Director and writer Jon Stewart on the set of Rosewater. Feature film tells the story of journalist Maziar Bahari Rosewater, who was imprisoned in Iran after appearing on the Daily Show
Jon Stewart's Comedy Central program, The Daily Show, satirizes the way the 24-hour television news often reduces complex real events into diagrammatic "news narratives" of good guys, bad guys and one-dimensional motivations. The news-narrative version of how Stewart came to direct his first feature film, Rosewater, would go something like this:
In 2009, Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari appeared on Stewart's show in a mock news item. As a result, Bahari was imprisoned for four months in Tehran. Out of guilt, Stewart decided to make a movie about it.
Bahari and Stewart, who came to the recent Toronto International Film Festival to jointly promote their film, tell a story that's less linear but more credible. It's about two men with similarly serious but ironic sensibilities, and similar age – Stewart's 51, Bahari's 47 – both with a high profile in the media world, who became friends. They wanted to make a movie together, and since no one else was available, they did it themselves.
In 2009, Bahari, a Newsweek correspondent based in London, was in Iran to cover the "green movement" protests that arose after the 2009 Iranian presidential election, calling for the removal of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The movement drew inspiration from foreign media coverage, and Ahmadinejad's regime decided to crack down. Intelligence officials targeted Bahari to intimidate other Iranian-speaking journalists. As evidence that Bahari was communicating with an "American spy," they pointed to Bahari's interview with Daily Show "correspondent" Jason Jones, in character as a secret agent in a segment called "Persians of Interest."
The Daily Show joke became real news when Bahari was subsequently arrested. He was confined in Tehran's notorious Evin Prison, where he was kept in solitary, blindfolded and brutally interrogated for four months. (The title of the film comes from his interrogator's favourite cologne.) Bahari knew that he might be killed, as another Iranian-Canadian, freelance photographer Zahra Kazemi, was in 2003. Instead, he was released after 118 days, after "confessing" to his supposed crimes.
Post-release, Bahari wrote a 10,000-word cover story for Newsweek and appeared on The Daily Show to promote the article. He described his experiences in a way that was often absurd (his interrogator, for some reason, was obsessed with the idea of New Jersey as a place of licentious promise). He and Stewart hit it off. The two men started meeting regularly for breakfast to talk about Bahari's upcoming book and a possible film.
Bahari's 2011 book, Then They Came for Me, was a New York Times bestseller. It was a story about growing up in Iran, and about his family history (both his father and sister had done time in Iranian jails). Bahari, who left Iran at 18, earned a communications degree at Montreal's Concordia University. Shortly after graduation, he made his first of a dozen documentaries, The Voyage of the Saint Louis, about the ship filled with German Jewish refugees that attempted to escape Nazi Germany. It was the first film about the Holocaust made by a Muslim filmmaker.
When Bahari expressed interested in developing his book into a feature film, Stewart volunteered to help produce it.
"He was going to find a writer and a director and make the film. But the process took a long time, as it does in Hollywood," Bahari says. "A couple of years later, in 2012, Jon decided to go ahead and write the script on his own. And then, because he had put so much energy and emotion into writing the script, he decided to direct it."
Adds Stewart: "It sort of flowed from our common understanding but, in some ways, from not understanding the movie business, which is a much more glacial method than I'm used to. So we would settle on writers we loved, but it turned out other people loved them as well and they had already been hired for other projects."
After "a couple of years" without progress, Stewart says he felt he saw a "reasonably clear path through the script, and the easiest way to get it done was to just do it. After that, Maziar and I had such a nice collaboration going, and we seemed to be on such a similar page – that there was a concern that we could bring in another personality and it wouldn't gel, and we'd be stuck. I was confident I could bring in the right people to bolster my inexperience and provide the things I couldn't, and it would be a better way to tell the story than risk it not getting done."
The film is divided into two sections. The first part of the film, shot in Jordan as a stand-in for Iran, sees Bahari (played by Gael Garcia Bernal) arriving in Tehran and getting swept up in the euphoria of street protests and the excitement of impending social change.
The most challenging part of Rosewater, from a filmmaking perspective, is its second half, when Bahari was in his prison cell, with little contact beyond his interrogator, Rosewater. Stewart decided to avoid a more conventional approach, relieving the potential monotony by using a flashback structure, or parallel scenes showing the efforts to get him out of jail:
"I wanted the audience to feel the discomfort of isolation, though not to be point where it becomes unbearable to watch. We're very accustomed to a sort of torture-porn aspect of what it's like to be traumatized in a prison: tortured, beaten and water-boarded and so on. The relative banality of being in solitary may not be what most people think of as torture, but it is, and it's ubiquitous. Thousands of journalists and bloggers and activists are alone and never get out."
Bahari, who was on location for most of the shoot, agreed: "What's brilliant about the film, to me, is that it doesn't desensitize or repulse you with the brutality, but focuses on this claustrophobic, psychological pressure which is not only the universal reality of imprisonment, but also allows you to look at this relationship between these two men. Rosewater isn't some cartoon sadist, but a human being."
There's another reductive narrative about Rosewater that Stewart and Bahari reject – that their film serves as some model of cultural bridge-building. It is a meeting of the minds between an Iranian-born journalist and a Jewish-American TV personality, who shot his film in an Arab country.
"That's where we met – right in the middle," Bahari says, laughing.
"In the middle of the Venn diagram where no one likes you," Stewart adds.
"But it wasn't like that," says Bahari. "It was never like: 'Oh, I want to build cultural bridges. I want to change the world,' That was the beauty of working with Jon. He wasn't some activist filmmaker. He has a sense of humour [and] saw it as a good story about family and family love. And then you had this important, political, historical, journalistic background."
Stewart agrees. "I think that a good story, well-told, accomplishes those things without that being the goal of it," he says. "One of the biggest problems with activist work is that it values the activism above the art, and it can get in the way … The goal is to tell this really compelling story as best we can."