By Michael Cieply

LOS ANGELES - In the glory days of the 1990s, Ben Affleck and his friend Matt Damon, a couple of struggling actors, startled Hollywood by writing brilliantly conceived roles for themselves into a screenplay called "Good will Hunting", and picking up an Oscar fot their effort.

Now Mr. Affleck has released “The Town,” which is drawing good reviews and represents the first time since then that he has worked on a project behind the scenes as well as in front of the camera.

It is an ambitious robbery film with Mr. Affleck as director, star and a writer, with Peter Craig and Aaron Stockard. Critic Roger Ebert wrote that it shows Mr. Affleck has “the stuff of a real director.” The film, which premiered in the United States in September and is in global release this autumn, is clearly meant to refocus a career that has bounced from roles in action thrillers like “Armageddon,” to bit parts in indie romps like “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,” through the on-screen embarrassment of “Gigli,” to acclaim for directing “Gone Baby Gone.”

All without delivering what “Good Will Hunting” seemed to promise: that rare actor with skills enough to create his own showcase. “It’s hard to disavow a movie when you’ve written, directed and acted in it,” Mr. Affleck said, describing “The Town” as a bid to find his place in an industry that hasn’t quite known what to do with him.

He added, “This is an emblem of the person I want to be going forward.” Mr. Affleck began hearing that Warner Brothers executives wanted him to become involved with “The Town” after the release of “Gone Baby Gone,” a critical success for which he was the director and a writer, and in which his younger brother, Casey, starred. It took in about $20 million at the box


A rare actor who
can create his own
showcase.

office in 2007. “The Town” made nearly $24 million on its opening weekend in the United States. Based on Chuck Hogan’s novel “Prince of Thieves,” “The Town” tells a story about crime and family in Charlestown, a Boston neighborhood that has spawned an extraordinary number of bank robberies and holdups. Mr. Affleck said he was not only entranced by the possibilities in a story that would take him back to Boston, near where he grew up, but he also saw a rare chance for a new start as both actor and filmmaker.

Internally at Warner, “The Town” became something of a favorite project, as both Jeff Robinov, the president of its film group, and Alan F. Horn, Warner’s chief operating officer, began to see in Mr. Affleck potential of the kind that has made Clint Eastwood a Warner perennial.

“They were the only ones out there saying, ‘We’d love to find a movie for you to direct,’ ” Mr. Affleck recalled. The Boston ambience, Mr. Horn said, brought out the best in Mr. Affleck. “It is as comfortable for Ben as New York is for (Martin) Scorsese,” he said. The picture is said to have cost about $40 million.

Mr. Affleck slipped naturally into the lead role as Doug McCray, a professional criminal caught between his relationship with an accomplice, played by Jeremy Renner, and his love for a witness to one of their crimes, played by Rebecca Hall.

Mr. Affleck, who was raised in a generally law-abiding neighborhood , said he grounded his film in the accounts of felons, some of whom worked on the movie, often in bit parts. Authenticity had become a fetish, if only because Mr. Affleck left himself nowhere to hide. “It’s all in for me,” he said of his commitment to “The Town.” “If it felt fake, I knew I’d feel like an imposto r the whole time.”