Ben Affleck came within two weeks of shooting his own movie before deciding to kill it.

The actor-director, who both directs and stars in the upcoming Netflix crime thriller Animals, told Entertainment Weekly that the project fell apart almost by accident. Someone on his team mentioned that Spike Lee and Denzel Washington were making a film about a kidnapping too, and Affleck's stomach dropped.

"We get very close to shooting, and then somebody said to me, 'Hey, you know, there's this other movie that Spike and Denzel are doing that's about a kidnapping,'" Affleck said. "And I was like, 'Oh, s — .'"

That other film is Highest 2 Lowest, Lee's take on Akira Kurosawa's High and Low. Affleck admitted he'd never actually seen the Kurosawa original. Didn't matter. He didn't want Animals read as a knockoff of something else in the pipeline, and he wasn't in the mood for the comparisons that would follow.

"I've already been in one of the two asteroid movies," he joked, referencing his own history of getting caught in a pile-up of similar releases.

So he walked. "We were two weeks from shooting, and I was like, 'We're not doing it,'" he said. "It's hard enough to make a good movie. You don't need those kinds of headwinds."

He called the decision painful, not procedural. Affleck said he'd genuinely gotten invested in telling a story set in Los Angeles, a city he realised he's now lived in longer than Boston, the place he's built his whole public identity around.

A couple of months on, the itch came back. "I was like, 'God, this is really sticking with me, and I actually wanna do this,'" he said. So Animals got resurrected. But by then his original leading man, Matt Damon, had booked out shooting a low-budget project with Christopher Nolan and wasn't available.

Affleck stepped into the lead role himself, playing a Los Angeles mayoral candidate whose son gets kidnapped. That left one problem: Jennifer Garner, his ex-wife, was still attached as co-star, and neither of them wanted the audience bringing their divorce into the theatre with them.

"I talked to Jen, and she was like, 'We don't wanna do that. You just get baggage,'" Affleck said. He was clear there's no bad blood. "I would love to work with her, frankly. She's fabulous, and we're really good friends... I still would wanna work with her in the future." Kerry Washington took the role instead.

Animals lands on Netflix on October 9. Whether it draws the Highest 2 Lowest comparisons Affleck was dodging in the first place is now out of his hands.