'Argo' and the Workaday C.I.A. Officer John Goodman may not have done much research for his part in "Argo" but his castmate and director, Ben Affleck, sure did, from meeting with the real-life C.I.A. operative he plays, Tony Mendez, to scouring old news footage. "I was really tragically horrified by the extent to which the research material that I looked at from 32 years ago looked almost exactly like our news today," he said, pointing to the similarities in political situations in the Middle East, then and now. Mr. Affleck was a Middle Eastern studies major in college, though he didn't actually graduate. The "Argo" story, about the Hollywood-style rescue of a group of stranded Americans from Iran in 1979, began as an article in Wired magazine, written by Joshua Bearman, before being optioned by George Clooney and his production partner, Grant Heslov, who hired Chris Terrio to write a screenplay. It came with many meticulously researched details. "For this you have film, you have newsreel, you have photographs and people are still alive," Mr. Affleck said, over breakfast not long ago. In some ways it makes it easier, in some ways it makes it harder, because there's this 'Rashomon' effect, where people are like, 'No, no, no, I did this.' In the end Mr. Affleck treated Mr. Mendez -- who in retirement has returned to his first love, painting -- as a personal library. "It was really important to me to have him with us supporting the movie, saying, 'This is real,'" Mr. Affleck said. Whenever you get somebody else saying, 'Wait a minute, I didn't wear that shirt,' you can kind of go, This is his story. Still, it wasn't always easy to get information out of someone trained in code names and subterfuge. "He always had this kind of taciturn, inscrutable spy guy thing happening," Mr. Affleck said. Fading into the background, very quiet. You don't get much. I wouldn't say he is an interviewer's dream. You get some one-word answers - like, he doesn't feel any compunction to do your job for you. But over time, in talking to his wife, Joanna - also a former C.I.A. officer - and his children, "a picture started to emerge." One of the things Mr. Affleck wanted to focus on was the day-to-day challenges of being an international spook. "I like the brown bag-lunch C.I.A. agent," he said. That was really affecting in real life, the way they were like a traveling salesman or something. It was not dissimilar, he added, from what movie stars go through, spending months on set, away from their families. "I really could identify with Tony Mendez," he said. Very similar. In fact, I'm a little taller than him, so - 30 years in the C.I.A., risking his life and saving the lives of others - we're very much the same. The decision to play him was easy. "The actor part of me was hungry for parts," he said at another "Argo" event recently. And I was sleeping with the director, so I had influence.