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PREMIERE: The movie sort of turns on this question of whether George Reeves took his own life or was perhaps murdered. After spending so much time in his shoes, do you have a theory about what really happened?

BEN AFFLECK: What I've come to believe, I can't be sure, but I've investigated it pretty thoroughly, from the forensic detail of the police reports to just a character analysis, and ultimately I just kind of felt the details of whether he pulled the trigger or whether it was an argument with [Reeves' fiancée Lenore Lemmon] or any of this stuff, what matters is where he found himself at this point in his life. Because there's no controversy about that. It was a really unhappy place and it was a really frustrated, broken place, particularly in light of where he could have been. I think it's a movie about people who are not able to be happy in what they have. I think most people's reaction to George is "Why was he so unhappy?" He was great at what he did, and the kids loved him. It didn't all have to be cause for humiliation. But unfortunately, that's just how he took it.

Knowing what you know about him, if you could go back and meet Reeves, what advice would you give him?

If I could go back, I would try to counsel him to be more patient. I think his weakness was that he wanted the fame a little bit more than he should have, and so he made a lot of bad choices just trying to achieve that.

A lot of people are calling this a comeback for you. Do you see it that way?

I think it's vaguely flattering, but not entirely somehow. I hadn't done a movie in two years in a conscious effort to just be away from everything, mostly paparazzi and the tabloid culture, with the idea if you just stop, maybe it will go away a little bit. I also made an effort to just kind of really examine what kind of actor I really want to be, and what kind of career I want to have. I was lucky that [Hollywoodland] was the first movie that I did after that, because I really like [it] and it would have been just as easy for it not to have worked. So in its simplest sense, I take it that that's a sort of way of saying like, 'Well, the guy's last movie wasn't very good, but this movie seems to be.' So I don't know if it's a comeback. But I guess it's an improvement.