Abbas Kiarostami Quotes

I had intended to make another film, called Pocket Money, which was to be about children at a school. I was very much intrigued by the story [of Close Up] – it came into my dreams and I was very much influenced by it. So I called my producer and asked that we put aside Pocket Money and start something else, and he agreed.

I don’t like reverse-angle shots – I find them very fake and very untruthful to the viewer.

I did not have a script [of Close Up]. I made notes in the evenings and we filmed during the day over 40 days.I didn’t sleep a wink for those 40 nights. I have a picture from the end of the shoot, and in it I have lost all my hair.

I don’t ask my students to have studied film or any education in general. What I ask them is to come and sit and tell me a story, and the way they choose it and tell it, for me, the best criteria for whether they are right for making films. There’s nothing more important than being able to tell your story orally.

It is a very important film, Life And Nothing More, in that what was filmed was inspired by a journey I had made just three days after an earthquake. And I speak not only of the film itself but also of the experience of being in that place, where only three days before 50,000 people had died.

I do think that we are sometimes, as directors, guilty of portraying or asking our actors to behave in certain ways that are perhaps not very morally acceptable. I’m not the only one.

People have curiosity, they have intelligence, they have interest in understanding their peers. But producers and directors of cinema have decided that the seats in the theaters have been made to transform people’s minds to lazy minds.

I think that if you’re a digital thinker, you can use a digital camera.

Children are very strong and independent characters and can come up with more interesting things than Marlon Brando, and it’s sometimes very difficult to direct or order them to do something.

I think Woody Allen is Woody Allen, and no matter where he goes he still makes his Woody Allen films.

I spend a lot of time doing carpentry. Sometimes there is nothing that gives me the contentment that sawing a piece of wood does.

I only make notes, I don’t write dialogues in full. And the notes are very much based on my knowledge of person.