Written Interview: Chris Terrio (“Argo”)

Dennis Faye at WGA.org has a great interview with Chris Terrio, screenwriter of the movie Argo which opens this weekend in the U.S.. The setup:

On November 4, 1979, militants stormed the U.S. Embassy in Iran, taking 52 Americans hostage. Six Americans managed to escape, seeking hidden refuge in the home of the Canadian ambassador.

Iranian authorities soon started to suspect something was amiss. As the noose tightened, CIA “exfiltration” specialist Tony Mendez snuck into the country and rescued the “house guests,” by masquerading them as a Canadian film crew scouting locations for a science fiction film, complete with fake passports courtesy of the Canadian government and a real, live, phony production office set up in Hollywood.

Of course, given the situation with the remaining hostages, the U.S. wasn’t in the position to tout this victory. The story was tucked into the CIA vaults until declassification in 1997. In 2007, it became the focus of a Wired magazine piece by Joshuah Bearman. The article caught the eye of the development team at Smokehouse Entertainment, who turned to screenwriter Chris Terrio to accomplish a task almost as challenging as Tony Mendez’s original stunt: write a credible script about the escape.

“Even at the genesis of the project I was cynical,” admits Terrio. “This story could so easily turn into a self-congratulatory kind of nudge/wink exercise. I wasn’t sure that I knew how to do it, and I was a little bit afraid of the tonal dissonance of the material.”

Luckily, Terrio talked down his inner cynic. His blueprint for the Ben Affleck-helmed Argo might not be exactly historically accurate, but it does a remarkable job of capturing this moment in history’s emotional truths — and it’s thrilling as hell.

Some excerpts from the interview:

When you’re basing something on a true story, how does reality come into play? Like how do you tell a three-act thriller and still honor the truthfulness of it?

Well, in a sense, because in its DNA, it’s an escape and rescue story, so you have three acts that are built in, which of course is a gift when we’re trying to write something. You have the setup, which is, “Here’s the predicament.” You have the second act, which is, “Here are complicating factors involved in the rescue.” Then, finally, you have the rescue or the escape. So, in that sense, I knew that built in was a happy ending and built in there was a lot of tension.

But then there’s the problem of a lack of a central villain.

Yeah. A lot of the forces that are coming to bear on our hero and on everyone are invisible. There’s not one antagonist in the film, it’s a widely distributed sense of threat that’s out there. It’s sort of a big geopolitical problem that they’re up against, in a sense.

Since you can’t throw invisible stones at characters, you have to begin to create stones that have weight and that have sharp edges and that feel credible. So that’s in a way how the story developed, just to get a sense of the various ticking clocks and the various sorts of obstacles hanging above the heads of the characters.

And then the next problem is how do you reconcile the three tonal worlds of the film — the world of Washington and its bureaucracy; the world of Tehran and the immediate sort of clear and present danger of the guards that are combing the city with automatic weapons; and then the world of Hollywood where the challenge really is to create a convincing fiction, or film? The problem becomes how do you write a script in which those three things are the same movie, and in which the tone feels like it carries over from one scene to another?

Some of it is just trial and error. You don’t want the characters in Hollywood — Lester Siegel and John Chambers — to turn into kind of a Vaudevillian sideshow. You want to feel that they’re human beings who are deeply invested in the lives of other human beings who are the six houseguests.

You want to feel that in the world of the CIA, it’s a deadly serious world of an espionage thriller, but also Bryan Cranston and his character has an acerbic sense of humor, so you could imagine him meeting up with Lester and with Chambers and sort of having the same conversation.

And then further, with the houseguests in Tehran, you have these six people who are in this is Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit kind of situation where they’re stuck in the house, but you also want to feel that the way that they talk and the way that they relate to each other can cut from Hollywood or from Washington to them and still feel like you’re watching characters in the same movie. I’m not sure that I did solve all these problems, but you write the script and hope for the best.

For the rest of the interview, go here.

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