Jon Stewart is getting serious this summer. No, seriously: John Oliver is going to fill in for him as Stewart takes three months off from The Daily Show to direct a film. A drama, no less. It’s based on the book Then They Came for Me: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity and Survival” by Maziar Bahari. Stewart wrote the screenplay and The Daily Show actually appears as an plot point in both the book and the script.

New York Times ArtsBeat:

A Canadian-Iranian journalist and documentarian, Mr. Bahari was jailed in Tehran in 2009 for four months, accused of plotting a revolution against the government. Shortly before his arrest, Mr. Bahari had participated in a “Daily Show” sketch, conducted by one of the show’s correspondents, Jason Jones, who was pretending to be a spy. Mr. Bahari’s captors used the footage against him.

“You can imagine how upset we were,” Mr. Stewart said, “and I struck up a friendship with him afterward.”

Mr. Stewart said he eventually read Mr. Bahari’s book and “because I’m naïve about the movie business” started to think about a film. He said he did not intend to also adapt the screenplay. “It just kind of happened,” he said.

Here’s an interview with Maziar Bahari (in which he talks about The Daily Show incident) and one with Stewart.

The Daily Show | June 7th 2011 [x]

On today’s Fresh Air: Journalist Maziar Bahari

Newsweek correspondent Maziar Bahari was arrested in Tehran in 2009 while covering Iran’s election protests. He explains how he endured 118 days in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison, where he was repeatedly interrogated and tortured — and how he now views his homeland.

Tomorrow: Newsweek correspondent Maziar Bahari, who was arrested in Tehran in 2009 while covering the protests and accused of being a spy. The evidence against him included this clip from The Daily Show. Bahari’s now written a memoir about his three month imprisonment, in which he was interrogated by a man he called Rosewater.