Talking ROSEWATER With Jon Stewart and Maziar Bahari

In my review of Jon Stewart's Rosewater, I expressed my appreciation for the audacity of the film even if I thought it fell a bit short of achieving something truly spectacular. Part of that disappointment came from my appreciation forthe rich, complex story of Maziar Bahari, a possibly impossible task to translate all the nuance and surrealism of the tale intact for a general audience.

As I wrote, "Stewart's passion for the project comes out in almost every frame of film. While not quite the masterpiece I was perhaps unfairly hoping for, this directorial debut from one of the great comedic minds of this era is still something well worth seeking out, despite it not being the bleak, hard-hitting and darkly comic work I was hoping for from this team."

My mild reticence about the final product did nothing to diminish my pleasure of chatting with Stewart and Bahari while they were in Toronto to play their film to TIFF audiences back in September. The two were eloquent about the project, and it's clear the easy rapport between the two underscores their long collaboration on this story.

We began by discussing the tone of the film, and how the balance was struck by both writer and filmmaker.

This is an incredible story that has not only tragic elements but also surreal elements. In developing the script and deciding how to tell to an audience that might not know your story, could you talk about the challenge of getting the tone right?

Jon Stewart: So much of the way that Maziar reclaimed his humanity under this circumstance was to take what is uniquely sort of human, and that is humor and absurdity, and to be able to recognize that and to be able to draw on his cultural background and his family background.

The whole idea of solitary [confinement] is to deprive you of your senses, so you have to manufacture that to some extent. Trying to bring in all of those elements to show the fullness of the experience was a lot of the challenge, to not turn absurdity into farce and to not diminish his experience by leaning too heavily on that.

Let alone leaning on satire.

JS: Correct. Because it's not satirical.

MB: Speaking of the tone, the book is a reflection of reality, the film is a translation of the book and the book is a reflection of the reality.

The reality of the authoritarian regime, of the dictatorial regime, is that they are funny. Whenever you think that you can control everyone, you can control everyone for ever and you can create the perfect society, that's a delusion and that's a funny delusion. You have to have half a brain to look at it that way, that people are imperfect people and you cannot create a perfect society. that is funny and that itself lends itself to satire.

That's why Jon is successful with the young people because young people don't have the dogmas that the older generation has. He looks at the situation in a real way. Jon, Colbert, John Oliver - they look at the situation in a real way. It's not only because it's not only government, it can be FIFA that John Oliver was talking about or it can be Fox News that Jon keeps on criticizing. All these regimes, they think that they can create a perfect society.

JS: Or their own reality.

MB: Or their own reality. And they can fool people forever. And that is funny.

All while believing that New Jersey is paradise.

MB: And New Jersey is paradise.

JS: That's true.

MB: And that you can have sex and go to heaven.

How do you think doing THE DAILY SHOW prepared you to direct this film?

JS: It's still content generation to a large extent. While what we do at the show is a lot more ephemeral, you're still calling upon a variety of collaborators and departments to translate intention into something that people are going to view.

Television is still a visual medium, although it doesn't have the possibilities of film and it certainly doesn't have the visual and sensorial effects of that, but you're still digesting source material and translating it through something else into a narrative form. It's a much more peculiarly digestible narrative form, but it can be applied to other media as well.

So it's not alien, to go from producing television to trying to dramatize a script, it's not an alien transition. It just took a different vernacular.

Obviously you had a personal connection to this story.

JB: Correct. The source material of what we do on the show is generally reality. The source material of this was the narrative of his reality that he had.

Perhaps the lesson to regimes is not to incarcerate journalists because they remember shit.

They are trained as far as detail and absurdity and analysis and commentary and it is [Bahari's] ability to translate that experience into something relatable that makes the story so powerful.

MB: even inside prison in the interrogation rooms, sometimes when my interrogator was saying something interesting, stupid, funny, moronic, I was thinking that. it was painful, of course, but I was thinking that I will remember this, [that] as soon as I come out, I will write this down.

The film illustrates visually the impact that social media had on the 2009 protest

Sure. I wanted to compartmentalize it and not overstate it. People have always been resourceful. I don't want to give too much credit to this idea that social media has created an ability to organize. Revolution certainly is not a product of social media. It's a tool.

Les Misérables is a story of revolution, and social media there was just little kids running through tunnels. I could have actually just made it little kids running through tunnels. I think the idea was to find a way to visualize the tool that they were using without creating the idea that it somehow was responsible for it. It's just another measure to democratize the type of activities that were being done.

There's a tendency to want to do it in a filmic way of "why don't we check twitter, we should do that. What a powerful tool". So the idea would be to just show it in a very brief, compartmentalized form as something that was being done as part of. Within that same montage is a disembodied girl's voice talking on the phone as you're watching that who's giving you the on the street rationale of their courage and bravery and the other is just merely an expression of one of the tools that they utilized to stay a step ahead of the authorities.

It's very easy to dismiss this as the product of a two dimensional evil and a regime that is oppressive. All regimes, democratic and otherwise, have inception points that they try and apply pressure to, to block what they feel should not be transparent. And you see that in a lot of different ways.

MB: That scene is the precursor to what is happening later to me because my interrogators [thought] that I am the perpetrator of these tweets and facebook messages.

Essentially all the authoritarian regimes these days, they are 20th century authoritarian regimes. They can handle shortwave radio, newspapers, analog information, but they don't know what to do with digital information. They don't know what to do with the internet, satellite information, but they are still using the same methods of suppression that they used in the 20th century in the 21st century.

What was it like, reliving this experience through this movie?

MB: I did not relive it. It's a movie that is a translation of a book. As a journalist, we put a distance between ourselves and what is happening in front of us so we are not that affected.

That said, some scenes in the film are still uncomfortable to watch. I well up when I see certain scenes and it's just natural to do that. But I cannot say that I relived the experience, especially at the time that many of my friends and colleagues back in Iran and all around the world, they are living that experience that I went through.

I am more worried about them than I am just watching some Mexican actor acting the part.

JS: He is handsome. And that was the real challenge, was to match Maziar's handsome[ness].

To what extent was this project driven by guilt or maybe responsibility?

JS: Guilt is obviously a powerful motivator for my people. Has been for years. Power to the misheguna!

But guilt is not a sustainable emotion when carrying through with a project,[as] that would be corrosive to the process of telling a story if that were the driving force.

The guilt was immediate and almost disabused immediately by Maziar [and] by the other people that had been arrested. One of the beautiful American traits is this wonderful narcissism [and] that our actions are incredibly powerful and control. It's Darwin's 4th law, that for every American action, there is a ridiculously unequal and opposite reaction.

There was that moment of, "My God, the power of The Daily Show got 3 men arrested - I must make this right!" But it was very clear, this was a huge crackdown by an authoritarian regime.

For Maziar, they concocted this incredibly elaborate theory of [him] as the hub of a media conspiracy to bring ordinary Iranians in contact with the CIA and the MI6 and all of these other things. Seeing that was completely untrue, they had no evidence. What they did have is a tape where a guy said he was a spy and he spoke with him in a café.

Remember the 3 Al Jazeera journalists who are still imprisoned in Egypt? [At] their trial, without evidence, they were just showing movies of Arabian horses and things that they had found that had nothing to do with anything. The [prosecutors] can't just walk out there and go, "eh, we got nothin'"

In that sense, the guilt was an utterly minor and trivial focus. What the real focus was was the universality of the story and the nuance and compassion and family aspect that Maziar was able to bring to the memoir. That was what was intriguing about it.

Could you talk a bit about your passion for documentary film. Did that have any influence on you as a filmmaker?

JS: Well, I think that you know Maziar is a documentarian, so he's done some wonderful films. I hadn't seen them until after I'd met him, but there are so many stories that are worthwhile to be told that are being told in a very real way. It's just if you have a platform it's a nice way of engaging in the responsibility of getting those stories out there. That's part of the passion.

Did you ever think about making this as a documentary?

JS: No, I don't know how to make that, I'm much more comfortable with narrative than I am with documentary.

MB: What we discussed in the beginning was to make the film in Persian. Jon thought of making it in Persian, actually, and I was the one who really insisted that the film should be in English because it's a universal story. And we couldn't make it in Yiddish of course.

During the filmmaking, did you guys have a relationship of back and forth as the film developed?

JS: Absolutely.

MB: On a regular basis, we had breakfast every month, long breakfasts...

JS: ...from the beginning, and this was when he was still writing the book. We were lucky enough to have Maziar with us in Jordan for a good deal of the time, to the point where I exploited it, where I felt like a giant asshole. You'd be in some dank, solitary room and I'd be like "so, is that where they hit you, so when he kicked you . . " and you forget that it's a real event that happened to a real person. You use him as an informational resource in a way that can only be seen as crass in a large measure.

MB: But that's what attracted me to Jon doing the film as well. Je was open to ideas and we had a good collaboration. It was an organic process that Jon wrote the film and then directed the film because we had invested so much thought, passion and energy into the process of talking about the film.

JS: I always viewed it as Maziar's story. That was the main thing for me, so there were always going to be moments. There was a prisoner in the flashback to when his sister was incarcerated in 1980, [one of actors playing a] prisoner that worked with the authorities had hair kind of out to here, very cool looking. As we're doing it, Maziar would lean in and go, no, nobody would have hair like that. That would actually never be allowed.

MB: The guy was reluctant to cut his hair.

JS: The guy wouldn't cut his hair, and I was like we're going to live with this one. But seminal inauthenticity, we would talk about. But I'm always going to present a more reductive point of view than the nuance that he had, but we worked nicely in figuring what was seminal and what wasn't.

Your Canadian citizenship doesn't factor in much in the film

MB: I don't think that it was intentional, but I think it would be confusing to tell people that he's a Canadian citizen who lives in London and goes back to Iran working for an American magazine. I think it was for the dramatic structure.

JS: I had a hard enough time telling the story of his family. You're telling the story of a democratic movement in a country, a man's imprisonment, the story of his family's journey through all of that. There were a lot of tributaries that were feeding into this and that was difficult.

I would never take a jab at Canadians. As long as you provide me with giant crack-smoking people . . . I owe you.

MB: But it is obvious at the end of the film, the fact that I had an international campaign for me, and that's why I am talking on behalf of many other people whose names you cannot pronounce. Of course, it took you a while to pronounce my name, which is fine.

JS: I still don't get it right.

MB: I don't get it right either.