Jon Stewart on ‘Rosewater,’ Springsteen and ‘Sexual Tension’ With Bill O’Reilly
Jon Stewart has a week off from The Daily Show, but as he walks into a tiny conference room at the show’s midtown Manhattan headquarters late on a Monday afternoon, it’s clear he’s completely exhausted. He slumps in a chair and admits he’s spent the entire day doing press for his new movie, Rosewater, and is beginning to grow hoarse. But he’s determined to promote his passion project, and soon enough he perks up. Writing and directing Rosewater is unlike anything Stewart has attempted in his career. It’s the true story of Maziar Bahari, an Iranian Newsweek reporter, who was interviewed by Daily Show correspondent Jason Jones in 2009. During the show, Bahari joked around that he was a spy; the Iranian government didn’t see the humor and believed Bahari was working for the CIA. He was detained and tortured for 118 days by the police in Iran.
After he was freed, Bahari came to New York and struck up a friendship with Stewart. “He told me he was going to write a book and then turn it into a movie,” says Stewart. “He asked if I’d be interested in helping. Having never done that before, I said, ‘Of course!'”
Did you ever worry this was too big a project to helm by yourself?
Let’s see, it was 100 degrees out, it was Ramadan and we were at a working Jordanian prison. I would say that overwhelmed is one of the nicer things I felt. I told the crew over and over, “I don’t know what I don’t know. Please raise your hand whenever you think I’m taking us over a cliff.”
I read you got help on the screenplay from J.J. Abrams.
It was more when I was done I would send it to people and say, “So, you’ve made a movie. Is this a movie?” I didn’t feel like I could impose on them in a notes kind of way. I couldn’t be like, “Give me a way to end act one dynamically.” It was more like, “Read this and tell me if it reminds you of a movie, a one-act play or a sketch.” I just needed to get confidence in its viability.
Had you ever written a screenplay before this?
I wrote one 15 years ago, but I don’t think I ever finished it. I’d certainly read that book about screenwriting, so that sort of counts as writing one.
Did you feel any guilt when you learned what Bahari went through because of comments made on The Daily Show?
We didn’t actually know that at the time. He was arrested and went to prison, but this was in the context of thousands of others being caught in these sweeps. It wasn’t so much that we thought it had something to do with us. It was more a question of, “Was there something we can do?” We contacted the family of another gentleman we had interviewed who had been arrested. The question was really, “Should we continue to air these pieces? What would you like us to do?” Their response was, “We need to raise the profile.” So we kept covering the election. We didn’t think, “Oh, my God, the Iranian government has cracked down on people who talked to The Daily Show.” We knew there was a much wider crackdown going on.
‘Axis of Evil’ is as reductive as ‘Death to America.’ It’s all the same shit. It’s ignorance-based.
In the film, you pull the curtain back on The Daily Show by showing how Jason Jones conducts the interview. Did you hesitate about revealing the show’s secrets?
Maybe we should have, but I didn’t even think about it. We don’t consider it a state secret. Hopefully, people will get a little kick out of it.
Unlike most movies about these situations, you didn’t portray the torturers as one-dimensional monsters.
We have a very sensationalized view of what constitutes torture. There’s this idea that it’s a ticking time bomb and someone yelling, “Tell me what you know!” and then you electrocute them and they finally tell you the bomb is in the school. But there’s a banality, a bureaucracy, to it. And there are regimes that build these infrastructures for purposeless torture. They get confessions and broadcast them, but it’s for no reason. It’s an exercise in existential depravity. The film is set in Iran, but it’s not unique to Iran. We put people in solitary all the time.