Ben Affleck tells Terry Gross about doing the research for Argo, which is nominated for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay at this weekend’s Academy Awards:

The earliest memory I have of … world events is President Reagan’s assassination attempt, which was 1982. So this was sort of history in the same way [that] doing a movie about the Revolutionary War would have been history for me. I had to start from scratch.

Image courtesy of Warner Brothers

Ben Affleck on his fondness for impressions:

“I like to do impressions. … I feel a little bashful of it because I know it’s not really acting. Like, once you get into mimicry and impressions, it is a gift and a gift that I love to watch. The guy on SNL who can do Denzel, to me, it’s just amazing, but I try not to rely too much on it because I know that it’s sort of like, I used to play chess a lot with my brother and Matt [Damon] when we all lived together, and then we got into speed chess, and all the teachers will say, ‘You can’t play speed chess. It will ruin your game.’ And I think there’s something about impressions a little bit that will ruin your game, because it’s just like the fast, Chinese-food-accessible version of a character.”

Image of Affleck in Argo courtesy of Warner Brothers

The film’s climax, a series of movie-ish narrow escapes, had me leaning forward saying, “Go. Go. Go. Go. Go-go-go-go.” I was annoyed, though, to learn that after all the movie’s assurances of realism, from the prologue to photos over the credits showing the actors side by side with photos of their real-life counterparts, those terrifying close calls are all invented. If it seems too Hollywood to be true, that’s because it is.

- David Edelstein’s review of the film, Argo:Too Good To Be True, Because It Isn’t