On Air interview

Seacrest interviews Stewart during On Air With Ryan Seacrest about writing and directing his film Rosewater. The film is about the life and capture of Maziar Bahari by Iranian forces.

He was an Iranian journalist that we met when we sent somebody to Iran to cover the new Axis of Evil. And he spoke with us, along with a couple of other people, and the Iranian officials arrested him in 2009 and showed him the piece he did with our stupid show as evidence that he was a spy. And they kept him in solitary for 118 days. So I thought, ‘Jeez, I could either give him a gift certificate to like a Baskin Robins, or maybe make a movie about him?’ I had to make it up somehow.