Jon Stewart’s Rosewater

Alexander Bisley interviews Jon Stewart:

IT’S SLIGHTLY SURREAL interviewing Jon Stewart, The Daily Show interviewer. His debut film Rosewater tells the story of Maziar Bahari (played by Gael García Bernal), imprisoned in solitary confinement for 107 days in Iran in 2009 after appearing on Stewart’s satirical news programme.

Bahari was detained for 118 days and tortured merely because he did a satirical interview on The Daily Show. The name of the fim refers to the smell of his integrator. Bahari was usually blindfolded when tortured and interrogated.

Stewart’s original idea was a film in Farsi, with an all Persian cast. “Maziar was the one who said, ‘I really don’t want to do that. I want it to be in English, and I want it to be as universal as it can possibly be, because these are issues that need to be seen as universal issues and need to be placed in as wide a context as we can place it.’

In a way a pity they couldn’t do a version in Farsi, for Iran.