EXCLUSIVE | 'Tehran' director Daniel Syrkin says show was shot in Athens and cast was 'from all over the world'
'Tehran' Season 1 has come to an end and many fans are praying for a Season 2 of the show. The Israeli thriller revolves around Tamar Rabinyan (Niv Sultan), a Mossad agent, who has returned to her hometown Tehran in order to carry out a dangerous mission. She needs to neutralize Iranian war defenses so that Israeli warplanes can bomb a nuclear plant and prevent Iran from obtaining an atomic bomb. Things don't go as planned, of course, as her romance with an Iranian makes matters further complicated. In an interview with MEAWW, director Daniel Syrkin talks about the show, the challenges of making it as well as what people could learn from it. The Israeli director's film Out of Sight (2006) won the Israeli Academy Award for Best Director and was also presented at the Cannes International Film Festival.
On how he came up with the idea, Syrkin explains the story. "We have this young, gorgeous 25-year-old girl, a Mossad agent. She goes back to the place where she was born, now as an enemy. And she has to, you know, to fulfill this huge mission. We also have the Iranian spy hunter... the unusual thing about the series (is) that we get to show the Iranian guy hunting for the Mossad. He's a big character, and you will maybe even kind of fall in love with him. And sometimes you're not sure if you want him to succeed or not."
He added, "A couple of years ago, my friend and one of the producers came to me with this idea and they had some of it written and I thought to myself, you know, I love the word Tehran. Just the word Tehran itself. It's like a fairy tale, it's an unknown place, there's a veil over it. There's literally a curtain over it. And I thought it's amazing, putting this young girl there, of course I want to do it. And, I was really fortunate enough to be able to sit with them in the writing room for months and discover this together with them."
They weren't able to shoot in Tehran, for "obvious reasons", as Syrkin says. Yet, they found solace in Athens. Asked about the challenges of shooting the show, he said, "We wanted it to be really entertaining, you know for people to just keep clinging to the edge of the seat. So we had this creative challenge, which is a normal challenge for any good thriller, but the bigger challenges were to recreate Tehran elsewhere. We weren't able to shoot in Iran for many various reasons, you know, obvious reasons."
"So first thing was to find a place to shoot Tehran and we found Athens, which came out to be perfect. We found an amazing Athenian production company to help us with it. With their help, we recreated whole streets of Tehran, changing a sign, putting numbers on cars, getting rid of American cars and putting European cars instead. We did extensive research. I had to learn lessons for about four months, just to be able to understand what our actors are saying. We had many advisers and we cast solely people who really speak good Persian. We found them from all over the world."
Was the language a barrier? "It would be okay for people to hear Farsi and two people, four people to speak Hebrew. We thought that it would be okay. And we saw that we need to be accurate and true. We wanted to make some realism. I would say it's a very aesthetic realism, what we do in our series. And I thought that while doing it. We thought we wanted to be real and true. And for our audience all over the world to embrace it. I didn't know Farsi was so beautiful. And I can hear some and I can catch some words in it."
Syrkin wants people to learn many things from the show, one of them being the culture of Iran. He says, "I want people to be entertained by the show. For me, that's the most important. I want them to come watch the show in this really uncertain, unstable world they're in just to have this escape and this thing that they can watch and really thoroughly enjoy. I think they can relate to the show. And also I think that through the series we can have people really learn about Iran, which is an amazing deep culture, full of young people who just want to live a normal life. That's what we're trying to show."
'Tehran' is streaming on Apple TV+.