Originally, the plan was for Ben Affleck to adapt the screenplay of Dennis Lehane’s best-selling novel Gone Baby Gone. Maybe, possibly, he would also star in the film, as the amateur P.I. investigating the kidnapping of a 4-year-old girl from her bed in South Boston. Instead, six months later, Affleck was in the hospital with a migraine so bad it was making him puke. He had been on the job as first-time director for one week.

If the head-splitter Affleck came down with was a physical manifestation of stress, maybe the chest-rattling cold he’s in the grips of this afternoon is, too. Maybe his immunity’s down because of the crushing pressure of his imminent, back-to-the-wall directorial debut. Or maybe he just caught a stray virus from his almost-2-year-old daughter, Violet, who’s at home right now squirming under the discomfort of a low-grade fever.

“I’m sick, Violet’s sick, Matt’s [Damon] kid is sick,” Affleck wheezes, looking like a more-chiseled FDR in the shade of a hotel cabana in Santa Monica. “You get old, you slow down.” Add to that the fact that his German shepherd, Hutch, got into a container of Metamucil this morning and sprayed diarrhea all over his Brentwood home—“There was no way Jennifer [Garner] was going to clean it up by herself,” he says, excusing his lateness—and you have one run-down 35-year-old man.

But those explanations for Affleck’s premature old-man-itis sound like a cover-up. No doubt a dribbling baby and a sick dog sledgehammer your immune system, but mounting a full-scale attempt to reclaim your career probably takes a little out of you too.

Affleck pounds out a shuddering, full-body-mule-kick cough. “It’s pretty simple,” he says, the red in his face subsiding after a sip of Coke. “If people don’t go see it, I’m fucked.”

Ben Affleck says he wanted to direct Gone Baby Gone because the film was set in a grimy neighborhood in blue-collar South Boston—his vestigial homeland.

“I guess I just thought, I’ve seen it done enough,” he says of directing. “I’ve been on sets enough. I’m a writer. An amateur photographer. An actor.” He pauses, realizing he’s made the province of Coppola and Scorsese sound like finger painting. “I guess I just hoped the sum of those parts would come together enough that I’d be able to do it.”

A cynic might speculate that Ben Affleck wanted to direct Gone Baby Gone because he was trying to save a career that’s been foundering for almost a decade. That cynic would be pretty much right. Nearly ten years ago, Affleck and Matt Damon—his best friend since Little League, the one whose face is right now grimacing from the side of every other bus chugging down Ocean Boulevard, a couple hundred yards from where Affleck sits—stood triumphant and awkward on the stage at the Shrine Auditorium, accepting an Academy Award for writing Good Will Hunting. Two yokels from Boston, flanked by their moms, slingshotting themselves into the insular Death Star of A-list Hollywood. The invincibility imparted by that little gold statue is now gone. The Oscar in Affleck’s possession is a hollow totem that holds about the same promise as the most likely to succeed banner over a high-school-yearbook photo. Affleck has been pilloried on TV shows from Will & Grace to South Park. Even Weird Al felt bold enough to take shots at him. Truth is, a fair encapsulation of Affleck’s current standing in the eyes of many moviegoers lies on the shelf at your local video store: A movie called Man About Town. A movie that went straight to video in February.

It’s not that Affleck isn’t recognizable anymore. In person he looks exactly like the furrow-browed asteroid-wrangler/fighter pilot/superhero of the multiplex that’s been paying his bills for the last few years. Not shorter. Not balder. Not surgically God-proofed. Just . . . well . . . it looks like he was pressed and sprung from some Ben Affleck factory. Right down to the green T-shirt printed with the word shamrocks and the white tennis shoes with the Boston Red Sox logo sewn into the sides. Recognizability isn’t Affleck’s problem. Credibility is Affleck’s problem. And with the Oscar buzz about his performance as fifties television actor George Reeves in 2006’s Hollywoodland having failed to deliver a Ben Affleck renaissance—plus a wife and kid to feed—it’s time to reevaluate his future. No blinking.

To his credit, Affleck wasn’t fucking around when he clambered into the director’s chair. He even dog-and-pony-showed Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris into working for him.

“I got a really nice e-mail from him saying how much he wanted me to do it,” says Harris, who plays a cop with dirt on his badge. “You could tell immediately how important the film was to him. Not just personally, but careerwise. That’s part of the reason I was drawn to it. I like people who have something at stake when they work.”

As for casting his brother, Casey, Affleck refuses to even acknowledge the nepotism factor: “He was the obvious choice by far. I think he’s a really good actor, but he also had the benefit of people not being as aware of him. Other actors, you have this expectation of what they’ll do. But Casey? He could surprise you.”

It also helped that Ben could actually “direct” his little brother—more so than he could have any of his peers. And it’s always nice to have a blood-related whipping boy during migraine-spawning, pressure-jacked situations . . . like directing your first movie.

“We talked about many, many things,” says Casey, whose laissez-faire body of work has largely consisted of sporadic indie fare and a few one-liners in the Ocean’s franchise. “And we disagreed about most. In the end, I just said ‘Yes.’”

For such a devoted and, apparently, fiendishly talented poker player—he once won $356,400 at the California State Poker Championship—Affleck has a surprisingly obvious tell. When self-reflection gets uncomfortable, he unbuckles his chunky silver watch, slides it from his wrist, and begins to fiddle with the clasp. The clicking sound makes awkward silences more awkward.

“It was probably bad for my career,” he says, unlatching the timepiece, pulling it over his hand, and gripping it between his fingers. He’s talking about the Bennifer years (2002–2004).

“What happens is this sort of bleed-over from the tabloids across your movie work. You go to a movie, you only go once. But the tabloids and Internet are everywhere. You can really subsume the public image of somebody. I ended up in an unfortunate crosshair position where I was in a relationship and [the media] mostly lied and inflated a bunch of salacious stuff for the sake of selling magazines. And I paid a certain price for that. Then, in concert with some movies that didn’t work . . .”

By his own design, you won’t see Ben Affleck’s name all over the promotional push for Gone Baby Gone. If you see the trailer, in fact, you’ll notice that it’s nowhere to be found. He won’t allow the word Affleck to be used as a marketing hook unless it refers to Casey. This isn’t because he’s not proud of the work.

The words are bold and full of the kind of bravado a man needs to sell his chance for salvation. But like Harris said, Affleck has a lot at stake. He’s not going to let the kryptonite effect he’s developed over the last few years jeopardize it. That means keeping his name out of the Gone Baby Gone glare—at least until he sees how it’s received.

“I feel like this film is a linchpin for my life,” Affleck says. “My career. I have a lot riding on it. I want [the film] to work. Badly. I mean, a shitty movie comes out on 2,800 screens? I’ve been there and it’s embarrassing.”

So as uncomfortable—maybe even flat-out immunity compromising—as this buildup to Ben Affleck’s Make-or-Break Moment (take 10) has been, the first-time director seems ready to ride it out.

“That’s why there’s something really great about directing—about having authorship over something,” Affleck says. “If you don’t like this movie, I’m the guy to see. I’m the guy to criticize. I take some measure of comfort in that. It’s fair, at least.”