Ben Affleck's 'Live By Night' Finally Starts Filming

After Ben Affleck's Argo won the Oscar for Best Picture back in early 2013, he quickly set his next directorial effort to be Live By Night, an adaptation of Dennis Lehane's novel of the same name.

Live By Night tells the story of Joe Coughlin, the son of a Boston police captain who - during the 1920s - sets his sights on moving up the organized crime ladder, taking him from Boston, to Florida, to Cuba.

Warner Bros. (who Affleck has worked with since 2010's The Town), originally set a December 25th, 2015 release date for the film, but then, things began to change.

Affleck was offered the lead role in David Fincher's Gone Girl (which released last year), and of course, he accepted the role of Bruce Wayne/Batman in next year's Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.

These developments created a logjam in the actor/writer/director's schedule, pushing back Live By Night to October 7, 2016, then again to an unknown 2017 date.

Well finally, Affleck has gotten back behind the camera and took to social media two days ago to officially announce that production has begun on the film, posting an image of the first shot on camera.

Not only is Affleck directing the project, but he's also playing the lead role of Joe Coughlin, as well as having written the film's screenplay.

Live By Night also stars Elle Fanning, Zoe Saldana, Chris Cooper, Sienna Miller and Chris Messina.

The full synopsis of the novel is listed below. We'll keep you posted on more regarding this project.

Boston, 1926. The ’20s are roaring. Liquor is flowing, bullets are flying, and one man sets out to make his mark on the world.

Prohibition has given rise to an endless network of underground distilleries, speakeasies, gangsters, and corrupt cops. Joe Coughlin, the youngest son of a prominent Boston police captain, has long since turned his back on his strict and proper upbringing. Now having graduated from a childhood of petty theft to a career in the pay of the city’s most fearsome mobsters, Joe enjoys the spoils, thrills, and notoriety of being an outlaw.

But life on the dark side carries a heavy price. In a time when ruthless men of ambition, armed with cash, illegal booze, and guns, battle for control, no one—neither family nor friend, enemy nor lover—can be trusted. Beyond money and power, even the threat of prison, one fate seems most likely for men like Joe: an early death. But until that day, he and his friends are determined to live life to the hilt. 

Joe embarks on a dizzying journey up the ladder of organized crime that takes him from the flash of Jazz Age Boston to the sensual shimmer of Tampa’s Latin Quarter to the sizzling streets of Cuba. Live by Night is a riveting epic layered with a diverse cast of loyal friends and callous enemies, tough rumrunners and sultry femmes fatales, Bible-quoting evangelists and cruel Klansmen, all battling for survival and their piece of the American dream. At once a sweeping love story and a compelling saga of revenge, it is a spellbinding tour de force of betrayal and redemption, music and murder, that brings fully to life a bygone era when sin was cause for celebration and vice was a national virtue.

Source: Twitter - Ben Affleck