An Interview with Moshe Zonder, Co-Creator, Writer, & Executive Producer of ‘Tehran’

Moshe Zonder is a talented writer that currently serves as part of the creative trust behind the award winning, runaway hit, Apple TV+ series, Tehran, and we here at NTG were lucky enough to sit down with Moshe to discuss his work on the show.

John Betancourt: If you could, tell us a little bit about what inspired the creation of Tehran.
 
Moshe Zonder: My desire and inspiration for writing “Tehran” stemmed from my ambition, since my time as an investigative journalist, to know the position of those defined in Israel’s national narrative as my enemies -- those who want to kill me -- and to hear it directly from them, without go-betweens and, ideally, on their homes.
 
I was privileged to do that numerous times, in meetings with Palestinians in the West Bank, in Gaza and in Arab countries. I gave expression to this in the way I determined the DNA of “Fauda”, during its development and while writing its first season. Afterwards, I searched for the next challenge. The idea of studying and understanding the world of Iran was both inviting and gripping. We dove into about two years of research, during which I wrote the biography and description of the main characters, Tamar Rabinyan and Faraz Kamali, additional supporting characters, and an initial season synopsis. I estimated that there was a chance that the series would fascinate a worldwide audience by raising the curtain on the hidden, pulsating emotions behind the news headlines about the clandestine and open war between Israel and Iran. Those headlines, in fact, are a smokescreen, and not a story with human intimacy and truth to it, starring characters that no one recognizes, ready to risk their lives at any moment and be plunged into conflicts. In the framework of the Israeli-Iranian conflict, these characters tell a universal story of migration and identity. As the son of immigrants, that’s a subject that’s in my blood.
 
John Betancourt: From a writing standpoint, what went into creating such rich and dynamic characters?
 
Moshe Zonder: Every script writer has their own way of writing. I believe, first of all, in writing an in-depth biography for each character, from the main character down to the most marginal. I dive into their childhoods, write in great detail about who their parents were, about their adolescent years, and on and on, although it’s clear that most of those details will never make it into the scripts. I do this for several reasons: The great mistake that threatens the work of every script writer, even the most experienced, is to force their characters to make decisions that they wouldn’t normally make, merely to advance the plot in the direction set by the writer. The better you’re acquainted with the characters you’ve created, the greater the chance that you won’t step on this ‘mine’ and do harm to the characters and script. In addition, writing detailed biographies enables you to write characters with a richer human and emotional texture, whose dilemmas move dynamically among several planes. And the bonus, which always surprises me, is that when writing character biographies ‘strands’ seem to emerge on their own which, if you tug on them, can reveal potential plotlines that can run throughout an entire episode and, sometimes, an entire season. 
 
John Betancourt: Now there is a real sense of realism that this series exudes, how did you as a writer, bring that to life?
 
Moshe Zonder: Writing well and realistically, with viewers believing what they see and biting their nails in anxiety over the fate of characters, it’s like spinning gold from straw, in my mind. In the German folk tale “Rumpelstiltskin” by the Brothers Grimm, the king imprisons the miller’s daughter in a room filled with mountains of straw and commands her to spin it into gold by the next morning – or be executed. She, of course, fails, but then an imp who knows how to do so comes to her rescue -- but demands her firstborn child in payment.
 
For us script writers, whose work rooms are often like prisons and who, instead of being executed at dawn face murderous deadlines, no imp appears to rescue us in the middle of the night.
 
The only ways I know of writing realistic scripts and, as much as possible, avoiding off-key artificiality are to first conduct deep, ongoing research, and to know what you’re writing about. Yet it’s important to clarify that our series is entertainment and not documentary. We conducted research for two years before the beginning of writing "Tehran", and the research continued in parallel with the writing. Beyond that, writing is actually re-writing, again and again, draft after draft, sharper and more precise, sometimes for as much as 20 hours a day; it means taking into account that the first draft is always terrible, and accepting the help of fellow script writers in creating a writers’ room. Omri Shenhar and I wrote the first season of “Tehran” on our own. In the second season we were head writers, joined by Assaf Beiser, Natalie Marcus, Lee Galit, Roy Idan and Marc Grey, with director Daniel Syrkin also very much involved. Only by working together did we manage to safely reach the finish line and meet our deadlines.
 
John Betancourt: What kinds of challenges did you run into in bringing such an intense second season to life?
 
Moshe Zonder: Morgan Wandell and Oliver Jones from Apple TV+ played a major role in the intensity of the second season’s scripts. Working with them was a lesson in writing. When people tell me that they held their breaths throughout an entire episode, or needed an oxygen tank nearby, and say how much they identified with a particular characters’ distress, or understood the complicated dramatic, intimate acts of another, I understand that we managed to do our job. 
 
John Betancourt: What kind of espionage and spy influences, both real and fictional, did you inject into this story?
 
Moshe Zonder: For example, in terms of the connection between Tamar Rabinyan (Niv Sultan) and Marjan Montazemi (Glenn Close) I can think of the influence of the British espionage series, ‘The Sandbaggers’, which I saw as a teenage and which remained etched in my memory. The two of them share a professional relationship roiled by intense underlying emotions, which they repeatedly put aside for the good of the mission. Or, if we think about the best espionage character ever written by the greatest author of the genre, John le Carré’s George Smiley, I thought about Smiley more than once in relation to the character of Faraz Kamali (Shaun Toub) of the Revolutionary Guards. Smiley and Kamali are very different characters, with almost opposite temperaments, but Kamali has the same skepticism, sixth sense and precise understanding of people, the same ability to detect when people are lying to him and the ability to connect the dots and see the big picture, when no one else on his side seems capable of doing so. Yet, despite this, just as the spy Bill Haydon in ‘Tinker tailor soldier spy" managed to penetrate Smiley’s home and carry on an affair with his wife Ann on the orders of Moscow's Karla, so does Marjan penetrate Kamali’s home, creating a therapeutic connection with his wife, Nahid.
 
And there’s also the late Sylvia Rafael, one of the best Mossad agents in history. She was born in South Africa, and one of her ‘covers’ was as a Canadian press photographer with anti-Israel and anti-Semitic tendencies and being supported Palestinians. Rafael, a beautiful and impressive woman, the true story of whose achievements will probably never be told, managed to do things and reach places that a few male Mossad agent ever did. Her level of professionalism, bravery, restraint – and her ability to cause people to do what she asked of them, even if they’d been ordered to do the opposite – was phenomenal.
 
I thought of Sylvia Rafael while writing the first season, when Tamar was forced to escape impossible situations. I asked myself: what would Sylvia Rafael would have done at such moments? I also thought about her while writing the second season. In 1973, during a botched assassination attempt on the wrong person (one of two worst operational failures in Mossad history), Rafael was trapped in Norway, stood trial along with five other Mossad agents, and sentenced to prison. During her incarceration and after her release, she was furious with the Mossad, the criminal negligence of whose people led to her capture. In the second season, Tamar is also angry with the Mossad in the wake of the events at the end of the first season, when Iranian intelligence made a mockery of Mossad people and Tamar managed to escape by the skin of her teeth. In the second season, Tamar has matured and is much more skeptical about the instructions she receives from the Mossad, not trusting anyone – just like Sylvia Rafael. 
 
John Betancourt: What does it mean to you, to have this show be such a rousing success?
 
Moshe Zonder: The series’ success files me with excitement, joy and optimism that additional projects that I’m developing and writing will be produced. I teach script writing in Israel and at universities in the US, and sometimes my students are certain that, due to ‘Fauda’ and ‘Tehran’, I hold the key to international success. I tell them about the difficulties I experienced at the beginning of both these series, which no one initially wanted. When I write, I fully believe that the movie or television series that I’m dreaming of will actually be produced. But, on the first day of shooting I always grab my head – metaphorically or literally – and tell my partners: “This is a miracle.” I always tell my students that they should never give up, never surrender after receiving rejections and always continue believing and dreaming, and writing the next draft. 
 
John Betancourt: What are you most proud of when it comes to your work on this show?
 
Moshe Zonder: In writing the first season, the thing that made me proudest was the reactions among people of my age, or slightly younger, who were born in Iran – or to Iranian parents who’d immigrated to Israel. Israel’s populace comprises Jewish immigrants from around the world, and each of these communities of newcomers, in turn, was belittled for its heavy ‘foreign’ accent and customs. But it seems to me that the Persian community received more than its fair share of ridicule and venom. After the broadcast of the first season of ‘Tehran’, we received many, many responses from second-generation Iranian immigrants, saying that the series gave them pride in their family heritage, in their parents and grandparents, and made them feel ashamed to have felt embarrassed for so many years. I thought that was a great achievement.
 
What makes me proud of the second season is writing the character of Marjan Montazemi. Marjan was born as Marianne Moore in London, a protestant Christian who became a Shiite Muslim after falling in love with an Iranian medical student she met during her studies in Paris, changing her name and trading London for Tehran. All this happened in 1980, just after Khomeini’s Islamic revolution. While it may now be difficult to imagine, at the time it was also a source of hope for many secular Iranians, who were fed up from years of corrupt rule under the Shah, who also had close ties to Israel.
 
After 25 years, Marjan became a Mossad agent. She didn’t do it for money or ideology. She was, and remained, an Iranian patriot. She did it because she believed that only the Mossad, in the service of Israel, would go all-out against the regime of the Ayatollahs which, in her eyes, was destroying and strangling Iran, and all remnants of the revolutionary dream.
 
Marjan operates in a space that fascinates me: When do you, as it were, ‘betray’ your homeland in order to try to save it from itself? I can relate to and understand her. I’m obviously proud that we had the great honor of having Glenn Close, whom I’ve admired for so many years, agree to portray Marjan. She does so with such powerful, deep precision, far beyond what we dreamed of for the character of Marjan and for the entire series.

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