This interview was originally broadcast on Jan. 15, 2013.
At the Golden Globes, Ben Affleck looked genuinely surprised and delighted twice toward the end of the evening: first when he won best director for Argo, and then again when the film won for best motion picture/drama.
The film, which Affleck produced and in which he also stars, is the mostly true story of the CIA operative who helmed the rescue of six U.S. diplomats who managed to escape at the outset of the 1979 Iran crisis that held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days after militants took over the American Embassy in Tehran.
Affleck, a Middle Eastern studies major in college, was a child when the crisis happened and does not remember the news coverage.
“ It's that struggle between ... the bookkeeper's reality and ... the poet's reality, and you make judgments as a director. And my judgment falls really cleanly on the line of, 'It's OK to embellish, it's OK to compress, as long as you don't fundamentally change the nature of the story and what happened.'