Interview: Why Ben Affleck’s new film is stranger than fiction

The plot centres on a daring Iranian rescue by CIA agents disguised as a film crew. But, 
as Ben Affleck tells Alistair Harkness, the biggest twist is that his new film is a true story

The plot centres on a daring Iranian rescue by CIA agents disguised as a film crew. But, 
as Ben Affleck tells Alistair Harkness, the biggest twist is that his new film is a true story

THERE are many perks to being a movie star, but Ben ­Affleck is clear about the most useful one. “Probably the smartest thing I ever did was use my acting career as a free film school,” says the 40-year-old writer/director/actor/producer. “They can’t kick you off the set and you can ask a lot of questions, so that’s what I did.”

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In London to promote his third feature, Argo, he’s not down on acting. On the contrary, he’s just finished working with Terrence Malick on his new film To The Wonder (“He’s not making movies for anyone but himself and there’s a lot of courage in that”), and he also takes the lead in Argo, joking that the actor in him couldn’t resist the part and “since I was sleeping with the director, I got it”.

But having always wanted to be a director – despite making “some very bad student films” in his youth (his 1993 opus I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her On A Meat Hook, And Now I Have A Three-Picture Deal At Disney is readily available online if you don’t want to take him at his word) – he has, over the past six years, put his on-set experiences to good use to ­become one of Hollywood’s most ­respected film-makers, with ­acclaimed thrillers Gone Baby Gone, The Town and now Argo harking back to the smart, adult-oriented studio films of the 70s.

Indeed, so significant has his ­creative regeneration been that while his rapid ascent to the A-list in the late 90s/early 2000s – along with the attendant tabloid scrutiny and subsequent bad film choices that followed – made it easy to forget that he broke through as the Oscar-winning co-writer of Good Will Hunting, these days it’s the notoriety that seems like a distant memory.

Such a surprising and clandestine career reinvention seems strangely appropriate, though, given that Argo focuses on a hitherto little known true story in which Hollywood’s gift for smoke-and-mirrors creativity is used as a force for good. Set during the Iranian hostage crisis, it revolves around CIA “exfiltration” agent Tony Mendez (Affleck) and his efforts to safely extract six State Department employees who managed to escape the American Embassy while revolutionaries loyal to the Ayatollah Khomeini were seizing it in November 1979.

While their colleagues ended up being held hostage for 444 days with the eyes of the world upon them, they found themselves trapped in Tehran at a time when their nationality carried the risk of execution. That’s where Mendez came in. Tapping some friends in Hollywood (most prominently Planet Of The Apes’ Academy Award-winning make-up artist John Chambers), he created an elaborate cover story to get them out: they would pretend to be a Canadian film crew scouting locations for a new science-fiction film called Argo.

Affleck was seven when the crisis was unfolding. “I remember practically nothing about it,” he says. “I remember [Ted] Kennedy’s primary challenge against Carter and I remember the Star Wars action figures I played with. I was more into the Star Wars stuff.”

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As it happens, that “stuff” had a place in the story. To make the CIA cover story credible, Mendez had to make the production seem credible, so he and Chambers (who is played in the film by John Goodman) found a genuine script for an abandoned science-fiction project called Lord Of Light that an aspiring producer by the name of Barry Geller fancied as the next Star Wars, even commissioning legendary comic book artist Jack Kirby (co-creator of The X-Men) to do concept drawings for both the film and a possible theme park spin-off. Re-titling the script Argo – after the ship in Jason And The Argonauts – Mendez and Chambers quickly set about creating a fake production company and used the entertainment press to sell the lie to the public.

Given that Hollywood rarely gets a good rap when it comes to tackling real-life political incidents, it’s a wonder a film in which the movie industry gets to be the hero has taken so long to come out. “Well, basically it was classified until 1997,” says Affleck. “The CIA had a sort of 50-year jubilee thing [to mark the birth of the Agency] and they announced the 50 most important agents, among them Tony Mendez, and they declassified a lot of material too.”

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With the CIA not in the habit of ­issuing press releases, though, it took another decade, and an in-depth article for Wired magazine by journalist Joshuah Bearman, for the story to ­really ­register in Hollywood. “[That article] was much sought after by Hollywood folks,” says Affleck, “mainly for the one-line pitch: CIA uses the cover of a Hollywood movie to rescue hostages.”

Among those “Hollywood folks” were George Clooney and his producing partner Grant Heslov, who bought the rights to Bearman’s article, commissioned a script and eventually sent it to Affleck after The Town came out.

“I was actually stunned by how good it was. It was a drama, it was a thriller, it was a comedy and it was a true story, so I called George right away and said: ‘I want to do this. Here’s how I would do this,’ and we talked for a couple of hours. I think he said yes just to get me off the phone.”

Affleck, who studied Middle Eastern Affairs in college, knows the film is coming out at a sensitive time politically. The recent, tragic storming of the American embassy in Benghazi and the scenes of anti-American protesters in Cairo have eerie parallels with the events depicted at the start of the film.

“There is a part of these images that suggests, in a very sad way that history is in fact repeating itself,” says Affleck ­cautiously, “but I think it’s a mistake to make too many determinations about that because events are still unfolding.”

He hopes people don’t view Argo as any kind of political statement on the situation, then or now. It’s one of the reasons he didn’t visit Iran to research the film (the State Department told him he could go, but he risked his presence being misinterpreted as an endorsement of the regime and felt that risked distracting from the film). It’s also why he added a brief prologue that put the story in historical context. “I’m not trying to lead the audience to any particular kind of judgment,” he elaborates. “I’m simply trying to tell the story and allow the audience to draw their own conclusions. I think that’s probably more ethically responsible.”

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It’s probably best not to read much into his inclusion over the end credits of an audio interview he conducted with Jimmy Carter either. Carter’s re-election campaign was severely damaged by the ongoing crisis, but, says Affleck, “the film isn’t a referendum on the Carter administration. I just thought there was something powerful about having the voice of the president of the United States at the time telling the audience that this was in fact something that really happened.”

Given all this, it’s little wonder that ­Affleck considers Argo his riskiest film to date, although he reckons that trying to make any movie is risky.

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“The potential for failure is great and if you fail, you fail in front of everyone,” he says. He remembers being terrified the whole way through making Gone Baby Gone. “I made a lot of mistakes – and I learned a lot and fortunately I got another crack at it. And now I love it. It’s just one of those things that’s like jumping off a diving board. It’s scary, but you just have to do it.”

Argo is on general release from 7 November.

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