Good Will Hunting is a 1997 film directed by Gus Van Sant set in greater Boston, Massachusetts, which tells the story of Will Hunting, a troubled young prodigy who works as a janitor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology even though his knowledge of and facility with mathematics is superior to that of all of the school's faculty.
The movie was written by Damon and Affleck. The widely-spread rumor that Good Will Hunting was written by legendary screenwriter William Goldman was refuted in Goldman's book Which Lie Did I Tell? More Adventures In The Screen Trade as a joke that got out of hand.
It is often compared to J.D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye, and some claim that it was written with a certain amount of influence from the novel.
Primary cast
Will and Chuckie hang out together with their friends, drinking and fighting in Southie. Will works as a janitor at MIT, suppressing his talent for memorizing books in a single, page-at-glance reading and solving arcane math puzzles that baffle grad students until his 21st year, when his life suddenly changes.
Just days after meeting Skylar (Minnie Driver) at a Harvard bar, Will and his friends pick a fight with a gang harassing a girl on the street, but Will resists arrest when the cops come and faces jail time. The judge says, "You hit a cop, you're going in."
Enter Gerald Lambeau (Stellan Skarsgård), who strikes a deal with Will: he will have the charges dropped if Will agrees to see a psychiatrist once a week and meet with him to discover the depth of Will's genius. Will reluctantly agrees and after meeting with a series of unwilling shrinks, Lambeau appeals to his college roommate Sean Maguire (Robin Williams), a professor of psychology at the local community college.
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