Big difference a decade has made, during which Affleck directed another acclaimed Boston crime thriller, “The Town,” and a Best Picture Oscar-winner, “Argo.” While there, he falls in love with a Cuban molasses supplier (Zoe Saldana), takes on rivals, racists and Christian revivalists, tries to get a casino up and operating as the end of Prohibition threatens the Mafia’s core business, and kills a lot of people.īut Joe also tries to maintain some kind of personal decency, in a line of work where that can be a fatal liability.Īnd there’s a lot, lot, lot more to the movie.

There’s nothing more annoying than an intrusive novelist.Īlthough he wishes to remain independent of both the Irish and Italian mobs, circumstances force Coughlin to head down to Tampa, Florida, to oversee the Cosa Nostra’s rum bootlegging operation in the town’s multicultural Ybor City district. I couldn’t care less, and that is because once I sell it to you, I’m getting out of your way. It has nothing to do with the money or if a big studio or a big name is interested or any of that. And it’s always on an aesthetic, artistic standard. “It’s a very short list of people I would sell my work to. “Where I can be a pain in the ass is at the selling stage,” adds Lehane, who is so far batting 1.000 with, alongside Affleck’s films, successful adaptations of his stories by Clint Eastwood (“Mystic River,” 2003), Martin Scorsese (“Shutter Island,” 2010) and up-and-coming Belgian Michael Roskam (“The Drop,” 2014). “Yes, that’s pretty much it,” the writer confirms on a separate call to Boston, both men’s hometown. But ultimately, it needs to be the director making the movie and the novelist writes the novel.”

I get advice and stuff from him early on and I screen him the movie when I’m done. “I try to be as faithful to it as I can, but I do it in my own image of how that’s going to be. “I just have tremendous respect for Dennis’ work,” Affleck says via phone from New York. But however the filmmaker goes about adapting Lehane’s books to the big screen (the first one, Affleck’s feature directing debut, was 2007’s “Gone Baby Gone”), it doesn’t need fixing.

Well, collaboration may be too strong a word. “Live by Night” is the second collaboration between director-screenwriter Ben Affleck and acclaimed crime novelist Dennis Lehane.

Live by night novel