Affleck to direct Argo… Vis à Vis!

Definitely on a roll with his first two directorial efforts, the critically acclaimed Gone Baby Gone and last year’s The Town; Ben Affleck is set to continue his solid streak with pre-production beginning on Argo. Straying outside his Massachusetts comfort zone, Argo is an adaptation of a 2007 Wired article detailing the daring rescue of six US diplomats hiding in Tehran, Iran during the 1979 Iranian Revolution after the storming of the US Embassy.

Also known as ‘The Canadian Caper‘ – the operation involved an elaborate hoax conceived by famed former CIA ‘Tech-Op’, Officer Tony Mendez (Affleck) to dress the group up as an ignorant Hollywood film crew, location-scouting in Iran for a big-budget, sci-fi epic. Going so far as to establish a production company (Studio Six) outfitted with movie posters on the Columbia lot (vacated by Michael Douglas), business cards, doctored concept art and adverts in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter; The deception eventually paid off with the six convincing their Iranian captives to allow them to fly-on to Zurich on Canadian passports.

Along for the rescue is Oscar-winner Alan Arkin as real-life producer Lester Siegel and John Goodman as Oscar-winning ‘inventor of Spock ears’, make-up artist John Chambers.

Chambers constantly walked the line between cinematic-art and espionage, performing numerous transformations for covert operations in-between stints on hit films such as Planet of the Apes. A lot of his lesser-known work can be seen at Washington’s International Spy Museum.

With The Men Who Stare at Goats collaborators George Clooney and Grant Heslov on-board as producers, Argo (originally titled ‘The Lord of Light‘ about a theme park manned by killer robots) is primed as one of the must-see films scheduled for 2013. Of note is that the original script was #9 on the most popular unproduced screenplays of 2010.

You can listen to the tale as told by two of its survivors, Mark and Cora Lije here.