It's confirmed, sir. Six escaped.
The six of them went out a back exit.
- Where are they'? - The Canadian ambassador's house.
Traffic calls them "The Houseguests."
Do they stay put? Are we attempting rescue?
These people die, they die badly.
- The only way out of that city is the airport. - You have a better plan?
Nobody had any good ideas.
There are only bad options.
It's about finding the best one.
Tony Mendez came up with this crazy plan.
They're a Canadian film crew on a location scout for a science-fiction movie.
When you're planning an exfiltration...
...you, first of all, figure out who are these people and where do they come from?
This is what I do. I get people out.
Actions of Iran have shocked the civilized world.
Oh, my God.
Our embassy has been seized...
...and more than 60 American citizens continue to be held as hostages.
...If we're going to go, we need to go now.
During the takeover, six people escaped.
They're hiding out in Tehran.
- And that's who I'm gonna go get. - What am I making?
I need you to help me make a fake movie.
Tony Mendez had this idea that because he was friends...
...with makeup artist John Chambers. He'd seen all these, you know...
...goofy special effects and space makeup movies and stuff...
...that that was a viable idea.
John Chambers, makeup!
John Chambers is known for a lot of things but most famously...
...for the makeup on Planet of the Apes.
The original makeup on Planet of the Apes.
He also invented Mr. Spock's ears...
...and working for the CIA.
By day, he would be sort of working with stars on these big Hollywood movies.
But then by night, he would be inventing prosthetics to help...
...CIA officers disguise themselves in the Cold War.
You know, he was a patriot. He wanted to help his country.
And he made disguises that got people out of Cambodia, Laos, and you know, Soviet Union.
All kinds of places.
So he was somebody that Tony was accustomed to relying on.
I was in the midst of meetings in Washington and so forth...
...and puzzling this out.
And I remembered...
...that we had just been just been working with J.C. so I rang him up.
Kevin Harkins.
Hey, Tony.
I said, "J.C., how many people in a location scouting party?
For scouting a movie."
And he said, "Oh, I read you."
I wanna set up a production company and build a cover around making a movie.
- That we're not gonna make. - No.
So you wanna come to Hollywood and act like a big shot?
- Without actually doing anything? - No.
You'll fit right in.
The Argo script was sufficiently sort of nebulous and took place in space...
...and you know, there was some vague desert component.
And it was called... “A cosmic war" was the tagline.
And Tony switched it to “A cosmic conflagration."
He thought that was better than "war."
He didn't want to have "war" in the title or on the title page.
"Argo. A science-fantasy adventure."
- it's in turnaround. It's dog shit. - It's a space movie in the Middle East.
- Does it matter? - Can we get the option?
Because they needed to have the fake film look legitimate...
...they had to go... Jump through all these hoops of taking out ads in the paper...
...and sort of creating buzz around Hollywood for the fake film.
They set up an office.
We found a suite of offices being vacated by Michael Douglas.
He had just wrapped China Syndrome.
And we were able to capture that space.
Studio Six.
They made business cards. They had people answering phones.
They did ads in Variety.
They did all the things in real life that you see in the movie.
Well, they got a bunch of actors, they're gonna read from beginning to end.
As Hollywood reporters got wind of this, they started snooping around...
...and they found it was J.C. that was involved.
He had just gotten Oscars and Emmys so he was top of his game...
...and it lended verisimilitude to the idea.
You're telling me that there is a movie company in Hollywood right now...
...that is funded by the CIA?
Yes, sir.
It seems silly because it's the movie world.
But when you look at it from the point of view of building a cover...
...cover's gotta be just as strong if it's about being in the movie business...
...as it does if you're pretending to be a watchmaker...
...or making aluminum siding or whatever.
It's about the disguise. And so they were really thorough.
If I'm doing a fake movie, it's gonna be a fake hit.
It was not unusual to have an association with Hollywood and the CIA...
...because if you look at what they do in Hollywood...
...it's a lot like what you do when you're out spying.
And action.
In both worlds, you're creating fictions.
These sort of fictional situations.
And you're playing dress-up, and they're forging...
And you know, we're re-creating...
When you make a movie you have to re-create all the documents of the period.
There's a lot of overlap. It makes sense.
From the movie, that Carter telex where he says "The Hollywood option is a go"...
...that's an absolute verbatim copy of the telex from the White House.
Copy D.S. Confirm the tickets! Go!
You have to hit the ground running.
You gotta be able to move into the area that you're gonna be working in.
Get set up and get ready to go.
If there's a technical problem or a logistical problem...
...you gotta figure out how to solve that problem.
And the people in Hollywood get very adept at doing that.
And that lends a lot of improvements in what we did in the intelligence profession.
I'm asking you to trust me.
They were courageous, and they were adventurous...
...and they went for this idea of, you know, pretending to be a movie crew.
The story is so powerful that it just keeps moving on decade after decade.
There were a number of times when I thought it was possible we would not get out of Iran.
I looked down and you could see people climbing over the wall into the embassy.
We made the right decisions just by pure luck, not from any knowledge of anything.
That was our only chance to get out of there.
Although it seems like fiction, every word of the story is true.
We saw demonstrations almost every day. We hardly paid much attention to it.
The carnival's a little bigger today, huh?
The previous takeover of the embassy, on Valentine's Day of 1979 lasted for 24 hours.
Everyone was released and so when this attack occurred...
...all of us thought this would also be a temporary takeover.
We saw this crowd and they had sticks and rocks and they were men and women.
It was the first time I had seen those demonstrators up close.
We had heard the slogans and things like that before...
...but I had never seen such a mob, such a crowd.
I actually found myself in a position where...
...I could watch and report to people inside the compound...
...what was going on, literally from my office window.
They're over the walls.
We were notified by people in the chancery...
...that the demonstrators were climbing over the walls.
So we locked up our building.
We wanted to believe that this would be a temporary occupation.
After a few hours though, this one didn't look that way.
We started thinking, "Let's get out of here. Let's go find a place to hide.
And let's see how things develop."
Someone smelled smoke and they thought they were building a fire on the roof.
There was only one choice, well, other than surrendering.
The marine in charge of security was told...
...that everybody in our building would move to the chancery.
That it would be safer for everyone to be together.
Which didn't make sense to us.
We're in the only building with direct access to the street.
If we're going to go, then we need to go now.
My office, and the reason that we were able to get out...
...is that we had a street entrance...
...which was designed for the visa applicants to come in...
...but in the actual events of the day, it was the way we were able to get out.
That was our only chance to get out of the compound.
I don't think I realized until later...
...when I saw video footage of how many people were actually on the compound.
So I really wasn't afraid, I was still thinking:
"Leave the building, go to safety, wait till it's over...
...and come back to work tomorrow."
The irony was, there were families with their young children in the crowd.
They were buying beets, they were buying dates.
It was kind of the event of the evening.
We knew it was gonna stretch out though...
...when one of the ayatollah showed up the next day to lead prayers...
...that had gotten a sanction.
Whoever took us in was going to be running the same risk as we were...
...of ending up as a hostage.
My best non-American friends were this Canadian couple.
They ended up being our hideout.
He called John Sheardown, the counsel general at the Canadian Embassy...
...and said, "We're in trouble now, this is getting pretty dicey."
He said, "Sure, come on over."
That was such a huge relief. Just such a generous gesture on his part.
And courageous, because, you know, he was taking his chances.
These were our friends, the diplomats who were there.
I don't think it's trite to say that the U.S. and Canada have a special relationship.
We leave the six where they are. I'll go brief the president.
I knew immediately that they were there.
But we kept that fact very secret because we didn't want the Iranians to know...
...that there were six more American diplomats whom they hadn't taken.
Yeah.
Yes.
I got a memo from the state department...
...and it said that six had been able to escape and were in the care of the Canadians.
Well, it didn't seem like an urgent matter until I realized...
...that at least one member of the International Press Corps in Washington...
...figured out that these six people were missing.
I called the editors and prevailed on them not to reveal this secret.
If these people die, they die badly. Publicly.
The Canadians, even before we asked them, had passed a secret order-in-counsel...
...and had approved the issuance of six Canadian passports.
The next part of the problem was...
...what are they doing at this time in history in Iran?
CIA Director Stansfield Turner kept me informed about all the events.
What we like for this are bicycles.
Deliver the six bikes, provide them with maps.
Or you could just send in training wheels and meet them at the border with Gatorade.
There were some ideas that hadn't been discredited...
...but nothing that really sounded like it was gonna work.
But one evening I had this notion.
They're a Canadian film crew on a location scout for a science-fiction movie.
He came and proposed what would happen with the rescue mission...
...and of course I considered it very carefully and I approved it.
This was a high-risk operation. About as high as a risk that you wanna take.
There are only bad options.
It's about finding the best one.
The Canadians, once they took us in, basically told their employees:
"This is what we're doing, if you're uncomfortable, go home."
Even though the cook was even a member of the Komiteh...
...he remained loyal to the Taylors.
He could have turned us in anytime. And he didn't. He protected us.
We were very sensitive to the danger we were causing them.
Not one single member of the embassy staff said to me:
"I've thought about the risk, I want out."
They all said, “I know the risks, I'm in till we depart."
There's no conceivable way the Canadian Embassy was gonna be closed...
...and leave these six hanging.
We were at the residence for almost three months.
What kept us going during the early days was, well, simply a lack of options.
I mean, we weren't gonna go to the embassy and turn ourselves in.
Luckily, John was a ferocious reader, so he had a great collection of books.
I'm sure that one of the reasons I was able to go through the airport...
...without being nervous was because I read every John le Carré book they had.
And so I realized from his books that if you act like you know what you're doing...
...then other people will think you know what you're doing and they'll think "fine."
We had plenty to eat and drink and we played Bridge and Monopoly and Scrabble.
We'd listen to the radio news together. Unfortunately, rarely was the news any good.
What really made it difficult to listen to...
...was that the two sides weren't talking towards a solution...
...they were talking past each other...
...so we knew that this could extend on quite a period of time.
Their concern was that the U.S. government was paying more attention...
...to the 50 in the compound rather than the six.
As time went on it got a little more tense.
Studio Six.
We got a green light. Keep the office running until you hear otherwise.
Ken was doing quite a bit more than just even hosting us.
I didn't understand at the time when we were sitting on the couch...
...how he would kind of hesitate when he would think about his answers.
I thought, "Well, just tell us. Just tell us."
But he's trying to figure out what he can tell us and what he can't.
We were told around the middle of January that things were gonna start happening.
Ken said that they had been in touch with Washington...
...and there were plans to get us out and someone would be coming.
We got a message back saying that our exfiltration was being planned.
Was a new word for me anyway.
Well, within a day or two, Kevin Harkins showed up.
I'm gonna get you home.
That was Tony Mendez.
When we met the house guests they were happy to see us.
They were very clearly ready to get out of there.
He presented us with three scenarios.
The most absurd of which was a group of American teachers.
Unemployed American teachers who were looking for work.
And it was one of those things, we looked at each other and we went:
"So how untuned are these people to think now would be a good time...
...for Americans to come and try to teach in Iran?"
The second was that we were some kind of agricultural experts visiting Tehran.
But it was winter so it was not a time when there's agricultural activities going on.
And then the third plan was this movie plan.
Have you've gotten people out this way before?
This would be a first.
Who but a Hollywood location scouting team would come to a country...
...in the midst of a violent revolution...
...and think they could just walk in and walk out...
...and get all the cooperation they needed to shoot a movie there?
I outlined these things very quickly...
...but obviously I put the emphasis on the one that I liked.
The one that had the pizzazz.
We had to unanimously agree. But two of them were pretty much throwaways.
We thought it was a brilliant plan, that all it needed from us was our belief.
It's suicide.
I'm asking you to trust me.
I don't trust you.
We had five warriors who were ready to go.
We had one reluctant warrior who was saying, "I'm not really sure this makes sense."
You really believe your little story's gonna make
a difference when there's a gun to our heads?
I think my story's the only thing between you and a gun to your head.
But I don't think it was so much the scenario as the fact that Joe really felt...
...that we had an obligation to the hostages to stay until they were released.
Joe had concerns up until hours before we left, but he did it.
The night before we left, I just remember everyone really cramming...
...and trying to learn everything they could and remember all these things about Canada.
We were having a lot to drink.
I think we were excited about the departure.
And nervous as well because obviously something might go wrong.
It's time to go.
The Canadian staff took a great deal of pride in getting to the final day of departure.
Tony had been busy in Washington and Hollywood...
...but however, during the three months, it was the Canadian staff...
...who dealt with the realities of the situation.
The drive to the airport was quiet.
You know how that sort of tenseness is when there's nobody talking at all.
So we were all very conscious of what we were about to do.
When we stepped into that airport, boy, it really hit me.
Bright lights, busy people running around.
Tony kept saying from the beginning that we needed to be confident, be natural...
...be who we were supposed to be in the scenario.
If there was anything wrong, Tony was gonna signal...
...and we would just turn around and go back.
The bus was still waiting there until we cleared into the departure lounge.
I personally felt that it was such a perfect plan and it couldn't go wrong.
So the six went through security, customs, checked in at the airline...
...and altogether were ready to go to the immigration check point...
...which was where the thing could come unraveled if something went wrong.
I had thought about what would happen if we were caught...
...but I always had this idea that we would be taken back and put with the other hostages.
We could see that Lee was having a conversation with the immigration guy.
So this guy takes my passport, looks at it...
...and steps off into a side room.
Later on, we learned that his mustache was a different size than in his photo...
...and that this caused a question.
So there we were in the departure lounge...
...which is the place that everybody was most worried about...
...because that's where the revolutionary guard was.
Komiteh were walking around, you know, they were hassling Iranians.
They weren't bothering any of the Westerners.
They were mostly concerned about Iranians taking the country's wealth out.
We get the word that the Swissair aircraft has a mechanical problem.
It will take three hours to repair.
When we heard the announcement, your stomach drops. You just think, "Oh, boy."
I definitely got worried because the longer we sat there...
...the more chance something could happen.
We had reservations on several different flights, as I recall.
So we thought, "Oh, that doesn't sound good.
Maybe we should try to get on that first flight that we had alternate reservations."
Tony said, “You know, it really wouldn't look good...
...if we walk up and we hand them another $10,000 worth of plane tickets...
...that we just happened to have for that morning."
Nobody travels with two sets of tickets, not even Hollywood people.
And nobody sends their luggage to Zurich and themselves to London.
Tony got us all together, talked with us.
He just said, "Be patient, you know, we'll be okay. We'll sit it out."
We're here, what are we gonna do? We don't have any choice. Stick it out.
As it turned out, it was only 20 minutes or half an hour...
...before they announced the flight was ready to go.
I can probably point to at least half a dozen little twists of fate where...
...you know, a decision one way or an action one way could have messed us up.
This was one of them.
The minute one of my colleagues said that the plane's taken off...
...I started to pack at that time.
We went through the rigmarole of destroying all our...
- ...communications equipment. - Get to your plane, Claude.
Closed the embassy door, put up a sign:
"Canadian Embassy temporarily closed."
it was temporarily closed for eight years...
...but at that time we had no intention of closing for eight years.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is our pleasure to announce...
...that alcoholic beverages are now available...
...as we have cleared Iranian airspace.
We felt really good when they announced that we had finally left Iranian airspace.
It turns out the flight from Tehran to the Turkish border was not a short trip.
Once we got out of Iranian airspace...
...Tony ordered Bloody Marys for us and it tasted great.
One of the best Bloody Marys I've ever had, yeah.
That cocktail over Turkish airspace was delightful. it was wonderful.
Everyone was, by then, you know, on quite an adrenaline high.
They were safe and free. It was a great relief to me.
The U.S. Department of State hereby honors Joe Stafford...
...Kathy Stafford...
I felt really good about the fact the Canadians got the credit.
They certainly had earned it.
I am forever indebted to the Canadians.
The fact that the story never broke publicly, for 17 years...
...was a function of, when we arrived back, being asked not to talk about it.
It was strange, always living a lie, in a sense.
I'm glad that eventually the CIA did declassify the story...
...and that Tony was able to receive credit for what he did to help us get out.
I'm not sure when I finally broke down and told my family...
...that it wasn't quite the way we'd been telling the rest of the world.
My mother in particular was mad we hadn't told her from the beginning.
But she'd be the last person I would have wanted to tell.
If we wanted applause, we'd have joined the circus.
- I thought we did. - Ha!
Carter said you were a great American.
I find it amazing that an individual like Tony would put himself in harm's way...
...when he doesn't have to, in very difficult situations.
He was willing to come to Iran when everyone could see it was such a dangerous place.
If he'd been caught, he would have been treated very badly.
This happened to be only one time...
...that as part of his business as usual...
...he put himself all the way out there on the line.
Well, he's served his country and he does things...
...and risked his life not just for us but many times over his career.
What more could you ask someone?
He's absolutely a real American hero.
Well, I don't think there's any doubt about it.
In fact, he has gone down in CIA history...
...as one of the 50 most important CIA operatives of all time.
I'm not sure what an American hero is all about.
I would say this about that...
...that my wife at the time, who put up with my 25-year career...
...not that she was enamored of it...
...but she said to me when I came back from Iran:
"You're a national hero."
She never said that before.
The way I approached it was to say, “Everything's just gotta be real."
A huge amount of what we were doing, what I want to do, is replication.
So when the Production Department came in and the Art Department...
...and Camera Department, everybody...
...I wanted them to see what I expected it to look like.
So we had a gigantic amount of photographs.
That's one of the most fun, the most interesting parts...
...is when we're doing the research.
Once he puts his mind to it and he gets involved in a project...
...it's because he knows every aspect of what he wants to do.
Authenticity, it's his vision.
I have a really high standard for what I think should go into design, and dress...
...and background, and, like, creating the world.
I really wanted to root the audience in the period.
You guys hear helicopters all the time, but this one is like right above...
...staying above kind of the house.
I was in college before Clinton declassified this mission...
...so I didn't know about this at all.
I was a Middle Eastern Studies major...
...and I took a couple classes on the Islamic Revolution...
...in Iran and sort of had details from college classes that would pop up...
...and that I would try to access to make the movie more interesting.
We kind of did our homework first.
Ben picked out a ton of books. Bunch of books.
I read all the major books on the takeover of the embassy.
I watched all the movies, all the documentaries, and then I read the articles...
...and the interviews with the house guests.
There weren't too many of those, and so I went directly to many of them.
The real people know more about it because they lived it.
I talked to them about their experiences, really to build the first 10 minutes of the movie.
Going, "The lamb is delicious." And you're like, "Yes, excellent."
You had like a molecule of bread in your mouth.
It was very unusual...
...what Ben had us do to prepare for this.
For rehearsal, it was mandatory that if we took the job...
...we had to go live in this house for six days.
I wanted the house guests to live together.
And I wanted them to live together in the location with the set dressing...
...in the environment as close to what it would be when they were there.
They sat in the same chairs that they then sat in as the characters.
We put in period movies and put in period music and record players...
...and magazines from that time, and books that were popular in that era...
...so they lived as those characters in that environment.
We had no cell phones, we had no computers, no Internet.
If you picked up a newspaper lying around it was from 1979.
The irony is a lot of stories in the newspapers are the same things that are going on today.
I wanted them to get comfortable with one another...
...so that when we were shooting scenes where they're supposed to be...
...comfortable with one another, or at one another's throats...
...that that felt real, it didn't feel forced. It's very hard to act familiarity.
It was a great way to get some texture and depth...
...and not necessarily only the political perspective.
It was a great experience to have.
Well, you can give the same effect if you're a little closer.
I went to the CIA and I researched what it was really like there...
...and talked to the director and talked to people who worked there...
...and, you know, walked the halls and spent time there.
It really mattered to me that it feel real.
The CIA doesn't typically offer any sort of public access.
I think that if this movie was not about an American hero who was a CIA operative...
...we would not have gotten into the CIA at all.
When the CIA said they'd let us shoot there, we certainly weren't gonna not shoot there.
The thrill for me of that was just to be in the hallway, to go over the seal...
...and to see the stars on the wall. That's why I designed a specific shot.
I'm pushing, pushing.
Tony goes by and we hold on the stars on the wall...
...and we had to use computer effects to take down the number of stars...
...because far fewer people had been killed, of course, at that point...
...than have now, in the service of the Central Intelligence Agency.
But still I wanted people to see that.
One of the biggest challenges of the film is we can't shoot in Iran. So that's tough.
We went all over the world scouting places. Jordan, Morocco, Bulgaria.
I mean, we scouted everything. And ultimately, Turkey just by far was the best.
Istanbul's pretty convincing as Tehran. Some of the architecture is similar...
- ...in this part of the city. - It really looks authentic.
With the overthrow of the embassy, the challenges were twofold.
One, successfully reproducing things that actually happened.
We couldn't shoot it for four hours, naturally, so we had to compress some stuff...
...and collapse some things, but keeping it true to the integrity of the real events.
Two, executing it as a filmmaker.
Making it good, frankly, with the limited time that we had.
Getting the shots we need...
...making sure the shots were interesting and told the story.
Three, and this was by far the biggest thing.
We had 2000 extras, more than I've ever worked with by far...
...who I needed to be frantic and rabid with anger, and they had to learn Farsi chants.
It just was a really difficult sequence.
It looks exactly like that footage...
...and so you get a sense of the scale of the protest and of the movement.
Pull him up and in front of the crowd, as a thing...
...the crowd's gonna see that he gets blindfolded as a symbol.
So the pressure was definitely on, but it worked out wonderfully.
We got lucky. Lucky with the weather.
The weather today in Istanbul is actually exactly the weather...
...that they had on November 4th, 1979.
It was sort of a drizzly day. It was overcast.
The people still turned out in throngs to the gates of the embassy.
And action.
We're in the Grand Bazaar. One of the reasons that we chose to film in Turkey as our Tehran...
...was that this bazaar was so fantastic.
The bazaar in Tehran is one of the oldest bazaars in the world...
...and it's gorgeous and complex and multi-layered.
And this we felt had the most of that flavor.
It's an amazing experience to be inside this building...
...that's shut down essentially for us.
And to be surrounded by all these extras...
...that sense of claustrophobia and that reality of being surrounded...
...and chased by these people is pretty overwhelming.
Our timing worked out really well for a giant holiday, Bayram.
And the bazaar is actually closed Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday...
...which is just unheard of.
They've set-dressed this to 1979...
...and put all these extras, like, 250 extras in 1979 clothes.
And it's fantastic. It makes it very easy to act.
We made all the clothes for the mullahs...
...you don't find those here, they're not in costume houses.
We made 500 chadors, the long black cloak that women wear.
Jackie West is an actual genius.
She's so amazing that she does all your work for you, just by finding clothes for people.
When you look at the research from Iran, all the student rebels, people on the street...
...very early 70s in their dress, a lot of big collars and fat ties.
When you look at the followers of the Ayatollah or the student revolution...
...you see no ties.
They quit wearing ties because ties stood for capitalism and the shah and Western culture.
Everything's perfect. Everything's more inspired than you thought it would be.
Nothing's pushed, nothing's exaggerated.
That was so great, to be able to create all that stuff.
Somehow it feels subtle the way she did it...
...and it feels like of the period and not sort of, like, "of the period."
it feels very real.
We get to shoot at the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque...
...and those are just beautiful. World heritage sites.
We're in the Blue Mosque right now.
It's kind of a rare opportunity, there's no one here.
It's been shut down this morning for us to film in.
It's really very, very old.
Maybe the oldest building I've ever been in. It's beautiful.
The Blue Mosque is, you know...
...one of the most important pieces of architecture in Istanbul.
I wanted to put the exterior of that and the interior of the Hagia Sophia in.
It's a little bit of a cheat because it sort of suggests that they're both the same thing...
...but they're next to one another.
The Hagia Sophia is incredible because it's been a church, it's been a mosque...
...it's now a museum, it's at the crossroads of all these cultures...
...and it is the actual embodiment of that intersection.
They had these really ugly light bulbs in there that were energy efficient...
...so in order for us to shoot, we needed to change the light bulbs, we did.
And there were 4000 light bulbs.
They had eight gentlemen over one night.
Each fixture, of course, has to be individually changed...
...with the lid popping off and changing the bulb.
It's quite a big deal. But it's a nice sparkly natural look...
...clear bulb like it would have been in the time we're shooting in 1979.
We needed the airport to look like an airport in Tehran.
That was the most important thing.
The Ontario airport, it's the same period.
And I should say that we used an old piece of the Ontario airport...
...that's now no longer used.
I really wanted to dig deep, I wanted to shoot close-ups on posters.
I never subscribed to this idea that you shoot the actor...
...and everything, as it gets further away from the actor...
...it starts to be increasingly less relevant, I wanted details.
We had extensive research, so because this is a historical piece...
...we based as much as we could on actual propaganda, slogans, signage.
The Mehrabad International Airport is directly a copy.
We were well aware that the country was blanketed with Khomeinis...
...so we bought some Khomeini photographs and then we had artists interpret them.
When we're in the airport, a lot of
"Gosh, this is bringing me back 30 years."
And I think they were triggered by seeing these big posters...
...and not just the big Khomeini posters, but little posters with the writing on it...
...and propaganda and sort of being stuck into the middle of this whole world...
...including extras, including guys with guns.
The most amazing part is really the exterior shot when they drive in.
The sequence in front of the airport with taxi cabs, cop cars, all the background stuff...
...totaled up to about 47 cars, 48 cars.
We were able to go out and score old Mavericks, Granadas, Fiats, Peugeots...
...some VW busses, and so we had a lot of fun finding the stuff and building it.
With all that background, I don't think anybody would ever question...
...that it wasn't the airport in Tehran.
Okay, going into the toast was great...
...and I wish we had cameras on everybody because we would be finished.
I think when you're making a film...
...especially a drama, you have to stick to the facts as much as possible.
You have to bring people into that world.
- It's a subtle adjustment, I think. - Yeah.
Ben has a great eye for that.
You can't fake it. We never allowed it to be okay...
...to say, "it'll be all right." "Well, it doesn't look like it, but it's fine."
Let me see the ending again.
And so together, I think we got to something that...
...you know, we were all much happier with at the end.