DESCRIPTION:
Partial English Transcript:
Saman: You've been called anti-american,
Jon: Yes
Saman: and some people also say you are anti-Israel. Now with Rosewater coming out the Iranian regime says you're anti-Iranian
Jon: Yeah, or a Zionist
Saman: Which to me it seems like you’re pissing off all the right governments, and you must be doing something right. So what are you exactly?
Jon: I hope that I'm a comedian and a writer that is just trying to have some sort of moral barometer in the work to expose what we think are absurdities or ridiculousness and so, you know in the Venn diagram when they’re calling you all those names, it only adds to that feeling of absurdity, so in some ways it just amplifies the work you’re doing and what you think you’re doing.
Saman: Absurdity. So in a story about Iran how do you find the truth? I mean who decides what the truth is? and how do you find it?
Jon: Well, I don't. I mean the other thing is that I have to kind of own my inauthenticity. I'm not Iranian, so no matter what I do, for someone who lives there, this will be a simplistic and reductive version of their life, but hopefully from a western performer for a western audience it’s a more nuanced look into a country that we’ve called evil and, you know, if the dialogue between our two countries is “you’re the Axis of Evil …”, “well you’re the Great Satan”. That's a pretty reductive conversation, so anything I do, hopefully will be a slightly more complex and nuanced version of that conversation and, hopefully, I think the film accomplishes that idea of showing that it’s not so easy to dismiss it as one dimensional parties going at each other, there’s a lot of complexity there. For me, the film is just a reflection of Maziar’s book, which is again an interpretation of his experience, so within that, truth is probably relatively allusive figure in all this but I think the film is true to his reflection of his experience and I think that’s probably as close as I can get to what I wanted to achieve.
Saman: You were very sensitive about how Iranians would feel about this film, especially we've had experiences with like Not Without My Daughter and those kind of negative films. How do you want this film to be received by Iranians inside and outside of Iran knowing that obviously the Iranian government is not going to show this but there’s probably bootleg copies of it in Iran already.

Jon: And knowing that they’re not a monolith to begin with. I think I like it to be received in the same way that almost any work is received anywhere which is as a conversation starter, as a point of reference to create a dialogue and there are moments within the film that I hope ... a western audience might look at the character of Davood and say “wow, I didn't realize there’s a guy I could see myself hanging out with”, it's a much more comfortable picture of an Iran that I'm familiar with. But then maybe a more devout version of that individual in Iran might look at Alireza and say he was presented in the film as western educated, he's from London, he's not some robot spouting something fundamentalist. Davood is seen praying. He is the only one in the film that’s ever seen..
Saman: Kind of like Hangover, we all kind of relate to somebody in ...
Jon: I wanted this to be Hangover for Iranians. Thank you