Dominic

These protests, these enormous street demonstrations have been going while he was in exile.

So they've been building and building every 40 days in 1978 with the funerals of the last people who'd been shot.

Then there would be another 40 days later, huge crowds on the streets.

The Shah's secret police would shoot some more people.

And that meant that 40 days later, there will be another set of funerals and another of these enormous sort of outpourings of rage.

And I think some of the energy to me comes from the contrast between these people who are so fired up and are so there's such passion and such a sort of loss of control in a way.

And then that is being focused through somebody who is the incarnation of austerity and control.

You know, the Ayatollah, when Khomeini returns at the beginning of 1979, and he says famously on the plane to Peter Jennings as he's coming in, Peter Jennings says, what do you feel?

What are your feelings?

And he says, I feel nothing.

And there's something about the sort of the coldness, the self-control, that in a weird way,

Well, it makes him kind of otherworldly.

It makes him seem holy.

And I think that almost, the fact that he's not giving in to the same passions that they are, it makes him an even greater focus for excitement.

People do view him as a kind of holy man and as the emblem of a kind of

unchanging, authentic Iran that the Shah had betrayed, I guess.

The Shah was too Western and the Shah was corrupt and all of these kinds of things.

And so people projected all of this onto the sort of what appeared to be the kind of blank slate of Khomeini.

And then he was, you know, I think it's underappreciated how pragmatic, how calculating, how cold-blooded he was in kind of using that, tapping it, eliminating his rivals and building his power.

Yeah.