Two weeks ago, Ben Affleck announced he was leaving Baz Luhrman’s Great Gatsby to direct his third featue – true-life thriller Argo .
Set to direct and star, the film will based on a 2007 Wired magazine article written by Joshuah Bearman , titled ‘How The CIA Used A Fake Sci-fi Flick To Rescue Americans From Tehran’.
Set during the Iran hostage crisis of 1979, the film tells the story of six stranded US embassy workers and the CIA’s elaborate mission to rescue them – disguising the trapped Americans as a movie crew scouting locations for a fictional sci-fi epic named Argo .
With echoes of The Great Escape and classic ’70s spy thrillers, the story is pure cinema – definitely worth a read.
Affleck proved he could handle sweaty-palmed tension with last year’s The Town and, if this is anything as engrossing as the article on which it’s based, he should have another hit on his hands.
Shooting starts this summer, with George Clooney on board as producer.
Argo is set for release in 2013.