TORONTO—Ben Affleck is from Boston. You probably knew that, but given that his art keeps bringing him home, it becomes increasingly clear with each passing movie. He shared an Oscar with fellow Bostonian Matt Damon for cowriting the Boston-set Good Will Hunting, and he followed up with his directing debut, the grim Boston-set drama Gone Baby Gone, starring his brother Casey. His second film as a director is also set in Beantown. The Town premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and will open across North America on Friday (September 17).

Affleck admits that he may have run out of stories set in Boston. “I don’t know that I have any Boston-related stories left in mind for the future,” he says in a Toronto hotel room. “I am not looking specifically to have a career directing stories about Boston. I just happened to find two stories about Boston, and being from there helped me a bit.”

The Town stars Affleck as a bank robber named Doug MacRay. Things don’t go according to plan on a job, and he and his crew have to take a hostage. Worried that his freed captive, Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall), might know too much, MacRay decides to shadow her and eventually throw a scare into her. That changes when he falls in love. The change in plans also affects the way his best friend and colleague, James Coughlin (Jeremy Renner), looks at him and the way the FBI looks at Claire.

Affleck’s loyalty to his hometown doesn’t end with making movies about Boston; it also includes authenticity. Although it seems that most Bostonian actors have made a movie there (both Mark Wahlberg and Matt Damon were in The Departed), inevitably you need to hire actors from elsewhere and teach them how to say “pahk the cah”. Affleck says he didn’t leave much to chance when he went looking for his cast.

“The accents are a big issue, because if you don’t do them well they can really upend your movie,” he says. “You have to hire good actors to do it. I sent Renner a lot of recordings, but it was more about the people you stand next to, so I put the right people around him. It is not just vowels and diphthongs. It is so many things, and people in Boston are really hard on that kind of thing [inauthentic accents].”

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter where you set a crime movie; you still have to find ways of separating it from the hundreds of films in the genre that have come before it. It would be even more difficult if you had an iconic genre film in mind when you decided to adapt a novel. Affleck says that although he had the bank-robbery classic Heat in the back of his mind, he was determined to bring enough twists to the table that the audience wouldn’t feel a sense of déjí  vu.

“Heat was a huge influence and looms large over this film,” he says. “We had to work hard to not be too close to Heat, actually. But I also thought The Bank Job was a great movie, and The Friends of Eddie Coyle was a big inspiration. The Italian film Gomorrah was a movie I watched a bunch. We were walking in the footsteps of films ranging from the great Warner Bros. gangster movies to Italian gangster films to Michael Mann gangster movies. The fact is, there are a lot of movies in this genre, which points to the fact that it is kind of tricky to make these films. You don’t change the genre and you retell these things over and over. So the danger is the audience will feel it is a little predictable. But good movies stand as reminders that even with doing the same genre conventions you can do something special.”