Interview - Chris Terrio, Oscar-wining screenwriter of Argo

Chris Terrio Interview

With the awards-laden Argo hitting the home market this week, David Watson talks to Oscar-winning screenwriter Chris Terrio.

1979 was a pretty momentous year.  Sid Vicious died of a heroin overdose.  Scotland voted for home rule but didn’t get it.  The first Sony Walkmans went on sale.  Jacko released Off The Wall.  Margaret Thatcher swept to power becoming Britain’s first female Prime Minister.  And in Iran, the Islamic Revolution paved the way for the return from exile of the Ayatollah Khomeini and a wave of anti-Western unrest culminating in a mob of Islamist students storming Tehran’s US Embassy and seizing 52 American hostages who would eventually be held for 444 days by the Iranian regime.  Six US diplomats however escaped the takeover of the Embassy and went into hiding at the homes of Canadian Embassy staff, eventually being rescued in what came to be known as the “Canadian Caper.” 

Born in 1976, screenwriter Chris Terrio was three when the Canadian Caper played out and last week deservedly won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for Argo, his dramatisation of the rescue and his first major produced screenplay.

“I live in New York and I was writing a lot of spec scripts that weren’t getting made,” says Chris Terrio, “But I’d worked for a producer named Nina Wolarsky who was producing independent films in New York and she went to work for George (Clooney) and Grant (Heslov).” 

“And they had this idea about making a film about this episode and they’d optioned a magazine article about it.  But they didn’t quite know what the story was, they didn’t know whether it was like The Men Who Stare At Goats or more like Syriana or some other thing because they knew it involved all these disparate elements and tones. 

“So I asked them to let me pitch it, to let me go off and create a pitch.  So I went off and wrote quite a long pitch about what the movie might be, including a bunch of scenes that are still in the movie that I just scrawled as my original take.  And then, ah, I was cheap and they hired me.”

Obviously any film that’s based on true story takes certain liberties with the truth.  Names are changed to protect the innocent and guilty alike.  Facts are massaged.  Characters become composites.  Events are sexed up, made more dramatic, more cinematic.  Sacrifices always have to be made particularly when you’re trying to make such a complex story fit the conventions of the traditional Hollywood thriller structure.

Terrio explains: “First of all, there were other Canadian diplomats involved in this.” 

“There were John and Zena Sheardown, who are fascinating people and kinda heroic in what they did,” says Terrio, “but as there were so many different things going on the film, when you came back to Tehran, we felt that we had to centre the houseguests in one house instead of in two different houses so first of all there were things like that. 

“But then there were also all these other sub-plots like the fact that the press found out about this, which is slightly alluded to in the film in one scene, but there was this whole other story about the press getting hold of the story and if the press revealed it then they would have been compromised and they could have been killed.  So there was a whole sub-plot about that going on. 

“There was whole other things about the Canadian Government; they had to hold a special session of Parliament in Ottawa to approve the fake passports because that was something Canada had never done before.” 

“There were all these other stories around the main story,” Terrio continues, “but finally I thought the railroad track you have to follow is Tony Mendez (director Ben Affleck’s character). 

“Except for the beginning, once we get to Tony, every little tributary of the river has to come off Tony otherwise it becomes a mini-series of all these things going on.  So in centring the story on Tony, you definitely sacrifice all these other interesting aspects of the story.” 

“Honestly, the way that things happen within the Ambassador’s residence, in Ken Taylor’s residence,” says Terrio, “to me that’s like a play in itself, it’s like Jean-Paul Sartre, all these people stuck in a house together, that in itself is fascinating drama but we could only gesture at that in the course of two hours. 

“So yeah, lots of sacrifices.  And some of them quite painful.  But ultimately Ben and I shared the idea that if the audience isn’t…if you’re not constantly moving the story along then nobody’s going to see the film and then everything’s in vain.  So we tried to be as economic as we could.”

A dazzling thriller which credits its audience with at least as much intelligence as the filmmakers, the engine driving Argo is the real-life character of CIA exfiltration specialist Tony Mendez, played in the movie by director Ben Affleck.

“He lives in Maryland now and I went down to meet him and spend some time with him, spend nights drinking with him and getting to know him,” says Terrio.  “And then he took me to Washington DC and took me to Langley so I got to meet other retired CIA officers, mostly, some of whom were very active during the Cold War. 

“And there’s this whole sort of…colony of former Cold War spies who now live in DC, both on the American side and on the Soviet side.  You have certain guys who were like KGB agents who now are buddies with Tony Mendez. 

“I felt very lucky that most of the participants are still alive and so I could get details from them that otherwise I wouldn’t be able to get.  You know you’re not gonna necessarily find in a book the fact that the CIA “Pit,” which is the big office where things are done, that it’s always a mess and the coffee maker didn’t work and the ashtrays were piled a foot high and all these little textural details that give you the quotidian sense of life as a CIA officer, which I think takes you out of a glossier version of the intelligence world and more into the world of Argo.”

“All of the houseguests now have seen the film and they’re really supportive,” Terrio continues.  “Joe Stafford who’s portrayed by Scoot McNairy in the film hasn’t seen it, he’s in the Sudan, but his wife Kathy’s seen it and everyone else has seen it. 

“And once the actors playing the houseguests started talking to the houseguests, we would get interesting moments on set where, like, Rory Cochrane who plays Lee Schatz would say to Ben: “I’m not going to smoke in this scene because Lee didn’t smoke at this time,” Ben would be like “I want you to smoke,” and Rory would be like “No!  Lee doesn’t smoke!” 

“And that’s always the tricky part of dealing with living people.  You have to give yourself licence to fictionalise things even while you’re dwelling upon them as a resource.”

While Argo deals intelligently with a dark time in US foreign relations and the events it depicts still reverberate today, it’s also a sharp satire on the movie biz, turning a jaundiced eye on Hollywood, allowing the filmmakers to successfully juggle very different tones.

“A lot of that was trial and error,” admits Terrio.  “There were certain scenes that we felt went too far into the territory of The Player or What Makes Sammy Run?  We could never get too broad as a Hollywood satire but that said, within the film, you do have people who embodied these disparate tones. 

“John Chambers who John Goodman plays really was, first of all he looked strikingly like John Goodman and second, he was this kind of acerbic, hilarious guy who was making creature masks on the set of sci-fi films but by night was working for the CIA developing disguise technology. 

“So right in the middle of the story, in Burbank, California, we had the two-faced Janus who embodied two tones of the film, which is to say, acerbic Hollywood satire and espionage thriller.  So, I felt like we had this gift of having John Chambers at the centre of the movie. 

“But then, also other characters, like the Alan Arkin character, developed around…some of it just around my own observations as kind of an outsider coming from New York, looking at Hollywood.  And some of it just because of my love of ‘70s films that could embody that.  Like Network that so many screenwriters always talk about, it’s a bit of a cliché, but there’s a film where you have Paddy Chayefsky who has almost this dark, immigrant sense of humour and he could focus that on big, political issues. 

“So, at once, you could have this satirical film that is actually about something broader and bigger and important.  Whenever I was lost tonally, I would look to those films and think “Well, they pulled it off, so if I can do it half as well or a quarter as well as those guys, I’ll be ok.”

There are no big FX-laden action scenes in Argo; much like Tomas Alfredson’s game-changing adaptation of John le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy much of the tension in key scenes is derived by watching grey men, bureaucrats, arguing in a room.  How do you make that exciting?

“It’s hard,” says Terrio.  “I think of film as, primarily, a visual medium.  I think there’s the theatre and there’s fiction, prose and poetry.  And then there’s film which has to take in elements of all those kinds of writing but ultimately is a visual experience. 

“Those scenes, they’re hard.  You write them and you tweet them and you keep trying different things but ultimately you rely on the director and rely on the actors because those scenes are so difficult to direct and you have to be so careful not only on the day of the shoot but so careful in the casting. 

“You know, Bryan Cranston giving one loaded look to Ben Affleck tells you a whole lot that I couldn’t accomplish in the script or Zeljko Ivanek, who’s the State Department guy giving this ridiculous idea about the hostages escaping on bicycles, which was a real idea by the way that the State Department floated, that could easily sound like Theatre of the Absurd.  But, you get an actor as truthful as Zeljko, and you don’t doubt for a second that this State Department guy is earnestly giving this bad idea.  So, there’s a lot of tweaking, but ultimately it’s in the director’s hands.”

Terrio’s admiration for Affleck is obvious and touching as he enthuses about his director.

“Ben, and I’m not just saying this because he’s famous and stuff,” says Terrio, “but Ben really is the easiest, smartest person to work with. 

“This is the first movie I’ve gotten produced that I’ve written and I really didn’t know what to expect.  I got a call one day on my cell phone that Ben Affleck was calling to talk about your script and I had no idea, I don’t know a lot of movie stars, I didn’t know what to expect but he immediately put me at ease and you just felt, like, he was - in a nerdy, intense way - he was dedicated to trying to make the film good. 

“And that’s where I feel like we could meet because, as a writer, you spend a lot of time alone, I’m probably, like, a slightly awkward, nerdy person but the great thing is when you find somebody who exists on that same nerdy plain as you do and, maybe I’m not that good at small talk, but I thrive if we’re talking about how to make the scene better. 

“So Ben and I immediately clicked on that level because he’s a really dedicated director and a student of film.  He has a library in his house of thousands of films and can just immediately refer to any number of films from any era, including the ‘70s which is probably his favourite era and mine.” 

A director himself, there must surely have been moments where Terrio thought: “That should be me.  I should be directing this.”?

“It’s such a big complicated film,” says Terrio, “and my experience in film has tended to be smaller and more independent so, sure as a director there are definitely some moments where you think “Oh God, I’d love to be in his chair,” but Ben was actually so inclusive and so generous about it and so I felt like we were on the same team and I would say to him “You know, I’m happy to be Robin if you’re Batman.”  I felt like he genuinely had a utility belt and a skillset that I didn’t have and had so much experience and has been in so many films and directed two very good films, I was just grateful to have somebody with his virtuosic abilities to just get in there and make it work.”

Terrio continues: “You show up sometimes for work and it’s a scene with thousands of extras in Istanbul outside the embassy, I think “Christ!  I’m glad I’m not in charge of all these people!  I’m glad I’m not the guy who has to make it work!”  So it’s been like free film school for me because I’ve got to work on the script and then watch really good people execute it.  But, you know, Ben and I are gonna work together on something, we’ve made plans, we’re gonna work together again so, yeah, I think something went right with us creatively.”

BAFTA award winning Argo is out on DVD, Blu-ray and digital download on Monday  4^th MARCH.