By Over the summer, Jon Stewart will take a break from hosting The Daily Show to write and direct his first film, an intense drama called Rosewater. Rosewater is an adaptation of the non-fiction work Then They Came for Me: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity and Survival by Maziar Bahari and Aimee Molloy. Here’s how Deadline explains the book:
Published in 2011 by Random House, the book is Maziar Bahari’s harrowing ordeal of leaving London in June 2009 to cover Iran’s presidential elections. With a pregnant fiancee left behind, the BBC journalist expected to be away for a week. Instead, he spent the next 118 days in Iran’s most notorious prison being brutally interrogated by a man he knew only by one thing: he smelled of Rosewater.
Stewart has an odd connection to Bahari’s story: when Bahari was accused of spying, the Iranian government used an appearance on The Daily Show against him. You can watch that Daily Show appearance here and then watch his subsequent interview with Stewart here, in which he explains his ordeal in Iran.
Stewart is expected to be away for about 12 weeks, during which time John Oliver will host the show, adding extraneous E’s and U’s to words and converting everything to the metric system.
What do you think of Rosewater as a directorial debut for Stewart?
[Via Deadline]