Ben Affleck's 11 Favorite Heist Movies

"That’s probably my No. 1. It definitely is vis à vis The Town. Same setting—they even had the same safe front in one of the bank robberies, like, the actual safe was the same in ours as it was in Eddie Coyle. I don’t know what that says except that they don’t update safes very much. We put a little piece of dialogue from The Friends of Eddie Coyle on the television that someone’s watching in The Town. It’s an exceptional film. It does what I try to do, which is to make it seem real. It’s not sexed up, it’s not glam. You feel like these are real guys, who really are doing this. And the stakes feel kind of dangerous and real in a sort of slightly scary, upsetting way; I think the way it would in real life."

"There’s an incredible sequence in Rififi where there’s no sound during the robbery. I watched that a bunch of times before making The Town. Rififi shows how much you can do, when that sort of tension is created so elegantly and so sparely. It’s just magnificent. That was also something I wanted to steal for my movie."

"Heat is the seminal, modern heist/robbery movie. It was made in ‘95. Still, a movie hasn’t been made since that has a deeper feel of authenticity. It feels so real that bank robbers then copied Heat. And when I was interviewing people in prison they referenced Heat. And when I was interviewing the FBI, they referenced Heat. So, aside from feeling bummed out that I’d always be in the shadow of Heat, I can certainly tell you, for sure, with great authority, that Heat is the one movie that’s cited as the real thing by people who really do that stuff."

"Inception is about heisting something really different; they’re breaking into someone’s mind. Leonardo DiCaprio’s really, really good in the movie, and Christopher Nolan is an extraordinary director. It’s virtually entirely visual effects, and yet you never think about it. There’s never a moment when you’re going, “OK, here’s the dragon that flies over, or here’s the robots,” or whatever. It all feels real. It’s the perfect example of story driving the visuals and the way, if the story’s working, it’s seamless, no matter how many pyrotechnics are going on."

That’s definitely the seminal Rat Pack movie, where they came up with this idea of the contemporary cool guys coming together to pull off a job. That’s the perfect example of a movie that’s smart and still fun. You really are having a good time and rooting for these guys, and I think it spawned a whole sub-genre of movies afterward. Inception is a more cerebral, kind of convoluted, version of that thing, where you’re feeling the drama and the intensity of what these guys are doing. In Ocean’s Eleven, you’re admiring them and having fun with them while they’re doing what they’re doing—ripping off the casinos.