Hostage to Hollywood

If ever there's a career to demonstrate the fickle nature of Hollywood then it belongs to Ben Affleck. Bursting on the scene with a starring role in Chasing Amy, and Good Will Hunting, for which he won an Oscar for best writing (original screenplay) with his friend, co-writer and co-star Matt Damon, Affleck was a golden boy of the thriving US indie scene of the 1990s. Then came the blockbusters - Armageddon, Pearl Harbor - followed by the fallow years. Facing intense media scrutiny over his relationship with Jennifer Lopez, his choices got worse by the film - typified by their abysmal 2003 romantic comedy Gigli.

"I've experienced wild ends of the spectrum - I've been through all different kinds of movies," Affleck says, sitting in London's Soho Hotel and looking more relaxed than his roller-coaster career might suggest. "For better or worse, I've seen a lot of different sides of this business. I had an acting teacher who's a really smart guy, who said: 'If you believe them when they say you're good, you better believe them when they say you're bad.' What he meant, in part, was to develop your own criteria for evaluating your work … and maybe your own life as well." He pauses, strokes his chin. "I can't say I'm always able to do that."

Still, nobody could quite have predicted Affleck's reinvention. Never mind Surviving Christmas - his 2004 yuletide abomination - he survived a Hollywood slump that would have destroyed most. Moreover, he has emerged from the ashes of a ruined career as a director to die for. His 2007 directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, is a gristle-hard adaptation of Dennis Lehane's novel about a child kidnapping. Three years later came The Town, another taut Boston-set drama.

"Switching to being a director was daunting internally because there's this sense that it's a real step up, in terms of responsibility," he says. "I was quite scared when I got Gone Baby Gone - I was quite terrified by the whole shoot and made a lot of mistakes, and learned a lot. Fortunately because of Warner Brothers, I got another crack at directing and I really love it. It's just one of those things, like jumping off a diving board - you just have to do it. It's scary, you don't know if you're going to do it … but luckily, as actors, we spend a lot of time on set, so we know what that feels like."

Now comes Argo, arguably his most accomplished movie to date. "I think Argo was the riskiest film I've made and also the most rewarding."

You can see why, with its juxtaposition of the gritty feel of his first two feature films with a wry look at "Hollyweird". And while it's based on true events, you're unlikely to find a stranger story than this. In 1979, Islamist students and militants raided the US embassy in Tehran, with 52 Americans held hostage for 444 days. Six people escaped, taking refuge in the Canadian embassy, and it's the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA's) hare-brained plan to rescue the six that forms the subject of Argo.

Only declassified in 1997 - and brought to light in a 2007 article for Wired magazine by Joshuah Bearman - it emerges the CIA sent an operative, Tony Mendez (played by Affleck), to Iran posing as a Hollywood film producer. The plan? To pretend he's on a location scout with his crew of six, then leave the country right under the noses of the authorities. The film? A sci-fi extravaganza called "Argo", based on a real script and put into production by two Hollywood players that Mendez recruits - make-up/effects guru John Chambers (John Goodman) and producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin).