Interview: Bryan Cranston and John Goodman of “Argo”

Posted on October 17, 2012 at 8:00 am

In Argo, Bryan Cranston (“Breaking Bad”) plays the CIA chief who supervises Tony Mendez, the character played by director Ben Affleck. And John Goodman plays real-life Oscar winner John Chambers, the genius in make-up and prosthetics who secretly worked with the CIA on disguises. Mendez called Chambers for help in setting up the fake Hollywood studio they needed to create cover identities to get the six Americans hiding out in Iran back home. A small group of journalists met with Affleck, Goodman, and Cranston to talk about the film.

What is the challenge in playing a character based on a real person, knowing that people who knew him will see the film and people who didn’t know him will think that they know what he was like based on your performance?

John Goodman: First and foremost, I had a responsibility to the character I was playing because he actually existed. He was a well-respected makeup artist, so I just felt the responsibility to not step on my foot.

Brian Cranston: My character was a composite character, and I think it was carefully crafted that way because at the time that you keep cutting back to the CIA and finding out more information and what’s happening back there, it was important to not have the audience confused for a second. If there was numerous people that were at the CIA giving him instruction and guidance, if the audience is going, “Which guy is it? Was that the guy from the White House or is that the guy…” then, we’re in trouble, because then they’re not listening. So, we didn’t want to slow it down and so my character became the composite character. But you know, it’s interesting. Some people will say, “Well, actors, they’re liars, right? They get up and pretend and say they’re someone else,” and the truth is that we desperately seek the truth and the honesty of a character, and we don’t feel completely comfortable until we find out how to play someone with that integrity. But yes, I think Ben and John had slightly more sense of responsibility because they’re portraying real people.

What do you think was going on inside the minds of these men as they went through these extraordinary challenges?

Bryan Cranston: Well, I had the good fortune of coming to Langley, Virginia early on before we started shooting and I sat down with a few CIA officers of varying degrees of experience. I wanted to get sort of a baseline of who these people are, and get a sense of the culture that they live in, and I guess what I came away with is that it’s not dissimilar from any other corporate structure. They’re still complaining about the boss and his crappy idea, and “that’s not going to work,” and there’s stale coffee in the break room and there’s all these kinds of things that they have to deal with. I think at first they were a little reticent to open up to a stranger. At first they would say, “There are several things we can’t talk about, you know, mission wise.” And I go, “I’m actually more interested in what your personal life is like and what sacrifices that were made with your spouses, what were you able to tell your children? How did it affect you? Your relationships? Do you guys drink? Did you go to a certain place to associate with other officers?” And there’s very much a club, in fact, one of the things that I found interesting was that a lot of them will socialize within and marry within, so that one guy was married to a CIA officer and their daughter was a CIA officer, and so it’s the family business. What I thought, going in, was “This is going to be completely different from anything that I have ever known” but it became sort of familiar to me. I just wanted to craft this man being a dedicated servant, truly believing in the value of the CIA and what he’s providing for it. I had a sense that, if this worked, this would be Jack’s last mission, that I’m going, “it’s not going to be any better than this, so I’m going to get debriefed and walk away.”

John Goodman: It’s like the idea of a man who manufactures disguises, disguising a part of his life and hiding in plain sight and serving his countries with the tools of his trade.

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Interview: Ben Affleck, Director and Star of “Argo” (Part 1)

Posted on October 14, 2012 at 3:11 pm

Ben Affleck directed “Argo,” the incredible story of a real-life 1980 CIA rescue mission, and he plays Tony Mendez, the “exfiltration” expert who came up with the idea to create a fake Hollywood film production company and get the six American out of Iran by convincing the people who had captured 52 other State Department employees that these six were members of a Canadian film crew, scouting locations for a big sci-fi/fantasy film. I spoke to him about the movie with a small group of journalists, the day after a screening attended by some of the real people rescued by Mendez.

You did something really remarkable in combining what is really two movies with two completely different tones in this film. How did you put that together so skillfully?

Well, I wish I could say it was my own skill, I don’t think it was. They’re really smart actors, they kind of looked at the material on the page and did me a favor of playing it honestly. Because it was played realistically it kind of blended anyway. If it hadn’t, I suppose I would’ve had a bunch of conversations about how we were going to get the jigsaw puzzles to fit, but all the parties, Bryan Cranston, John Goodman, and Alan Arkin were really pretty adept. They knew how to play it real, and that kind of saved my bacon.

Did you anticipate that there would be so much connection to current events and what do you think the movie can say about where we are now?

I was kind of stunned, naturally, just to see that the material that I looked at for research from 30 plus years ago all of a sudden was looking exactly like what was on the evening news. That surprised me and it surprised everybody and obviously, it was just a terrible thing for everyone. I expected the movie to be resonant to the sense of what happens when the United States gets involved with the government of another country and overlooks some of the negative things they may be doing because they’re pro-Western, the unintended consequences of revolution, those are the kinds of things I was anticipating. What it ended up being more about, in some ways, was an homage to our clandestine service and our foreign service folks, who, as illustrated by these tragic events do a lot, sacrifice a lot, put themselves in harm’s way, give up a lot to go overseas. Our Foreign Service folks are doing a lot and making a lot of sacrifices for us, and sometimes it’s even the ultimate sacrifice.

It really seems like you shot it as if it was a film made in the 70s, starting from the old Warner Bros. logo.

I thought it would be a trick of the brain, where, if you’re looking at a movie that looks like the kind of movie that was made in the 1970’s, it’s easier for the brain to subconsciously accept this notion that the events they’re watching are taking place during that period. Now, you can’t do that if you’re doing a movie about the Revolutionary War, but that’s why we had this interesting advantage. Even better, that era that I was trying to replicate, to sort of fool the brain, was a really great era for film-making, so I got to copy these great films and great film-makers, Lumet, Pakula, Scorsese.

How does it complicate things when you’re making what is basically a living history film, knowing that the people who were really there will see it?

It’s about a whole story, you know, and you have to maintain the integrity and the honesty of the spine of the story. That’s one profound responsibility because. I want them to look at it and say, “Yeah, that’s basically it.” Now, the real takeover was four hours long, and we have five minutes. That’s the kind of thing that we need to do to sort of compromise. It was raining in the real takeover, it’s not raining there. There are some details that are naturally changed. But the essential spirit of it, that has to be preserved. You know somebody did find a picture of Khomeini with the darts in it and say, “Who did this?” They really did blindfold people and things like that. I also have a responsibility to make a good movie, to tell a good story, because that’s what I do, and so those two things are constantly intentioned with one another, because I want to make it true, but I gotta make it good, you know?

How much was changed for dramatic purposes?

The main change, really, is the cars in the runway. They got to the third checkpoint, they got through, that was all the same, and they got there and sat there and they said, “Well, your plane has been delayed.” I thought, “Well, we’ve all been through that!” And then they got on the plane and left, and so in an effort to sort of externalize that and make the third act work, I added the sort of, them just barely getting away, when in fact they got away a little bit more ahead of the wire. But that really, fundamentally, in my view, doesn’t change the story. The same things happened, you know? It was a close-call in terms of trying to get out in terms of their own deadline. Most of the sins, really, in terms of story-telling, are sins of omission, you know? Not being able to include the fact that Pat Taylor got money from her co-workers or that in Ottawa they approved this special session to make these passports that had never been done before. You have people who are all alive, there’s a natural tendency to feel like, “Well, this is my story.” So you have to sort of do everyone’s story justice, and also take into account the sort of Rashomon phenomenon where you hear slightly different accounts from different people, and definitely maintain the realism of it while not sacrificing what’s really interesting about it.

What movies of the period ended up inspiring elements of this film?

There were a lot of them that I had seen and I still watched again, and I liked “The Thing” for my hair, and I liked Killing of a Chinese Bookie, the Cassavetes movie, for the sort of seedy LA, I just loved the look, the feel, the way they use zooms, the way it felt kind of raw but you also realized it was choreographed—and I didn’t expect to see that coming. There’s a movie called Let Me In that I watched, that’s really good, a guy named Matt Reeves directed it, the remake of the original one, and I thought it was really well directed and watched it with my DP, and we were looking at stuff that they did with focus in that movie, you know, keeping things in the foreground, focus, and maybe soft the background—that was something that I didn’t expect to influence me and it really did.

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Argo

Posted on October 11, 2012 at 6:00 pm

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language and some violent images
Profanity:	Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Scenes of mob violence, hostages, references to terrorism
Diversity Issues:	Ethnic, political, and cultural differences a theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	October 12, 2012
Date Released to DVD:	February 18, 2013
Amazon.com ASIN:	B00AHTYGRW

The movie within the movie, an outlandish space fantasy possibly named “Argo” for Jason’s vessel in the ancient Greek myth, may be more believable than the true and recently declassified story that surrounds it. In 1979, when American State Department employees were taken hostage in Iran, six escaped and were hidden by the Canadian ambassador. A CIA “exfiltration” expert who specializes in getting people out of difficult situations, rescued them by disguising them as members of a Canadian film crew, scouting locations for a fictitious Hollywood movie called “Argo.”

It is like an episode of the television series “Mission: Impossible” except that (1) it really happened and (2) it was much, much harder. Unlike “Mission: Impossible,” the people creating an elaborate false reality in order to fool the other side had to work with civilians. And they had to navigate a lot of bureaucratic, diplomatic, and national-security-related internal conflicts in a volatile environment with limited sharing of information. James Bond has something more valuable than a license to kill. He has a license to pretty much do whatever he wants with M ready to stand behind him. But Tony Mendez (played by director Ben Affleck) has to make a lot of literally life-or-death decisions very quickly and yet is still subject to oversight by layers of people with different priorities and points of view.

Affleck, following “The Town” and “Gone Baby Gone” (and a screenwriting Oscar for “Good Will Hunting”) is no longer one of Hollywood’s most promising new directors — he has arrived. This film works on every level. Even though we know the Americans were rescued (Canada’s embassy was given a prominent location near the White House in gratitude for their efforts), the tension is ferocious. The scenes in Hollywood, with John Goodman and a sure-to-be-nominated for a third Oscar Alan Arkin are as sharp and witty, recalling “The Producers” and “Get Shorty.” But rather than an easy way to provide contrast or comic relief, Affleck and first-time screenwriter Chris Terrio (based on an article in Wired Magazine) use those scenes to provide context, along with some tang and bite. One masterful section of the film intercuts the two stories as the Hollywood group set up shop, secure the rights to the screenplay, and put together a staged reading to get publicity to demonstrate their bona fides while the six Americans are trapped and the exfiltration mission gets underway. There are a lot of similarities — both sides deal in illusion, and not just the illusion of the sci-fi fantasy film they are pretending to make. The constant lying about the project comes naturally to Arkin’s character, an old-time Hollywood guy who has seen it all and who himself has no illusions about the integrity and loyalty of those around him. He says, “You’re worried about the Ayatollah. Try the WGA.”

Affleck locates the film in its era with hair and clothes that evoke the time period without exaggeration or ridicule, not easy to do with 70’s styles. He even used 70’s era film stock and borrowed some of the staging from movies of the era like “All the President’s Men,” and the opening titles are in a 70’s font. But the film also has some important insights about what happened and about our own time, reflected in the conflicts of three decades ago. It begins with a brief description of the events leading to the hostage crisis, emphasizing America’s support (to benefit the oil companies) of the Shah’s brutal regime, told somewhat differently than it would have been in 1979.

“You don’t have a better bad idea than this?” a State Department official asks the CIA. “This is the best bad idea we have,” is the reply from Jack O’Donnell (Bryan Cranston). They can’t fake any of the usual identities for the Americans because they are too easy to disprove. The normal reasons for foreigners to be abroad — teaching, studying, aid — are not plausible. Only something completely outrageous could be true. And it turns out that Iranians are as in love with Hollywood movies as everyone else. This one is a good reminder of why we all feel that way.

Parents should know that this film includes scenes of mob violence, hostages, references to terrorism, characters in peril, tense confrontations, alcohol, a lot of smoking, and very strong language.

Family discussion: Why did the Canadians take in the Americans? Why did Mendez defy his orders? What would you do if someone approached you the way Mendez approached the Hollywood insiders?

If you like this, try: “Charlie Wilson’s War”

Trailer: “Monster University” from Pixar (Summer 2013)

Posted on June 20, 2012 at 7:18 am

Before they went to work for Monsters, Inc., Sully (John Goodman) and Mike (Billy Crystal) had to go to college to learn how to be scary. Next summer’s release from Pixar is “Monster University,” which shows us what their school days were like, and Pixar has released this adorable trailer to accompany “Brave.”

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The Borrowers

Posted on December 13, 2002 at 5:16 am

Mary Norton’s delightful book about the tiny people who live in houses and “borrow” foraged items (thus explaining why no one can ever find anything) is charmingly translated to the screen. The art direction is sublime and the performances are utterly engaging. Children will want to watch the movie a second time just to identify all of the items used by the Borrowers for clothes, furnishings, and equipment. The Borrowers in this story are the Clock family, Pod, his wife Homily, and their children Arietty (played by the adorable newcomer Flora Newbigin) and Peagreen. They live in the home of the aptly named Lenders, until an unscrupulous lawyer named Ocious Potter (John Goodman) has them evicted so that he can tear down the house and build an apartment building. In 83 fast minutes the Clocks find a way to survive Potter and his exterminator, get separated and then reunited, meet up with long-lost friends, and, with the help of the Lenders’ son, save the day for both families. Lots of fun and well worth watching.