My Nerve-Wracking And Extraordinary Conversation With Asghar Farhadi
BY KRISTY PUCHKO
It was 30 degrees outside, but my palms were slick with
sweat as I cut through midtown New York, headed to a posh hotel for a meeting I
was both elated about and dreading. There have been few moments in my life as
nerve-racking as those leading up to my interview with Iranian writer-director
Asghar Farhadi about his stunning new drama The Past. I've interviewed bigger
"names" before, but I was about to sit down with the man who, by my
count, is one of the greatest living filmmakers .
After a string of Iranian TV shows and films, Farhadi won
the world's notice and an Academy Award in 2012 for his absolutely sensational
ensemble drama A Separation. Catching it while covering NYFF in 2011, I was in
utter awe, having never before seen a movie that put so much of its identity in
the hands of its audience. It hid key moments, thereby forcing the viewer to
take sides of characters without the omniscient view movies often offer.
Afterwards I spent hours debating the meaning of the film's intentionally
ambiguous scene with a colleague. More than two years later, I still tear up
remembering that drama's poignant and provocative conclusion.
A Separation beat out The Artist for my Top 10 list that
year. But to be clear, I don't just think it's one of the best films of 2011; I
think it's one of the best films ever made. Which should explain my anxiety
over meeting Farhadi, despite the fact that he seemed perfectly pleasant in other
interviews I'd witnessed. What if I embarrassed myself? What if my questions
didn't translate? What if he wasn't everything I hoped he'd be? They say you
shouldn't meet your heroes, don't they?
My fears were allayed almost instantly when Farhadi, a small
man with a contagious calm demeanor and neatly trimmed beard, entered the
luxurious suite and offered his hand in way of introduction. In response, I
blurted out my love of A Separation, and how thrilled I was to see The Past, a
drama that stars The Artist's Oscar-nominated Bérénice Bejo as a woman who
invites her estranged Iranian husband to return to France so they can finalize
their divorce. He smiled and thanked me through his translator Sheida Dayani.
And then began a conversation unlike any I've ever had before.
It was a new experience for me to speak to someone through a
translator. Dayani was a total pro, so it made for an easy exchange. But what
shocked me was how much of Farhadi's communication I felt I understood without
any knowledge of the Persian language. He also spoke no French and yet directed
a French-language film with fluent actors who claimed the translators weren't
always needed to know what he was saying to them. That seemed kind of heady
artist-speak when I'd read it in the press kit. But through the intonation of
his voice, the pauses in his speech and the way he spoke with his hands, it was
uncanny to me how much of our conversation I felt needed no translation.
Here it is in full, fully translated:
So, I want to start by telling you that A Separation was at
the top of my list in 2011. I completely adored it, and actually The Artist was
number 2, so I was completed elated to see The Past. Actually, this is a really
tricky interview, because I don’t want to ask you anything that’s going to give
any kind of certainty to the film, because I really love the way your films
create this ambiguity and uncertainness that forces the audience to make kind
of character judgments on their own. I was hoping though that you could talk to
me about that approach to storytelling.
Asghar Farhadi: Doing interviews about my films really
bothers me sometimes, because I have to speak directly and clearly about things
I’ve intended to keep ambiguous, and in a way I feel like I’m betraying my
film. But ambiguity is important and valuable because it helps the audience to
go think about the film after they’re done seeing it and the film doesn’t
finish in the audience’s mind. They’re still thinking about it. People who ask
me those kind of questions think that I know something about the characters
that I’m hiding from the audience, but that’s not the case. Everything I knew
about that characters I told the audience and as ambiguous as they are to the
audience, they are to me.
That’s really interesting because your characters do feel
like they have private lives, apart from us. It feels like they do have rich
backstories that we’re not party to. But I’m curious if in the development and
the rehearsal stage, if that’s something that you cement more with the actors.
Yes, most of the rehearsals go to this, and there are little
signs of those private lives that you talked about in the film. For instance,
there is a part where Marie tells Ahmad that for the first time she saw Samir’s
wife in the pharmacy when she would come to get her medication. We practiced
and rehearsed that scene in our rehearsals, even though it’s not in the film.
We rehearsed this process of Samir coming to the pharmacy, explaining that his
wife is sick, explaining that he needs certain medications, then coming back in
a few days. We were trying to make the actors get to know the backgrounds of
the characters and the relationships with each other before the film started.
That’s so cool. Another thing I’m really impressed by is
that while father-son stories are kind of a dime a dozen, both The Past and A
Separation focus very much on a father-daughter story. Why is that so appealing
to you as a filmmaker?
Perhaps because I am in that situation myself. I have two
daughters. My first daughter (Sarina Farhadi) was the one who played in A
Separation. And the father-daughter relationship is a very strange relationship
to me. It’s both a very close and a very far relationship. It’s one of those
that I think I will work on in my other films.
Did you ever consider having your daughter for A Separation
play Lucie (the teen daughter) in this?
No, I really didn’t think about it from the beginning. I
didn’t want the audience to have the image they had of the character in A
Separation to be broken by this new image, and I didn’t want the audience to
mix these two characters.
What inspired you to go to France for this film instead of
making another film in and about Iran specifically?
It was the story itself. A lot of people think that I went
to make a film in another country because of the limitations and pressures in
Iran, but that really wasn’t the case for me. I even thought about making the
film in Iran because in a sense, it’s more comfortable for me. With all of the
pressures and limitation there, it’s more comfortable for me to make films in
Iran, but the story was a story of a man who traveled to another country and I
couldn’t make that in Iran.
Now, I was actually curious about, how much you relate to
Ahmad, because he is very much in love with his homeland, but then he also has
this love in another nation with another family and he feels very divided by
that.
Ahmad is one of the most difficult or complex characters in
the film. A lot of people might think why wouldn’t he, as this kind of gentle
soul, stay with this family and why would Marie not live with him, but they
only look at his surface, but if we go a little bit deeper, we can see the
black points of his character, but Marie also points to these black spots of
his character. When she is fighting with him, she says to him once that it
really makes me sick when you take this position of a teacher and you try to
teach everybody. Ahmad is one of those characters who considers himself above
everybody and he’s constantly wanting to teach people something. And this is
something that bothers Marie. He left his family four years ago without telling
them that he’s never going to return, and Marie, that’s why she’s suffering. I
think Ahmad has a dual character, and living with these type of people is very
difficult. On one hand, you fall in love with their kindness. On another hand
those black spots really bother you.
You spoke about the limitations of shooting in Iran.
Frankly, as an American we don’t have that same kind of thing. So I was
wondering if you could talk a little bit about what those limitations are and
how you feel like they actually have encouraged your creativity.
The most important characteristic about those limitations is
that they’re not a fixed, they’re not anything fixed or they’re not going to
always stay the same. This is both good and bad. It’s good because sometimes
when they change, then you can pass around them, and it’s bad because you can’t
predict how they’re going to turn out in a day or two. When you wake up in the
morning, the limitations have one form and in the afternoon, their form is
different. Part of these limitations are political, part of them are religious.
What happened is that the filmmakers have been able to find a new language due
to these limitations. I’m not saying this to encourage censorship, but I’m
saying that the unintended consequence of it is creativity. I hope that the
censors don’t hear this, because they’ll get encouraged, but the fact is it has
turned into creativity.
It sounds like what you’re saying is that creativity can
overcome that as an obstacle versus that barriers necessarily inspire
creativity.
Yes, that’s true, and the point about it is that it’s only
in a short period of time that censorship could create creativity. If they last
and they survive for a long time, they will get rid of creativity.
So, your films have actually been opening the west up to the
culture of Iran. Time Magazine called you a "de facto spokesman" for
your country and named you one of the most influential people. Is that
something that you consider now when you’re making films?
I really think of myself just as a filmmaker. It makes me
happy to hear these things, but I don’t let them limit me.
So, after your Oscar win, it was announced you were working
on a film with Marion Cotillard. Was it this film?
This one. I started this film before A Separation won the
Oscar, and I had talked about Marion Cotillard playing in this film before the
Oscar came, but I needed her to be present at the rehearsals for a few months.
But she couldn’t; she didn’t have that time. I could’ve asked her to come (do
the movie) without coming to the rehearsals, but I couldn’t accept that.
So, how did Bérénice come into it?
Bérénice was in the initial list that I had for considering
the actresses, and I kept running into her in the trips that I came for
promoting A Separation, and I got to know her more and I realized that she’s a
really good choice. I’m very good friends with her husband (French filmmaker
Michel Hazanavicius) as well and I’m close to them.
I was actually completely shocked to find out that you don’t
speak fluent French, nor does Ali Mosaffa. How does that impact making the
film?
Of course, Ali knew French before, but he hadn’t spoken it
for a while in Iran and he had forgotten the language. He came to live in
France with his family for a few months and then he remembered everything. I
didn’t know any French and this was the biggest challenge to the film. A lot of
people told me that this is dangerous, but something told me that, some sense
told me that after the success of A Separation, I shouldn’t go risk-free. I
should do a project that has some risks in it, and this was an appealing risk
to me. I lived in Paris for two years with my family. I would roam the streets
of Paris during the day for a few hours in the subway, on the streets, and I
listened to the French language and I got a sense of the rhythm and the melody
of the language. I also had a crew of translators. They weren’t just
translating my information and my data. They were also transferring my feeling
and emotions. Even their gestures and facial mimics, they were copying after
me.
That actually makes sense to me, because I completely don’t
speak your language but I can understand how that would work having this
conversation (with the help of a translator).
We tend to think that human connections are only through
language, but that’s not true. I’ll bring you an example. A few members of the
Oscar Academy had came to Iran a few years ago, and one day they wanted to see
my fourth movie About Elly. They were watching the (Persian-language) film with
English subtitles. In the middle of the film, I left the room because I had
something to do and then I came back. And I saw that due to some technical
difficulty, what they were seeing had no subtitles. But then they were just
watching the film, and in the end, I said to them, "I think you missed
some parts of the movie because you didn’t have subtitles for 10 minutes."
And they said to me, "We didn’t miss anything. We understood everything
completely," and they had realized some stuff as if they knew the Persian
language well.
So, that actually reminds me, in this movie, several times,
we see the characters either interacting behind glass or interacting through
glass where they can’t hear each other, but we don’t really lose anything in
that. Is that partially inspired by that experience?
This using window panes was also present in my other films.
Sometimes people are speaking a common language, but they don’t understand each
other, and sometimes they don’t even have a common language, but they can
understand each other.
So, there’s a real earnestness toward kind of a naturalism
versus a glossy reflection of reality in your films. Is Italian neorealism
something you’re inspired by?
Very much so. I think all of the Iranian filmmakers have
been influenced by Italian cinema, because there is a realism in Italy’s
neorealism cinema that is also present in Iranian cinema. At a stage, the
conditions in my country were at the same as the conditions of Italy after the
war and we had similar experiences. Perhaps this similarity has made the cinema
and the films look familiar to each other.
Along those lines, the children in your films feel not
precocious, but for lack of a better word, very real. Can you talk about how
you direct performances for them?
It’s vey difficult for me to explain how I work with
children. I never tell children directly what I want, because they won’t
believe you. Even though they do a lot of childish acts themselves. But they
don’t believe the plays and the games of the adults. So, I knew that if I told
Elyes that he needs to be sad about the fact that his mother is in a coma in the
hospital and look depressed, he’s going to laugh at me, because children don’t
believe in the games of grown-ups. But what we can do is we can form the
relationships with other characters gradually. I really tried to have the
relationship between Fouad and Tahar, like a father-son relationship, and this
took several months of rehearsals. They were always rehearsing together, and I
wanted Tahar to get as close as possible to him.
Well, thank you. That was extraordinary.
http://www.cinemablend.com/new/My-Nerve-Wracking-Extraordinary-Conversation-With-Asghar-Farhadi-40792.html
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