(Ar)going the distance
Hollywood actor Ben Affleck might be a man of few words, but what his words don’t convey, his talent does. Playing a real-life character onscreen sure is a challenging task and only few actors can pull it off with élan.
Ben Affleck as Tony Mendez in Argo, is perhaps one of those few who has gained accolades from critics and fans alike. The dashing actor, producer and director opens up about being Tony Mendez in the Academy Award winning film Argo.
Actor vs Director
The process of looking at a project as an actor or a director is very simple — do I think it’s good? Does it affect me somehow? Do I feel something when I’m reading it? Am I interested? Does it surprise me? All of that stuff comes together to make something either a thumbs up or thumbs down. Argo came to me as a director first. When I found a script this good, I thought well, I’ve got to give myself a job and cast myself in the lead. But being an actor and a director does have its fair share of challenges. Movies that I’ve done that I think have worked okay and the ones that I’m not as happy with, they’re just as hard, both of them. They’re equally difficult. So it’s the process. It’s what you invest into it. If you go into it knowing that it’s going to be difficult, you just have to work as hard as you possibly can, and you’re still very likely to fail. Fortunately, it just turned out to be what I think is the best movie I’ve ever been involved with. I just think it’s amazing.
Of real and reel
The majority of the characters are exactly real people. They have the same names. It’s absolutely true that these people, with these names, were working at the U.S. Embassy when it got taken over. John Chambers, a Hollywood makeup artist, and Tony Mendez, a CIA agent, came up with an idea to get them out, rescue them using the cover of a movie story location scout. That’s completely true. All of those characters are completely real. The stuff that we had to do to sort of help make a three-act structure was kind of tertiary.
On Allen Arkin
Not only did I think of Arkin immediately when I read the role of Lester Seigel, I was genuinely concerned who we would get if Arkin didn’t do it. I thought we were going to have to go to some old producer living up in Bel Air because I don’t know who in the world we could possibly get.
Swinging in the late ‘70s
The film is set between 1979-1980 and the film reflects that time period, right down to the Warner Bros’ logo in the beginning. We did not use any real footage from the incident except news footage. We used special effects instead. We used it to change things to Farsi letters or take off the new logos off something and make everything period — not obvious and not funny. We didn’t want the clothes and everything else to turn out to be “Remember this brand?” game. We wanted to layer it in so that it was in the background and it felt convincing. We spent a decent amount of special effects’ time doing stuff that you would never know was special effects because it was just basically 1979 special effects.
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