00:00How did you get a sense of the culture of a CIA officer?
00:05Well, Jack O'Donnell is an amalgam of people at the CIA.
00:09He's not any one particular person.
00:11So I needed to just get a sense of the culture of a CIA officer
00:18and make up my own idea of who this person was going to be.
00:24So I did.
00:25I went to Langley, Virginia, and I talked with CIA officers there,
00:30and it was an eye-opening experience.
00:33This is a group of men and women
00:36who are so used to keeping secrets
00:38and so used to not saying a word
00:41that at first it was a little difficult
00:44to open them up a bit.
00:45They would give monosyllabic answers,
00:48you know, yes, no, yeah,
00:50sometimes, you know, occasionally,
00:52you know, that sort of thing,
00:53and you keep trying to pry it open.
00:55And I think they were surprised
00:57because I think they thought,
00:58assumed that I would be asking more questions about specific missions and
01:03the danger of that and quite frankly what I was after more is to try to create
01:08a base a foundation of who my guy would be and so I was asking personal questions
01:14age background marriage status strain on marriage separation for so long what
01:23about just the fact that you can't come home and talk to your wife or husband
01:26about what you do for 30 years you can't talk to them about anything how does
01:32that how does that work and they were like well doesn't work very well it was
01:35divorced twice you know is it okay all right now how does how do you make it
01:39work and another guy happened to marry a CIA officer and this is very common
01:45because then they go home and they realize we don't have to ask each other
01:50we know that
01:54Ben is fantastic a tremendous command of the story an absolute passion for
02:03filmmaking number one and for making sure that he does the best job he can you
02:11know in the directing that I've done I always get a sense that I have to stay on
02:16top of it I have to stay on top of it because during production if I miss a beat
02:20if I miss this I can't go back and you know it's hard and maybe you won't have
02:23the same opportunity again and he has the same anxiety but outwardly on the set
02:30you show confidence and comfort so that your cast and crew feel relaxed and we can
02:35do the best job we can and you know it's it's great we had long conversations
02:41about the character and the relationship between my character and his and and where
02:45it fits in the movie and it was a it was the the best experience you can hope for
02:57it's actually a lot harder to actually film those tense scenes because we are
03:02doing them in compacted form we're shooting all of the scenes at the CIA in a
03:09we're not intercutting and coming back on all that we have to just imagine how
03:15the tension has been cranked up and so when you go through a script you you get
03:21that sensibility hopefully it hits you when you first read it and you go oh at
03:25this point it's really tense but not quite as tense as that you know and then
03:31here's absolute relief at the end so you you can see the the markers and where
03:36your character needs to go and then you you have to work on how I can justify
03:42ratcheting up to that point of tension where you're vibrating at certain points
03:46and and that's through experience and and and imagination quite frankly
03:57Argo is an important story it's a heroic story and I think there's a lesson it's
04:03saying we we are culpable for our actions in the very beginning of the
04:09movie we say the the culpability of the United States and and putting the shah
04:13of Iran in that position and and we as a as a country I think what I take away
04:20from it is that any country needs to be responsible for its actions and and to
04:26to to lead by example not by might and the ultimate message out of Argo is one
04:34of cooperation look what great things can happen when when working well with
04:40people for a greater good things that are beyond your own personal gain all
04:45these people who have to work anonymously in the Hollywood section of the movie too
04:50as well as the CIA everyone did it for the right reasons to save the lives of
04:56human beings there's no greater story than that
