Photos Courtesy of the Filmmakers It is clear, in conversation, that Casey Affleck is still trying to work Company out. His third directorial feature, set to premiere next week at the Venice Film Festival, begins on Christmas Day circa 1975, when a young woman (Emily Alyn Lind) arrives at a party and begins telling a strange story to those in attendance. From there, Company proves as rich in atmosphere as it is in ambiguity, unfurling a Gothic-infused mystery across three different timelines that click into collective place only in the film’s final moments. “There’s the story you think you’re going to tell, and then there’s the one that comes out of you,” Affleck says. “Those, at least in my experience, are never the same.”
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When it comes to the final product, a haunting but earnest tale of loneliness and healing, the roots proved deeply personal for Affleck, though he’s reluctant to say too much on that score. The script was written over six years with Ron Hansen, with whom Affleck has remained close since starring in the 2007 adaptation of Hansen’s novel The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and evolved into a reflection on old wounds and how to move past them. “If there’s anything that can be taken from really awful experiences that seem to have no explanation and certainly no justification, it’s that if nothing else, they’re going to give you a way to connect to other people who have had similar kinds of hardships,” Affleck says.
The screenplay is structured as a kind of cinematic nesting doll, with the 1975 woman’s story transporting us to the Colorado mountains of 1953, where an older man living in isolation named Tom (Nick Nolte) takes in an actress (Caylee Cowan) who’s materialized outside his cabin and is on the verge of freezing to death. She then has her own story to tell to keep them company, which is where the crux of the film’s action takes place: in 1903, with spouses Emmett (Scoot McNairy) and Rebecca (Adelaide Clemens) allowing a mercurial young drifter named Caleb (Atticus Affleck) to live on their farm. This strand of the film gradually informs the secrets and surprises of the later timelines.
Atticus Affleck and Adelaide Clemens in ‘Company.’ Opposite Australian native Clemens (Rectify, R.J. Decker), a standout in one of her most notable big-screen showcases to date, 18-year-old Atticus emerges as Company’s unlikely lead in his first acting role. He’s Casey’s youngest son, and this is only where the intimate familial nature of Company begins: Casey’s eldest son, Indiana Affleck, also plays a sneakily pivotal role onscreen; Cowan, who portrays the ’50s actress, is the director’s girlfriend of more than five years. Finally, both of Casey’s parents appear in the movie — and it is dedicated to them, as they both died recently, after production but before its completion.
“I suddenly felt an enormous amount of pressure,” Affleck says of involving his loved ones in the movie. “I’ve made lots of movies and my kids have said, ‘That sucks’ — they’re always very honest with me, and they definitely don’t like everything that I’ve done, and that didn’t hurt my feelings ever — but this time, I really felt responsible for all those people in a way that I hadn’t even been thinking of.”
The tightknit nature of the set was partly a matter of necessity: Company is, like Affleck’s last directorial effort, the post-apocalyptic family drama Light of My Life, its own quirky thing. “It feels unlike anything that I’ve ever read,” Affleck says. “It doesn’t fit neatly into any one genre. It doesn’t behave the way that most movies do, doesn’t follow those rules. It doesn’t really even have a three-act structure. It just moves along in this really unpredictable way, which I like.”
When Affleck was doing press for his eventually Oscar-winning turn in Manchester by the Sea, a Variety cover story called him “The Outsider.” While he’d bristled at the label at the time — and others might find it surprising given his collaborative history with brother Ben Affleck and Matt Damon — he’s since assumed it with conviction. “That’s exactly, in fact, how I think of myself when it comes to Hollywood — it doesn’t feel like I’m a part of the club,” he says. “I’m definitely not an insider, so when I go around to raise money for a movie, people aren’t quite sure what to think.
“Nobody wanted to take on the whole thing, write a check for $6 million,” Affleck continues. “I think people aren’t really sure of who I am as a filmmaker.”
What resulted with Company is perhaps his clearest statement in that regard — executed, not so coincidentally, through “the most guerrilla filmmaking that I’ve ever been a part of,” Affleck says. The bulk of production took place over two weeks on Whistler Mountain in British Columbia, Canada — and across all four seasons. “It was nothing but favors just to make it work because we had no money,” Affleck says. For each of those shoots, lasting a couple of days, he’d need to assemble a new crew: “Sometimes I had no DP and I was shooting it myself. Sometimes I had just a local person who happened to own a camera, and I would invite them to come and operate. And Indiana participated in every department on the crew: He was shoveling snow, he was helping with the horses, he was carrying boxes and light stands.”
The on-the-fly approach extended to casting. Nolte and Ben Mendelsohn, who makes a vivid impression as a farmer who encounters Caleb, were locked in early on, but otherwise, things went down to the wire. Clemens arrived on set 48 hours before her first scene on camera. Lind read the script 36 hours before speaking her first lines.
Ben Mendelsohn in ‘Company.’ And then there was Atticus, who had no interest in doing the movie at all. He’d never done school plays and, per his father, still does not want to be an actor. “Atticus was never going to be in the movie, but I couldn’t find anybody that felt right to me, and our dates kept changing,” the director says. “He didn’t want to miss any school, and I didn’t want him to miss school, but now it was his one week of spring break that we were going to shoot, and he said, ‘Listen, if you want me to come do it, I’ll do it.’ I said, ‘Thank God.’ ”
Whether Atticus changes his mind or not about his ambitions, he makes an auspicious debut in Company. He was tasked with holding the movie’s most complex, morally challenging ideas, as a young boy running from trauma and left to decide between danger and redemption. He recognized the story his father was telling — maybe even better than Casey Affleck himself knew until he saw for himself.
“Atticus showed me that he understood that part of me, that he understood these complicated, grown-up feelings of dealing with the really hard stuff that happened in your life that you’re never going to get an apology for — that you’re never going to get any sense of satisfaction around,” Affleck says. “It was really an acting job for him. It wasn’t like, ‘Hey, I’m writing a part that’s just like you, can you come do it?’ It was like, ‘I’m writing this part that is a part of myself.’ And he was able to find those shoes and step into them, lace them up — and walk a mile.”
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