Krasinski: I probably subconsciously wrote the script for my dad. He grew up in Pittsburgh and worked in a steel mill town. Life was simpler, and we believed in each other, and that to me is in a very fundamental way not the case anymore. I brought it to novelist Dave Eggers, and we sat around and hashed out the ideas. Then Matt Damon and I decided to do an actual script. He was shooting We Bought a Zoo in Malibu, so we just worked together every single weekend in his house.
I had always heard from my friends that the blank white page was terrifying, and I was like, "Come on, there's a lot of things that are terrifying." And then you realize it's one of the scarier things: To actually put yourself out there and be telling a story that's very personal is really hard.
