Maziar Bahari was imprisoned, interrogated, and beaten in Iran for 118 days in 2009 on charges that he was attempting to stage the overthrow of the Iranian government. One of the pieces of "evidence" that Bahari's Iranian captors held against him as proof of his guilt was footage from a segment on The Daily Show (1996) in which he was interviewed by Jason Jones pretending to be a spy. During the sketch, Bahari called Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an "idiot". After he was released, Bahari was interviewed on "The Daily Show" by Jon Stewart, who discussed the role that the show had (inadvertently) played in his imprisonment. Stewart and Bahari became friendly, and Stewart decided to adapt Bahari's 2011 book "Then They Came for Me: A Family's Story of Love, Captivity and Survival" (co-written with Aimee Molloy) into a screenplay.
Jason Jones was cast to play himself because of an interview on The Daily Show (1996) that partially led to Maziar Bahari's imprisonment. During Bahari's interrogation, he was shown the interview between himself and Jones that the Iranian government claimed was proof that Bahari was a spy. Bahari later stated the interrogators were fabricating charges to the Iranian government and were aware of Jones' satirical and risky approach.
During the Jason Jones interview, certain shots show not only the camera purporting to be part of the film, but also the matte box of the Arri Alexa used to film the movie.
Maziar Bahari: The writer, as a man sitting in the desk near the camera when his character "confesses" to his crimes on Iranian Television.