First, Iran is planning on suing Hollywood filmmakers — including the creators of “Argo” — for contributing to “Iranophobia” throughout decades of films.
Now, New Zealand — a country with more sheep than people — is mad over one line of dialogue early on in the film, the Associated Press reports.
At the beginning of the movie, CIA agent Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) asks his supervisor Jack O’Donnell (Bryan Cranston) what happened to the group of six Americans that escaped the American embassy in Tehran.
“The six of them went out a back exit,” O’Donnell says. “Brits turned them away. Kiwis turned them away. Canadians took them in.”
This is the first and only time New Zealand is mentioned in the film, but the country’s Parliament has “passed a motion” (whatever that means) that states Affleck “saw fit to mislead the world about what actually happened.”
According to public documents, diplomats from Britain and New Zealand did in fact help the Americans by giving them food and even driving them to the airport when they eventually fled Iran. But Canada was the only country to offer the Americans shelter.
Back in February, New Zealand Prime Minister John Key asked the producers of “Argo” to publicly apologize for the film’s portrayal of the country, the Washington Post reported at the time.
Affleck responded with a non-apology apology, “Let me just start by saying I love New Zealand, and I love New Zealanders,” Affleck said. “I think that it’s tricky. You walk a fine line. You are doing a historical movie and naturally you have to make some creative choices about how you are going to condense this into a three-act structure.”
Basically, the Kiwis have their panties in a twist over a diss in a historical fiction film that nobody would have even noticed had they not brought it up in the first place.