"In my view, the Iranian governmFent has a problem with the independent cinema in which filmmakers such as Jafar Panahi, myself and many others are working." "In other words, with the filmmakers independence." "It seems that this is very important for them." "Well, we all understand it, but nothing can be done about it." "I have been doing this for the last 40 years." "My style is quite defined." "There are obvious reasons why they don't approve of my movies." "Because my work is welcome in the Western world, they assume we have secret ties with western authorities." "It doesn't matter where a film is being shot." "I just can't figure out why shooting inside a vehicle is not allowed there." "As soon as you choose to shoot in the car, they ask you why." "Inside a car is just like any other place." "It might even be better in the sense that, inside a car, a conversation is less likely to be left unfinished; everyone is buckled up, confined inside the vehicle and cannot quit the discussion just because they cannot come up with an answer." "Kiarostami proved to be an exceptional director even as early as when he came up with Bread  Alley." "I am not sure if I watched that film as a jury member or in the theaters," "but I still remember hovv it touched me, how I was impressed by its controlled speed." "A fast rhythm is easy to edit while a slow pace is rather difficult to manage." "I never imagined myself making a feature film one day, because I was completely satisfied working at Kanun, where I was making short films." "I think the main idea for The Report, though I don't remember exactly, was based on some of my observations." "What I did was to sort out the pieces of information I had gathered from here and there." "It's the nature of people in my profession;" "we are curious about stories around us, our friends and families." "All in all, The Report was a composition job and the elements needed for writing it had already been collected." "I don't think there was anything in The Report that was created purely out of my imagination." "My initiation into Iranian Cinema was through Abbas Kiarostami, and that was in The Report, one of my most beloved movies, even to this day." "It was filmed essentially exactly as I wrote it." "I can't recall much about it after 26, 27 years but I can say it was turned into a feature film page by page." "During the shooting, this being my first feature film" "I had some fears, and thus, I felt I was obliged to follow the scenario exactly as written, and not to allow any changes during filming." "When I read the script for the first time, honestly, I did not understand it because I was not able to relate to it." "Our film industry was not familiar with that kind of script at the time." "When I read it again for the second time, I found it excellent and unconventional, with no congruity with the Iranian cinema of those days." "The Report turned out to be a landmark of Iranian cinema." "It inspired other filmmakers and you can still trace its impression on many other movies made in Iran." "The Report was the first film designed to be shot with direct sound recording." "Yousef Shahab had just come from the United States." "We did the first direct sound recording experiment after The Brick and the Mirror made by Ebrahim Golestan." "No one else had tried their hand at it for the past 4 or 5 years." "Shooting The Traveler," "I used an Arriflex camera and a regular portable O'Hare tape recorder without any sync wire, but my first real experiment with professional sound recording took place when I filmed The Report." "1937-2013" "Mr. Kiarostami told me:" "It is unimaginable for me NOT to record the conversations simultaneously," "and to dub someone else's voice later instead." "He seriously wanted a live sound for that film." "I still think the characters' voices contribute to half of the film's value." "The importance of live sound in filmmaking is huge knowing that, when they are in the dubbing studio, even those same actors cannot reproduce what they have said before." "They feel compelled to reproduce what they have said in front of the camera." "Thus, their recorded voices and conversations will be technical and void of feelings." "Abbas always said, "Look, no matter how experienced a dubbing artist might be, when you are, for example, having a cup of tea with a cube of sugar in your mouth and delivering dialogue, no voice artist can convey the effect" "of the sweetness from your teeth to the audience." "Live dialogue can bring that sweetness out, and the listener can feel the sweetness of the cube of sugar." "At any rate, as my first try, I would say that was a good experience." "The location was in Shahre Ziba, far from Tehran, where we had rented a house." "I knew I needed to find a house typical of a regular clerk with a housewife." "It was important to know whose house it was, and make sure his salary was not more than the salary of my main character." "Therefore, I was looking for a household where only the man was working and there was only one child, like the script." "I didn't make many alterations in the house except for painting the walls slightly darker based on Zarindast's suggestion for filming." "What we filmed in The Report was based on ideas that were shared entirely by both of us." "Mr. Kiarostami had confidence in me, which gave me a certain freedom also in evidence in films such as" "Close-Up, Recess, Experience and Chorus." "In this context, we were able to create a vision shared by both of us." "This was a direct result of the confidence Mr. Kiarostami had in me." "When the setting I need is a house believable as one that belongs to a civil servant," "I don't feel comfortable picking a vacant house and then bringing in a set designer to set it up." "I try to go directly to the door of an actual civil servant, or, if the character is a high ranking civil employee, then I find a high ranking one." "My main character has a low ranking position, thus the setting should match his position." "And I remember we received strange reactions from those members of the audience with slight religious or leftist inclinations, who maintained that the house was luxurious, just because the family dined at a dining table!" "And I had no way of proving to them that it was possible for a low ranking civil employee to afford a cheap dining set." "To make a film with an Iranian identity should not mean we have to spread a table cloth on the floor for them to eat and then claim this is a low ranking Iranian civil servant's household." "This type of audience had reached the conclusion that this low ranking employee must have taken bribes to have such an "aristocratic" lifestyle." "Mr. Kiarostami gave me the script and I read it." "Then I designed a plan in my head for a sound recording based on the scenario." "You would see egg cartons all over the walls as well as the roofs to sound proof the room." "Kiarostami insisted on shooting it in a real-life house." "It was not easy to work in a tiny townhouse which happened to be located near the airport, too." "After I tried my hand at a few more direct-sound shootings," "I began to appreciate how progressive Mr. Shahab had been those days." "I used to know this tax collector from the Ministry of Finance." "I have never created any purely fictional character, still is the same." "When I am working with three or four characters in my film," "I look around for the closest real-life model." "Then I imagine that person as the character and collect the rest of the information for the character based on that model, or I start to socialize with that person, and create the character I have in mind from that interaction," "sometimes even going so far as to use the same words he uses-without his knowledge ." "I was called an agitator when I was young." "I was that part of Firuzkuhi." "Kourosh Afsharpanah was at Kanun, where I was working, but I did not know him well." "I once saw him fighting with someone in the elevator." "I think he still has that sort of temper-the same sort of temper as the character in my film." "I offered the role of the heroine to Shohreh even before meeting her in person." "Well, not being a part of commercial cinema in those days, as I still am not to this day," "I did not know any actors." "Nor did I care for the idea of hiring a famous actor, and then taking this already-established actor and ruining his career by forcing him to fit into this character I had created." "I was sitting in the Quartier Latin Cafe, because she had asked to meet there, otherwise I would have never gone to that place." "I had no idea where it was and I had to ask a few people before I finally found the place." "I was waiting for Shohreh whom I had never seen before, but she was supposed to have a role in my film." "That was absolutely out-of-character." "Normally, I would approach my actor in a casual way without them knowing they were being auditioned." "This time, I did it the other way around." "I was just back from London, and I went to the appointment in a long red dress and a red scarf." "Red is my favorite." "I remember, I noticed that suddenly everyone was looking outside." "So I looked out through the window and saw a lady coming into Quartier Latin directly toward my table." "I sat across from him at the table." "As soon as she sat down, I said, "Look, miss, you don't match the character in my film." "You are nothing like 'A'zam,' the character in The Report."" "I quickly realized I had made a mistake wearing a red dress and full make-up the way I did." "I should have dressed like a house-wife." "I said: "Didn't you read the script?" "She is a housewife - slightly chubby - a consumerist - she is ignorant of world affairs - ignorant of social norms, but she is a good housewife."" "I quickly said: "Mr. Kiarostami, would you give me another chance?"" "And before I could utter a word, she beckoned to the waiter and ordered one kilo's worth of cream puffs." "How much do you want me to put on?"" "He said, "The way I imagine "her", minimum 2O pounds."" "The waiter brought her one kilo of cream puffs and laid it on the table with an amused look." "And I started eating the cream puffs right in front of Mr. Kiarostami." "And she started talking with me while eating cream puffs one after the other," "I did that." "I wonder if she remembers, "How much do I have to gain?"" "And she did gain weight." "But he wanted to know how much work I was willing to put in to get the part." "Of course, I will never forget, she actually implied that I had no choice!" "Like, "You must select me for that part and lam beginning right now"." "She showed a professional spirit by being willing to gain weight instantly." "But then I became a bit concerned, and I asked her," "Are you going to be all right, eating all those cream puffs?"" "She said, "I want to be a professional actor, so I know exactly what I am doing." "You don't have to take responsibility for me;" "I will gain weight on my own and will lose it later on my own. "" "The next day I read the script again, I realized how similar this story is to everyone's life." "Instead of going through the entire piece," "I focused on individual sentences and read them twice or three times." "When I focused on the bigger picture, particularly her relationship with her husband," "I was pleased to realize that it had no similarity to my relationship with my husband, that it was all very sad." "I have to say, I found it all very baffling." "Here we have a kid who spent a great deal of time at his mom's spa among the customers who keep coming in and going out." "Growing up in such an environment has caused him to become quite an extrovert with no reservation whatsoever when it comes to communicating with others." "I had given the script to Mr. Nooriala." "He underlined some passages and left question marks in some places and exclamation points in other places to ask, for instance, how a "two-year-old" baby, in the sequence when her parents are fighting and her mother is about to take her out," "is expected to look at her father, then her mother with eyes full of tears, and say these words:" "Now that I check again, I can see that even the kid followed the script verbatim." "Abbas told me to review the dialogue." "Together with Nasser Zeraati, we rehearsed the lines and tried rearranging them in certain ways." "We finally agreed they were sequenced so perfectly that we could make no alterations." "I had decided that I wanted to work with non-professional actors." "And I really wanted them to per-form it exactly as written, word for word." "I remember, in one of the sequences, both Shohreh and Kourosh Afsharpanah asked me to leave them alone to act, to put a film cassette in and not to cut it till the end." "Within thirty seconds, I realized that they were following a different direction and so I let them go on for around four minutes." "Then, I said, "Well, now we will take this cassette out and it won't be printed either - now we film it exactly the way it was written,"" "and then we filmed the whole scene again." "Despite all the strings that we pulled, they would not allow us to shoot in the Casino." "They said it was private property, so we had to create one of our own." "As for the casino ambiance," "I had to go in there with a portable tape-recorder under my jacket and walk around the tables for a while to record sounds that could be used in the film." "Few of my films deal with social issues in so straight-forward a manner." "This one is a bit more people-oriented, more tangible, so-to-speak, or more realistic;" "This is not a style that I would use in my later films." "The scene in the pub was also shot in an actual bar in Tehran, and no retakes were required." "That scene was also a tough one." "These wireless microphones which are now so common had just become available in Iran back then and we were using two of them for the first time." "I sell the cow tongue, I make a few dollars." "What does your tongue bring me?" "I personally find that a very difficult film." "One of the scenes that really wrenches my heart is the one where the man is in the bar and his kid is having a sandwich in the car we were using two of them for the first time." "There is a so-called "boys night out" sequence in The Report." "This sequence was extremely difficult for me to shoot because" "I wanted to stick with the light of the lamp all the while." "It was almost six weeks of constant shooting with Afsharpanah, our protagonist, who gave a good performance." "Afsharpanah hadn't studied acting, and he wasn't acting so much as playing himself." "Instead of playing at being angry, he would become himself as he was when he was angry." "Kiarostami demanded this style of performance from both of us." "In fact, I have to say, this is not the sort of thing I learned in school, meaning how to perform without "acting"" "I learned it from Kiarostami while making The Report, because he talked to me about this issue constantly." "He didn't tell me what I should do, how to approach my husband, how to make love to my husband, how to hold my baby." "He believed all these instincts are in my nature and I should be able, although I didn't have a child of my own, to hold my baby and handle her in the shower." "And he turned out to be right." "It was mostly my natural instinct that came in to tell me not to "act."" "And so I was able to intertwine my experience in theatre with what I had learned from Kiarostami to play the kind of woman Kiarostami wanted me to play." "Abbas never told me, do this or don't do that." "However, there were subtle bits of direction more effective than" "Abbas telling you to go left or right, do this or that, come inside this way." "In the sequence when the couple makes love," "At the last moment right before I was going in front of the camera," "Abbas took me to the side and said:" "be careful not to make this man like Jalal, an aggressor/rapist type common in Iranian commercial films." "In the larger context, nothing about this scene was ever intended to be sexual." "It was really a sad scene." "It was at a time when, as a filmmaker, you could easily illustrate, say, the perdition of an individual." "There you had a man being tempted to take a bribe to help him make a living." "To shoot A'zam and Firuzkuhi shopping in the streets," "Zarihdast fixed the remote-control camera to the vehicle that I drove." "Most of this scene is shot with hand-held camera." "There is one shot where the camera moves almost 250 degrees around her with an 85 mm lens." "I carried the camera on my shoulder." "Thus, you could really follow the argument and feel the tension between them." "Kiarostami is open to improvisation." "There is one scene in which I am in the street waiting for my husband to pick me up." "Out of nowhere a car pulls over to, so-to-speak, pick me up." "Instead of cutting the scene," "Kiarostami welcomes the interruption and makes sure not to miss a single second of it." "As a way of teaching that impudent driver a good lesson." "As for the recording inside the car with me sitting in the back seat," "I remember how difficult it was for me to keep the voice recording synchronized." "The problem, I guess, was that the camera must have run a bit slower because it was running off the generator on the scene." "On replay, it was faster so we had to curtail the soundtrack to achieve synchronization." "It was running off the generator on the scene." "I shared certain attitudes with Firuzkuhi." "One of which was that I could never raise my hand to a woman." "I have not seen The Report for a long time." "The last time that I watched the film I was with two other people." "I don't know if it was my own view or the impression of their views on me, but I didn't like it very much." "I kept leaving the room to go to the fridge." "Then coming back to the room and watching a little bit more." "And then leaving the room again." "I think I have moved beyond what I was doing with that film." "We are not always the filmmaker." "Meaning as soon as we finish a movie we become the viewer as well." "Then it becomes like a photo album." "We turn the pages to see ourselves during a certain period through that film." "But this is not the kind of film I like to recommend to people." "Tell this or that person to watch it." "Or if I do recommend it, then I will say, "You can watch it without me."" "This is a film that I can watch with someone, but is not a film that I could watch alone." "It is an independent film belonging to a certain period of my life." "I was very surprised when I saw The Report." "Because it represented a conventional theme that happens every day" "but was, in this case, developed very well and turned into a feature film in very little time." "On one hand, it was a fairly typical depiction of how a fight between a wife and a husband can turn ugly." "And yet on the other hand, it led to the discovery of Kiarostami's genius." "When I left the movie theatre I was so shocked by the film that" "I said something that Kiarostami and his biographer still remember to this day." "I said: "Realism plus talent is what produces a masterpiece like the film we have just seen."" "It is no coincidence that he named the film The Report, because it is very much the product of his methodical approach." "Besides the act of reporting, which is a major part of his work, the report comes from documentary cinema itself." "It comes from Kiarostami's documentary cinema which originated from his life." "And is based on the fact that he was always an observer, not an interventionist, just a reporter." "And he was perfectly content just being a hidden observer." "The Minister of Culture, Pahlbod who was not called the Minister of Guidance back then-he was called the Minister of Art  Culture." "And he did not see the task of "guidance" as a personal moral crusade." "He had seen the movie." "And it was interesting for him to see how the baby could say 'Mama.' And how well she spoke her dialogue." "I remember he was deeply moved by the movie." "And his comment on the film was very interesting to me." "When we were filming for the first time, Ali Bagheri, our traveling operator who is not in Iran at the moment, told me that this movie reminded him of his life." "And that there was one other guy on the set whose life it resembled as well." "And then another person who surprised me was Pahlbod, who also said, "My, how similar this film is to my life."" "I was shaken a bit by that and asked myself:" "what Kind of similarity could exist between the life of all Bagheri and that of Pahlbod?" "This was an important point for me." "Because it made me think that people, regardless of their class differences, experience much that is the same emotionally." "And therefore, it is natural to find similarities among them." "I still don't think very much of the film." "But this was an indirect compliment towards it that I found very enjoyable." "There was a poster of me holding an umbrella with money falling down." "The point of that picture was to say:" "Firuzkuhi, has not taken any bribes." "The Report was shown at the Cine-Monde Theater, the outside of which was set on fire by protestors." "That led to the burning of other movie houses." "It was a box office hit." "It had a run of almost three months before the Revolution began." ""Taste of Cherry" is one of Kiarostami's weakest films, because for me, cinema is a medium that tells a story or communicates a subject pictorially." "In "Taste of Cherry", unlike "Where is the Friends House"," ", "Life and Nothing More" or " Through The Olive Trees"," "the story is conveyed purely through conversation" "Kiarostami, like any other author and filmmaker, tends to talk about himself indirectly." "I, as an impartial viewer who is detail-oriented," "view Kiarostami as a very intelligent and extremely scrupulous film director." "The world that he is rebuilding, defining and introducing to the audience, in fact, is a reflection of his own private world." "Therefore, I think it's fair to say that "Kiarostami Cinema" does exist." "Day by day I am further away from the social drama." "Perhaps we are trapped in a strange situation not to know what kind of film can be made to express truly what is happening now to human beings." "Today, when I see how far modern man has fallen." "How deeply into a valley." "I wonder how I can look at this moment and conceive of the kind of socially responsible film I should be making to contribute to my mission as a filmmaker who wishes to confront society." "If you look at film today, it is still perfectly capable of reporting the historical reality of a certain period of our lives." "But, at the present time, the basic problem is that we don't have anyone in our society who could resist the temptation of taking a bribe." "Now, everything is different." "The bribery has moved from under the table to out in the open." "And for every citizen who wants to survive, this has become the rule." "I do not think we can easily portray someone who is in the same psychological limbo that" "Kourosh Afsharpanah was in The Report." "Because that person does not exist anymore." "Now, everyone has learned and accepted what they need to do to live their lives and what the solution is." "In fact, the law of the jungle rules." "So when I look at the film, perhaps part of why I don't care for it is disbelief, since the character does not exist anymore." "For this reason, it has been said that to judge a movie, it should be watched 27 years, 30 years later, to see whether the film still works or not." "If people are not familiar with today's social condition in Iran," "I think, this movie still stands up." "And Iranian women like A'zam will still be relatable." "Or is Kourosh Afsharpanah similar to today's Iranian civil servants who have to work three jobs to survive?" "Thus, at the present time I find myself in a situation where I, as a filmmaker who feels a strong social obligation, do not consider myself equipped in any way to make a film about social problems."