Following the success of Gone Baby Gone and The Town Ben Affleck returns to the director’s chair for the thrilling true life tale of a CIA plot to free six US embassy staff from Tehran in the 1979 Iran Hostage Crisis.
The story of Tony Mendez and the fake Hollywood film cooked up to provide cover for the CIA team to enter Iran is brought to the screen in riveting fashion. You can see the roots of Affleck’s handling of the tension inherent in the film’s narrative in The Town, with the dangerous location scouting trip to a bustling bazaar in Tehran sitting well alongside the claustrophobic labyrinth of the Charlestown streets.
Affleck also assembled a fine cast with John Goodman and Bryan Cranston in particular doing some great work as the Hollywood make-up artist John Chambers and Mendez’s CIA supervisor Jack O’Donnell respectively. Our interview with the two actors will be up on the site tomorrow but today we have Affleck talking about moving out of Boston ad acclimatising the cast with the period and the political turbulence of the time.
Here’s the man himself talking with our good friend James Kleinmann about Argo,
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