired 5,000 people on a Tuesday. And he thought it wouldn’t be that difficult to find another job because he had fielded so many offers over the years, but his entire industry contracted in the same moment. And within about six months, he had lost his house and was living in his in-laws’ basement with his kids.

I wrote that first, and in doing research, I ended up communicating through the Internet with different guys and got little anecdotes and stories from about 2000 people, in very short order, who had experienced something similar. And then I interviewed a couple hundred people over a two-year period, but by the time I had finished it, the economy had rebounded and I turned the script into Warner Brothers, who said “Well, the economy is doing fine now.” And it was right around 9/11, so the attention of the country was elsewhere.

BLAST: What got the project going again?

JW: About two years ago, Paula Weinstein, who I had been developing the script with, called and said, “You know the economy is bad again, and this is happening to a lot of people again. You ought to revisit it.” So I went back and started interviewing people again and discovered what had been, at the time, something that was really happening a little below the radar when I wrote it the first time, because it was something people were ashamed of and trying to keep to themselves. But when we went back, we were talking to 15 million people. Sometimes as many as two million people a month were losing their jobs, and not for any reason like they weren’t doing their job well. It was simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and at the wrong moment within their company.

BLAST: How did the cast come together?

JW: I immediately thought of Ben and sent it to him and he responded. And then I sent it to Tommy and he liked it very much, and then suddenly, this was Christmas last year, and Roger Deakins, who I had sent it to, said he would be willing to do it. And Kevin Costner called me out of the blue and said he wanted to play Jack. He had read the script because someone he knew had it and said it was a good piece and he called me and said he could do it. Chris Cooper said he was interested. But what happened when I tried to put all those dates together, I had always thought I would do it sometime in the fall, but the only time they could all do it was exactly eight weeks between the beginning of April and the beginning of June. And that was the second week of January, so it came together really quickly. It was good because we didn’t have a lot of time to think about the wisdom of doing it; we just sort of did it.

BLAST: What was the challenge of dealing with such a topical issue?

JW: As we were researching, all the actors were meeting people and talking to people, and the places we were shooting in were the same places that we were going on. The building we used for the corporate headquarters was a large building, and we were on one of the floors that was no longer occupied. One Friday afternoon, the assistant director came over and said “Go and look in the lobby.” We went out and one of the other firms in the building had let, like, half their employees go, and they all had their cardboard boxes from a window which is kind of a shot that ended up being in the movie. They actually had their cardboard boxes and their plants and were walking out en mass. So it just came to be that was what was going on.

BLAST: What do you hope people take away from the film?

JW: I’m hoping it is more than timely. I think the film is talking about this notion that we have kind of defined ourselves by this notion that the American dream is exactly what Ben’s character has done. Which is come from this working class neighborhood, get an education, work his way up and get a nice house and that then you have then moved into this place where you have done exactly what you were supposed to do and then (you lose your job) and all of a sudden, it’s over.

BLAST: Who is the “bad guy” in the film?

JW: I don’t think there is a bad guy. One of the lines in the movie that’s one of my favorites…I left in the film because it was something I heard from one of the secretaries at a company who had just fired a bunch of her friends and she was in her 60’s and was the only one left. And two days after the big downsizing, her 401k, which was her stock in that company, went up, and she thought it was maybe her opportunity to retire early. And she said “It was bad for everyone else, but my 401k went up.” And the truth is, we are all like that. If you have money in the stock market, you want it to return a profit. We are all participating. Our desire to have a certain kind of return on our stocks forces the companies to act in a certain way. And there’s a lot of hubris and a certain amount of greed in CEO’s who are making 700 times more than the average worker in the company, but at the same time, they are being paid to do a certain kind of job that we are asking them to do.

BLAST: Did you find any answers for that kind of system?

JW: I think we are going to have to find some way to redefine the responsibility employers have to employees in this system. So when you give your loyalty to a company, you have some sense that they may look out for your interest and not only their own. I don’t think anyone has a solution to that yet. But I don’t know if you’re going to be able to keep stable, educated workforces in your place of work who know what their job is if you don’t look after them. And that is what is kind of starting to happen, now, in a lot of workplaces. They’re just leaving. If you have another opportunity, you take it, because you don’t think your employer is looking after you.

BLAST: Are you looking to direct more feature films?

JW: I’ll have to step back and think about it, because I am not sure I will have the opportunity on the next one to work with Roger Deakins, Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones and Chris Cooper.

BLAST: What do you have slated for next?

JW: I don’t really have anything. This came together so quickly. We shot it and edited in June and we finished in November. Then Sundance accepted it and then I booked the flight to Sundance. That question has come up and it’s the thing that’s striking the most horror and terror into my heart, because I realize I have four or five things that I have started researching. So sometime next week I have to go back to my home, go up to my office by myself and turn on my iTunes and decide which one of those I am going to write next.

Blast got a chance to sit down with the actors at Sundance as part of a roundtable interview with other journalists. We talked with them about the film’s message concerning the American dream, corporate America and the unique realities of an actor’s life. Watch below for a clip from the interview, and keep scrolling to read the interview.

BLAST: Ben, how did you find your character?

Ben Affleck: There was a little bit of internet research to start. John (Wells, director) showed me some internet sites with people who had gone through this experience and then it was really constructing a biography. Then I went home and talked to some people from Framingham. I kind of keyed into that town because I knew a lot about it since I am from Boston, so that wasn’t that hard.

BLAST: Where is your character from exactly?

BA: The character is from Framingham, which is really suburban. It’s right out by route 128 about 10 minutes outside of Boston. It could be kind of suburban anywhere, but it isn’t. It’s got specifics too. So I went there and keyed into it and talked to some people. I went and visited some companies and talked to some folks who still had their jobs, which I thought was kind of interesting even though their companies were in for some big layoffs. Then I put the character based on that. There was a kid I went to school with who I really based most of it on. I like to find one person I know really, really well to base it one because you have a ready made, full biography of like 20 years which does all this work for you… I’m lazy I guess.

To me the character struck me as a guy who worked really hard on this goal that he had. He started out with relatively modest means, go to college, work really hard, get this job and work your way up the ladder. Have the Porsche, have the nice house, get the job, get the promotion, kill himself for the company and the promise was then you will be happy. That is the American dream and then he lost it all. And there is this feeing of betrayal and emasculation and confusion and loss that was really powerful to look at.

BLAST: John talked about how there is a sense of distrust between employees and employers now. Did you get that feeling when you were talking to people who still had jobs?

The people I talked to just have this thing that reminded me of stories you read about in American history. “The Trail of Tears” or something. These forced marches where people would die but you keep marching. There is this internalized fear that people are dying but you’re thinking, “I gotta live.” I’m sorry about him, sorry about them but there wasn’t a lot of pause to mourn anybody else. Most people would go and would get forgotten because if you start worrying or pausing for those people, you would die too. People really viewed their job in the very primal caveman way of going out with a stick and providing for your family. You’ve got to go kill the lion or whatever and bring it back to the cave. You eat the lion or the lion eats you.

BLAST: In your professional careers, have you ever felt that gutted by the loss of a job or something that went wrong in your own careers where you were able to tap into that for your roles in “The Company Men?”

Rosemary Dewitt: I fell like that is part of the gig of just being an actor. I know actors who are out of work for years at a time. And if they thought their worth was equal to what their career was or what their resume was, they would probably jump off of a building. Someone said to me very early on in my career,“When you go into the room to audition, pretend that you have a little Uzi in your bag.” And I was like that is such a violent image. But they said “No, your Uzi could be ‘my grandmother thinks I’m awesome’ or ‘I did something really good today for my next door neighbor.’” I think everyone needs that sort of stockpile of what’s really important, because your stuff will go. Your career’s going to end. I watched my dad when he retired and all these men are like “What are we doing today?” The thing about the movie is it asks you to ask yourself those types of questions, which when people say “Why see this movie?” You have to ask these questions — everybody does.

BA: Actors are really unusual in that they live that reality from the beginning. You get really inured to that. You start out as an actor…it is really unstable. You never have that kind of stability that most other jobs have promised. You always know your next job could be your last. So you audition for something and get that, who knows if you’ll get the next audition. And you learn that lesson rather quickly. I think every actor internalizes that on some level and lives with it. But it is also why see people get moved by actors who make big comebacks. I was reading a book about old Hollywood and there was this speech that Sinatra gave about how he thought he was washed up at 37. And then he got “From Here to Eternity,” but before he was having to borrow money. Actors’ lives, even Sinatra’s, have those movements in them. But most Americans’ jobs aren’t like that. We expect, and, I think, fairly, that if you give this much time to a company that they are not going to just saw you off on a whim.

RD: And that’s the promise. Go for the stable job. Go for the one that gives you the 401k. Don’t go be a creative person because then you are going to be dealing with uncertainty for the rest of your life. You might not have any pension. When you go for that you expect the company to take care of you.

BA: that’s the exchange.

RD: That’s the thing, because I think a lot of people in corporate America could have chosen something creative.

BA: They would have been sculptors if they had wanted instability.

RD: I remember someone saying they were going into sales, and I asked, “What are you selling?” And they said, “It doesn’t matter. I’m going into sales.”

BA: They would have started drinking at lunch and painting if they wanted uncertainty.

Rosemary, what do you keep in your “bag,” if not an Uzi, for maintaining that confidence or edge?

RD: I think it changes. I don’t know that it always gives you a measure of confidence. I think as I get older I try to figure out there is more. There are times — I hate to admit it — that you don’t get the job or you hear some criticism that sends you reeling in a way, that has you saying, “Come on. I know this. I’ve learned this lesson.” For me it falls into the category of wanting more.

It is always a competitive process for you guys. This job is very competitive. How do you handle that?

BA: You try to learn the lesson that it shouldn’t be. That it’s not. I’ve always tried to feel like there is a role for everybody and that there are a lot of great actors. And I root for other actors. I like other actors and directors and writers. I respect them. I know people who feel like every time someone else succeeds they’re taking food out of their mouth and I know people who don’t. And I have always tried to be the latter. I have my smallness inside me, and my better half, and I’ve tried to veer towards the better half. I think we all struggle back and forth with it, I know I do. It’s tough. This movie speaks to the way that materialism and corporate America tries to solve that by trying to tell us, “You know what is going to make you feel better about that? Better than the Jones’s and not worrying about the next guy? Buy this new blender. You know you should try this other snowboard even though you’ve never snowboarded before. How about a carbon fiber 10-speed? And we accumulate stuff.

RD: It is such an outward-looking competition. Saying “What does that person have?” or “Is this person taking something away from me?” And I feel like in this movie it goes from the outward to what does a country club membership mean? I mean really what does it mean? It just means that you can go play golf.

BA: What it means to people is that they have elevated themselves and become part of an elite. So they raise themselves up from others so they feel special, they feel better that they have accomplished something. It’s literally buying self-esteem. Some people get self-esteem that way. The only real way to get it is by doing estimable things, but that’s the hardest to do.

Brooklynne Kelly Peters contributed to this story.

The acting and writing duo from Cambridge share a 10th grandfather on their fathers’ sides, William Knowlton of Ipswich, making them 10th cousins once removed.

“We suspected they might be related since both of them had ancestry going back to colonial New England,” said geneologist Chris Child.

Rhonda McClure, another geneologist involved in the research, told the Herald she saw Affleck filming in Copley Square recently and just decided to look into it. McClure and Child also discovered that Affleck is related to Princess Diana and 16 U.S. presidents, including Obama. Similarly, Damon is related to “six or seven” presidents.

While interesting, this doesn’t really mean much. Anyone with colonial ancestry is likely to be distantly related to a lot people. Damon and Affleck’s friendship is certainly a lot stronger than their blood connection. Still, it’s rather nifty.

Photos: Getty Images

I’ll preface this by saying that I feel writing this review is somewhat of a conflict of interest. Not that I know anyone that had to do with its production. But as a member of the print media, I feel as if this film was made especially for me.

“State of Play” is a reasonably tight, entertaining thriller, a competent knockoff of the great journalism movies of yore (“All the President’s Men,” obviously, “The Pelican Brief,” “Absence of Malice,” etc.) In certain moments it’s also a surprisingly tender elegy to the rapidly changing print journalism industry (stay for the ending credits, which has shots of working print presses while CCR’s “Long As I Can See the Light” wails melancholically in the background.)

Mainly, though, “State of Play” is more or less simply an opportunity for journalism nerds to indulge in their worst impulses and desires. It’s a hell of a lot of fun.

What journalist in their heart of hearts wouldn’t want to be Cal McCaffrey (Russell Crowe), the hard-bitten investigative journalist who bribes, steals and illegally tapes his way to the top of a story? McCaffrey is old-school; he detests internet journalism and its ilk, he types on a 16-year-old computer and daily risks being sued and/or jailed in pursuit of The Truth. He’s thrown together with a chirpy, no-nonsense and unfortunately named cub reporter, Della (Rachel McAdams), after a story breaks surrounding a Congressman (Ben Affleck), his mistress who dies mysteriously and a corrupt Blackwater-esque military contractor. Then the fun begins.

The film may be chock-full of Blackberries, blogs, and references to the War on Terror, but nonetheless there’s something lovingly dated about the whole setup. Besides Crowe and Adams doing the “His Girl Friday” routine, we get a bunch of jaded, wise-guy co-workers (a fabulous trio of Michael Weston, Rob Benedict and Josh Mostel) and the coup de grace: McCaffrey’s Dragon Lady editor Cameron (Helen Mirren) in a role that trumps “The Queen,” because Queen Elizabeth never got to use the phrase “Fuck you very much.”

Not surprisingly, it’s Mirren who steals the show. Her role as it’s written is a complete cliché, of course, but Mirren goes about it with a razor-sharp glint in her eye; this woman’s been a member of a resolute boy’s club for many years, and it has pissed her off. Even picking up the phone and dialing a number is imbued with passion and barely-controlled tremor of rage. I loved her. I wanted to be her.

There’s a lot of good stuff in here, despite the fact that the plot has that cheesy, ripped-from-the-headlines aura that plagues so many thrillers today. Besides Mirren, we get Crowe, who always turns out at least a decent performance, and Jason Bateman.

Yes, that Jason Bateman.

He plays a sleazy PR guy. A sleazy PR guy who does uppers. It’s just … it’s just awesome, especially by the time he appears, you’ve relaxed and begun to ignore the glaring inconsistencies of the plot, the ridiculous twists and the fact that at the end of the day none of these journalists would have jobs after what they’d done for The Truth. When Bateman appears, you are ready to watch McCaffrey bully him in a sleazy hotel room until he cracks. You’re ready to hide information from the police and ignore codes of ethics. Because you’re a journalist too, dammit! Just as in “All the President’s Men,” which created a huge influx of journalism students looking to bring down a president of their very own, “State of Play” let’s the public, and the lithograph, be the hero.

Love triangles. Desperate women. Desperate men. Lots of tears. It sounds more fitting for 3 p.m. on ABC, but it all comes together on the screen in “He’s Just Not That Into You,” a fictional story based on a non-fiction advice book “He’s Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys” by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo.

Let me save you two hours: If you’re a single guy (me) you’re going to come out of this movie feeling hopeless (though why you’d go see this movie, I do not know). If you’re a single girl, you’ll come out of this movie with a rejuvenated sense of hope. If you’re gay, you’ll just laugh (the gay angle makes more sense after you see the movie). And if you’re a guy in a relationship going to see this movie with your girlfriend, you’re not going to get any that night.

Try to absorb all this:

The movie opens on Gigi, (Ginnifer Goodwin) a desperately single woman who goes out with greasy real estate agent Conor (Kevin Connolly). Conor never calls Gigi after their first date, but Gigi sits by the phone hoping beyond hope that he’ll call. She eventually decides to “casually stroll into” Conor’s usual bar hangout where she meets bar manager Alex (Justin Long — the Mac guy) who takes poor Gigi under his wing, explaining, deftly and darkly, the true nature of guy-girl interactions.

Queue Ben (Bradley Cooper) and Janine (Jennifer Connelly), the token married couple in the film. They are pouring their yuppie dollars into renovating brownstone when Ben gets tempted by a yoga instructor-come-singer named Anna (Scarlett Johansson). Conor is in love with Anna, and they are technically dating, but Anna treats Conor like a best friend — ergo, she doesn’t screw him anymore. Anna gets bad advice from her best friend Mary (Drew Barrymore) who works in advertising sales for a gay lifestyle magazine. Anna decides to pursue the married Ben.

Then we have Neil (Ben Affleck) and Beth (Jennifer Aniston) who have been together for seven years but aren’t married, despite Beth’s desire and the fact that all her sisters are already married off. Neil is Ben’s best friend.

Finally, Mary is struggling with her own pseudo-single-ness, dealing with guys that text message, web chat, and MySpace her instead of call. Facebook would have made the movie seem less “2005.”

The whole shtick takes place in modern Baltimore, and it’s nice to see a city besides New York and Los Angeles portrayed.

The movie has an undoubtedly all-star cast. Affleck and Aniston seem like elder statesmen, and each give strong performances. In many ways, this is a break out film for both Justin Long and Ginnifer Goodwin. “He’s Just Not That Into You” was the #1 movie Friday night, with more than $10.5 million coming in at the box office.

Goodwin was (albeit purposefully) a little annoying, and Long seems to try just a bit too hard to sell his character as a chick magnet, but it’s obvious as the baton gets passed to these two young stars and that we have more to expect from them down the line.

The movie was full of “awwww’s” and hateful hisses from the largely female audience which really got emotionally invested in the film. It was a bit too long at 2:10, but that’s not surprising considering how many stories the ending had to tie up.

Scarlett Johansson plays a skank surprisingly well and comes off particularly sexy, even for her, and especially considering the shockingly wholesome temperature of the entire movie.

It’s a total chick flick, and “He’s Just Not That Into You” isn’t a movie made to please critics.

Playing to its base it does well.