“I do love him, and I’m friends with him, and I adore him, but he’ll f*cking lie if he thinks it will get a reaction.” — Ben Affleck

Affleck made the remark on an Oct. 12 appearance on the Happy, Sad, Confused podcast, according to E! News, where host Josh Horowitz brought up David Fincher’s claim that a Yankees hat held up Gone Girl’s production for four days. Affleck laughed off the four-day story and answered with those words about his friend and director.

The way Affleck tells it, the hat disagreement lasted about 20 minutes, not days, and Fincher later turned it into a much bigger tale on the film’s DVD commentary. The problem was an airport scene in the 2014 thriller. Affleck’s character, Nick Dunne, needed to conceal his identity with a cap, and Fincher wanted the New York Yankees logo.

A lifelong Boston Red Sox fan, Affleck figured wearing it would give people something to hold over him indefinitely. They agreed on a New York Mets cap, the one Nick wears in the finished movie. Affleck called that compromise “very Switzerland.”

As for Fincher’s account, Affleck put it down to the director’s “dark sense of humor” and desire to make him suffer. “The truth is, I don’t think anyone had ever said no to him about anything,” Affleck said.

Affleck also joked that agreeing to the film’s shower scene, which includes a glimpse of full-frontal nudity, hadn’t taken him four days either. His response to that scene was: “Oh f*ck it, alright.”

That answer is why the line has stuck. It reads as affection and exasperation at once, the kind of thing you only say about someone you have worked closely with and still count as a friend.