Affleck reflects on Oscar speech

[April 11, 2013]  LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Ben Affleck took home the best picture Oscar at this year's Academy Awards for his Iran hostage drama "Argo." But what everyone really remembers is that emotional, slightly uncomfortable acceptance speech. Everyone, apparently, except Affleck.

"I barely remember the Oscar speech," the actor-director said when asked about it at Tuesday's premiere of his latest film. "Certainly, the most important thing for me, in a way, was to honor my wife and to let people know how much I love her."

During his speech Affleck choked up while thanking his wife, Jennifer Garner, for working on their "marriage for 10 Christmases."

"I think you can tell what people care about really by their actions -- by what they invest in, by what they work on," he explained. "It's hard to tell somebody that you care about them when you're never around them and you don't see them and talk to them. So that was what I was trying to get across. Although I don't know how articulate I was."

Affleck was joined by co-stars Olga Kurylenko and Rachel McAdams for the Los Angeles premiere of Terrence Malick's romantic rumination "To the Wonder," which opens Friday.

Affleck, 40, admitted that seeing the celebrated director in action was indeed a wonder to behold.

"I think that you know he's a director who does really unusual stuff, really interesting stuff, and somebody who works outside the typical Hollywood norm. And that's interesting to other directors, certainly to me, because you go like 'wow, what would happen of you experiment with this?'"

The film stars Affleck as an American whose relationship with a woman he met overseas turns cold, leaving him drifting back toward a childhood love.

"To the Wonder" was the last review written by celebrated film critic Roger Ebert, who died Tuesday, and it sent "shivers" down Affleck's spine.

"I thought it was a profound honor," he said. "To have this be the last movie that he reviewed and to have it viewed through this sort of transcendental lens of a man at the end of his life is as important as anything that's ever happened around movies in my career."

[Associated Press; By NATALIE ROTMAN]

Associated Press writer Nicole Evatt contributed to this story.

Follow Nicole Evatt at http://twitter.com/NicoleEvatt.

Follow Natalie Rotman at http://twitter.com/NatalieRotman.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.