Matt Damon and Ben Affleck Cried on Good Will Hunting Set: 'We Actually Accomplished Something'

Miramax/Kobal/Shutterstock Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in Good Will Hunting

Matt Damon is recalling an emotional moment he and Ben Affleck shared in the process of making Good Will Hunting.

The 1997 film, which the two childhood friends wrote together and subsequently starred in, led to Damon's first Oscar nomination for acting. The pair also shared a win for Best Original Screenplay, with Affleck becoming the youngest to win in the category and Damon, the second youngest.

In an interview for GQ's latest cover story, Damon, 50, opened up about crying on the very first day of filming Good Will Hunting, while Robin Williams and Stellan Skarsgård shot a scene together.

"Sometimes those moments sneak up on you," Damon told the outlet. "And that was another one of those moments we never thought was going to arrive. To see not only actors, but those actors, saying the stuff that we wrote, was like…f---."

He continued, "Just, I guess, a mixture of joy and disbelief. And relief. And gratitude. That would probably be it. That was a really nice moment. I'm not ashamed to say it."

Evan Agostini/ImageDirect Matt Damon and Ben Affleck

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He also recalled Affleck, 49, breaking down. "I remember him as crying," he said. "Now, memory is a funny thing, as we know, so you would have to ask him, but my recollection is we both were. Yeah. I think, as I recall, I put my hand on his arm, as these guys were talking. On his shoulder. Like: 'Holy s---…'"

Affleck confirmed Damon's memory — "We both cried," he told GQ.

When asked whether he was surprised by his friend's tears, the Gone Girl actor said he knew Damon was "emotional."

"No, it didn't surprise me at all to see Matt crying. It surprised me a little bit to be crying along with him, but maybe he felt that way about me," he said.

Todd Williamson/Getty Matt Damon and Ben Affleck

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Affleck added that the start of filming on Good Will Hunting was a sign of accomplishment for both him and Damon.

"It was all we thought about, it was all we focused on, and we never really believed it would happen. And it sort of represented the sum total of what we tried to do," he said. "You know …we might have cried for other reasons had we been able to see the whole future and understand the complexity of what we'd gotten ourselves into."

He continued. "But at the time, we had the sort of surety and the naivete of being just guys in our mid-20s who weren't thinking about anything except what was happening just right there in the moment, and feeling a tremendous amount of belief and satisfaction that it actually happened. That we actually accomplished something. We just felt relieved that we hadn't totally failed."

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Earlier this summer, Damon opened up about the process of writing Good Will Hunting with Affleck when they were in their 20s, sharing that it "was so inefficient" compared to their upcoming movie, The Last Duel, premiering in theaters next month.

"You know, because we didn't really understand structure so we wrote thousands of pages. ... We'd be like, 'Well, what if this happened?' and then we'd just write different scenes," Damon told Entertainment Tonight. "So, we had all these kind of disparate scenes, and then we kind of tried to jam them together into something that looked like a movie."