In 2009, Iranian-born Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari was back in Iran covering the countries supposedly democratic election for Newsweek. Seemingly out of nowhere, Bahari was snatched up by local authorities and held in prison for 118 days, in large part due to a comedic interview he gave for a video piece for “The Daily Show,” in which he jokingly admitted to being a spy. I guess the administration in Iran at the time didn’t get the humor. After his release, Bahari came on “The Daily Show” to discuss the ordeal, which he eventually chronicled in his memoir “Then They Came for Me.”
“The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart immediately wanted to turn this story into a film, and after failing to find another person to take a crack at the screenplay, he wrote it himself to later direct. Gael Garcia Bernal masterfully plays Bahari who goes from defiant prisoner being brutally interrogated to man who will do or say anything to get out alive and home to his very pregnant wife. It’s a fascinating story that, shockingly enough, Iran’s State TV has accused of being funded by Zionists (they also claim Stewart is working with the CIA).
I sat down recently in Chicago with Stewart and Bahari for a conversation that could have gone on for an hour, at least. Since the story of how the film came to be has been well documented (including by me, above), I wanted to focus more on the actual production and choices made in the writing and directing by Stewart, and we cover a great deal of interesting ground. Please enjoy my talk with Jon Stewart and Maziar Bahari…
Capone: After 15-16 years of doing “The Daily Show,” writing and performing, was there ever a point that you realized that none of that was going to help you in terms of making your first film?
Jon Stewart: [laughs] Right. To be perfectly honest, I think it did. I think it would have been much harder to get the project off the ground had I not had that platform. I think it was, throughout the process, a great advantage. And even within the actual mechanics of production, it’s not so alien to what we do on a daily basis. Obviously it’s not as disposable as the egg salad that we make every day, but in terms of the process of collaboration of narrative, of form. It’s not as if Mazier approached me and said, “Let’s make a Christmas album of music.” That would have been probably tougher to pull off. Although I play a mean trumpet, and I think you could probably join in on percussion.
Capone: What I imagine happens on the TV show, is that if something isn’t working, you can abandon it and move on to something else. But with this story, you have to stick to certain events. Is there still the freedom to try something different if one approach isn’t working?
JS: My brother, it is exactly that. You have to be willing to jettison something that is not working. You have to be willing to improvise. You have to be willing to have a clarity of vision, but a flexibility of process. There are certainly a lot of things that we could design intellectually, that we could craft on paper, but on its feet, it becomes a very different animal as you see the actors try and inhabit it, as you see the set, all those issues impact whether or not it’s gelling or becoming something. And in that moment, you have to be willing to abandon what you thought was the perfect scenario for this when it’s not working and shift gears and improvise and try something else.
Capone: Can you give an example of something that ended up completely different than where you had originally envisioned it?
Maziar Bahari: The dance sequence.
JS: The dance sequence.
Capone: In the prison?
JS: Yeah. Originally I had envisioned that as a cocktail party with all the, you know...
MB: Dream characters.
JS: Yeah. Maziar had inhabited all these characters, all these memories, all these things that helped sustain him. It was to be a celebration among all of them.
MB: Anton Chekhov, Pauly Shore…
JS: Right, all that he had been in his life. His sister, his father. But apparently convincing a lot of these individuals to fly to Jordan for a day in the middle of Ramadan turned out to be slightly more daunting than we’d expected. So within that, it’s just a question of “Okay, how do I do this?” And ultimately, it ended up being a much more elegant and simple way of expressing the emotion that we wanted to express. So in those moments, going up against the obstacles and the parameters, often times you end up with something far more effective than what you thought you were going to intellectually.
Capone: I imagine Leonard Cohen was on that list of party guests?
JS: Dude, you have no idea how many times I called him and was like, “But it’s just in Eastern Europe, I’m telling you. We’ll drive there.”
Capone: What was the nature of your collaboration?
JS: Maziar was there the whole time.
MB: Basically, what happened is that when I came out of prison, I went on “The Daily Show.” In January of 2010, I met with Jon, and we talked about doing the film. I had just started writing the book. I had the Newsweek article already out. We looked for different writers, directors—I approached some and Jon approached many of them. We did not want to go with any writer or director; it was just Oscar-winning ones [laughs].
JS: We had a pretty good list going.
MB: Someone was working on James Bond; someone was directing his first film. So it was a very glacial process, let’s say. And after the book came out in 2011, we were talking and meeting every month and talking about things, about Iran, about family, and all that. So in 2012, Jon said “Fuck it. I’m going to write it.” And he was not thinking about directing at that time either. So, after I guess six months or so, directing came organically from that process. So he was sending me drafts and was commenting on the draft, and when the filming started in Jordan, I went on the set. So it was a very close collaboration. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here promoting the film [laughs].
JS: I wouldn’t be here, because it would have sucked.
[Everyone laughs]
JS: His input is what grounds it, entirely.
Capone: Talk about meeting Gael for the first time, and what were some of the things that he wanted to know from you and trying to capture about you.
MB: Well, I think Gael was a really inspired choice by Jon. He’s not only a very good actor, he’s been amazing in AMORES PERROS, Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN, MOTORCYCLE DIARIES, but also he’s a very political person. He’s doing documentaries, he has this festival, and he’s aware of the situation in Iran. So when we met, he knew many things, and he had read my book so he asked me questions, we had a few dinners. We were in the same hotel, we had breakfast, lunch, dinner. So we were hanging out. Throughout the process, of course, I was on the set, and we were talking as well.
Capone: There’s a real visual beauty to the film. You counter these very sparse scenes in the cell or in the interrogation room, with these moments that are just visually gorgeous—the scenes where he is reaching for the sunlight. Was it important for you, because that’s the hope you’re giving us even before his character gets tangible hope. Talk about working with your cinematographer on developing that visual.
JS: Bobby [Bukowski] is phenomenal and was under conditions that I think he probably hadn’t faced since he was in film school. He’s out there adjusting the lights. We wanted to make very clear that once we got into the prison, it had to be very stark and cold. So the colors are all in that blue and grey, sort of steely, it’s bureaucratic, it’s cold, it’s antiseptic. That’s the general tone. There’s no warmth. If you notice in the early scenes, it’s all browns and yellows and greens. It’s very warm, it’s very rich, it’s very vital. And so, we wanted to play very much with the idea of light. At his darkest moment when he is finally confronted with the mock execution, it’s shot so that the only light source comes from his wife’s image. So you see when he’s outside, he’s trying to find light, finding sun. And he has 20 minutes before it disappears over his head. Those were the types of ascetics that we wanted to play as the subtext of it all, and allow that to infuse the film with something that the audience could absorb and have a visceral experience with it without over-intellectualizing it and telling them, “I need light!” It’s just trying to create those palates and atmospheres so that it becomes part of the narrative.
Capone: The other thing that you’ve infused this film with is humor, although strangely enough, I think that just about any director tackling this story might have found humor in the same places that you did.
JS: That’s really hewing to the book. One of the things that was most compelling to me about the book was Maziar’s ability to retain that sense of the absurd. To have the ability to observe the ridiculous things around him and still register them for what they are, which is farce.
MB: I don’t think that Jon would be interested in the project to start with if I was like silently, stoically sitting there.
[Stewart laughs]
MB: Processing everything internally, going through the emotion, and talking really heavily about my philosophical, torturous, existential thoughts and semiotics of torture.
JS: Yes, yes. Not that we don’t have those discussions, but within that.
Capone: I’ll never forget the moment sitting in a room full of critics watching the scene where Gael talking about massages, because every one in the room was figuring out what was going on at a different time, and this slow, rolling laughter just took over the room, and you just let that scene go and go. What a great moment that must have been.
MB: That is the culmination of this internal battle between the prisoner and the interrogator, and the physical level from outside the torture, of course. He’s bigger, he’s stronger, he’s in power. And the prisoner, he has a blindfold on and is smaller. But when you’re thinking about the cultural background and the imagination, it’s the prisoner who has the upper hand. He can basically put the torturer through this torture, really, through these sexual stories and imagination, which the torturer does not have.
Capone: It’s the first moment when you had the power. The other great moment—and tell me if this is more or less how it happened—it seems like throughout this ordeal that, of all the lies that they told you, the one that you might have believed was that no one was looking for you. And that moment where the one guard mentions Hillary Clinton, that’s the most joyous moment I could think of.
MB: That’s exactly what happened.
Capone: You realize that not only are people looking for you, but that everybody is looking for you. Talk about just that moment, because you captured it beautifully.
MB: One of the reasons that they put you into solitary confinement is to disorient you, because they are depriving you of all your senses. You cannot see anything except the walls around you. You cannot hear anything because the walls are so thick. You cannot smell anything. These are like modern prisons. You don’t smell bad things, you don’t smell good things, you don’t smell anything. Everything is clean. You can not taste anything. Whatever you touch is just the stone, so you are deprived of all your senses, and the information that you get is through your interrogator. And sometimes when they put you into solitary confinement without any windows, then you don’t know even if it’s day, if it’s night.
JS: They used to change his room. They’d give him smaller rooms, slightly bigger rooms. They used to move him around.
MB: Just to disorient you in order to be able to control you. And you don’t have any watches. So because of that you become delusional. As you see in the film, you become suicidal as well. And when the guards, mistakenly I’m sure, he mentioned the name of Hilary Clinton, because I had just become friendly with him through really dirty jokes, I realized that if the Secretary of State of the United States is talking about me, it means that there is a campaign because I’m not American, because it usually does not happen for non-Americans. So that’s exactly like what happened.
Capone: It’s a perfect moment, actually.
MB: Hillary Clinton for 2016!
Capone: There you go. You shot this in Jordan, even though a lot of the film is shot in these rooms that could have been built in a parking lot at Walmart. But I imagine that being away from your comfort zone on the East Coast might have helped you to focus a little more.
JS: That’s quite possible. Well truth be told, it was a pragmatic choice more than it was an ascetic choice. It really was a question of, “Do you know how much money it’s going to cost you to build this in New York and shoot it here?” And you don’t qualify for the tax break if you don’t shoot more than 80 percent there, and you have to do post there. So it really was a question of financially, logistically, and everything else. We had to find one location that could encompass all of the various aspects that we needed to do. And also to bring a surrounding sense of authentic atmosphere. Maziar still had some friends who are in Iran, who are in the government, who filmed some things inside, who gave us the POV for the driving scene.
MB: Those are all from Iran.
JS: Those are all from Iran.
Capone: I love that a big chunk of this film is essentially a documentary, because you’re using footage--
JS: Maziar’s footage.
Capone: His footage, as well as the news reports on the election in particular. When you were putting those things together and working on the edit, were you saying, “This is more what I’m used to.”
JS: Yes. Obviously, that’s the part that I know how to do in my sleep.
Capone: Were there aspects to directing that you found unusually challenging that you had not anticipated during the process.
JS: Obviously, wearing a beret I wasn’t used to. I’m more of a baseball hat man, but as a director, though, you want to project intelligence. Honestly, I trusted in the people that were around me, and I trusted in the people that I hired. I hired them for a reason. I never settled for somebody just because we had to get it done. So I think for me, my comfort was in knowing that the people that I had hired were really talented, really dedicated, and really ready. And then it just becomes about the collaboration. Everybody working towards a common cause. When you get into that, then it’s not that different of a process than what we do every day. That’s what helped me feel more comfortable even though I was in less comfortable circumstances.
Capone: I read somewhere that you had floated the script to other directors.
JS: Right. Anybody that had come on the show, I’d throw it in their hands.
Capone: Is that really what it came down to?
JS: It really did.
Capone: Was there anyone who was particularly helpful?
JS: Well, Kathryn Bigelow gave incredibly good, actual logistical suggestions, because she’d filmed there twice.
Capone: Logistical in terms of where you shot?
JS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So she was mechanically very helpful as far as down to the names of people that we could call given certain requirements that we had for props and things like that, or set building.
MB: J.J. Abrams?
JS: J.J. and Ron Howard. Those guys. Paul [Thomas] Anderson. They gave me the sense of the viability of it. I wanted to send it to people that I really like and respect, but who do a different variety of things. Not so much for notes, because, look, they’re busy. But for that sense that they can look at it and go, “Look, man. I’ve done this for awhile. Why don’t you just turn this into an off-Broadway play? Do it like ‘Love Letters.’ It’ll run for years. Get Blythe Danner.”
Capone: That was Nathan Lane’s advice.
JS: [laughs] Right. But for the most part, it was to get confident in the viability of it.
Capone: Once you had an assembly cut, did you show it to other directors?
MB: Yeah. Some people who came on the show. I remember Robin Williams saw the rough cut. He liked it.
JS: Friends of mine would come by the show, so I showed it to Robin and Billy [Crystal] and some other people that had been there.
MB: What about Pauly Shore?
JS: He never came by. He hasn’t seen it yet. He will.
MB: He probably wants to read the book first.
[Everybody laughs]
Capone: Has it been strange doing a press tour for this, being on the other side of the desk as it were?
JS: The whole experience has been strange in that regard. And I was just realizing this, I was talking to someone about this yesterday, that my whole career has been standing with people staring at me. I’m on stage in a stand-up scenario; I’m on set of a talk show format. So seeing the film as part of the audience is the first time I think I’ve ever seen work that I’ve done and created from the audience perspective, as a part of them, as a third-person experience as opposed to a first-person experience. You feel subversive in a way. You’re just sitting there, and you want to every now and again lean over to someone and say [whispers], “I did that.”
Capone: I’d do that every five seconds if I’d made this film.
JS: You know what I mean? It’s hard not to tug on someone’s shirt and go, “That’s a pretty nice shot, wasn’t it? You like that, don’t ya?”
MB: “My shot!”
Capone: Gentlemen, thank you so much.
JS: Our pleasure. Thank you. Really nice to meet you.
