Jon Stewart Teases a Wild Sequel for 'Rosewater'
Though he may be a first-time director, Jon Stewart is well-versed in the topsy-turvy economics of Hollywood. And so while his debut feature film Rosewater is a small sociopolitical drama about the imprisonment of journalist Maziar Bahari in Iran, that doesn’t mean Stewart doesn’t have plans to cash in by turning it into a franchise.
"We’re going to send him to other repressive countries and just see what happens. We’re going to do it as bait," Stewart joked to Yahoo’s Katie Couric in a recent interview. "We’re going to call it Maziar Bahari: Take Me. It’s the opposite of Taken. We’re going to send him and Liam Neeson to a bunch of countries. He’s going to get captured and Liam Neeson has to go get him.”
Okay, so maybe his film about the politically charged incarceration and torture of Bahari doesn’t exactly lend itself to a sequel. But it’s still a film worth seeing, in part to discover how Stewart’s distinctive comedic voice translates from The Daily Show to a big screen drama.
It wasn’t hard to write the screenplay, he told Couric, because it involved similar comedic beats and storytelling conventions. But as he told Yahoo Movies last week, directing the thing required him to admit his ignorance fo certain cinema conventions.
"There’s a vocabulary to filmmaking that they’re all very fluent in and very comfortable with, in the same way there’s a vocabulary to television," he said. "It was stepping into that, and making sure that the department heads that I’d brought in were really comfortable knowing that I didn’t know. So I was very clear with them, not in a Rumsfeldian way, that I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I wanted to make sure they felt empowered to raise flags early and often."
Watch more of Couric’s interview with Stewart as he talks about the future of The Daily Show:
