CraveOnline: Where did you develop this method of your screenwriting? Was it just trial and error or were you taught at some point?
Asghar Farhadi: From when I was doing plays and through the films, film by film, I feel that that’s how I reached this manner, but I still feel I have more to learn in terms of how to work. It seems as if I’m using one style in all of these films, but myself, I feel that, from one film to the next, I am expanding and developing the style, and that they do not resemble each other.
Are you trying to expand to something in particular? Is there a goal you’re heading towards in your writing, an ideal story or screenplay or style?
There are several goals towards which I am moving. One is that the relationship between the audience and the film should be a democratic one. What I mean by that is, the viewer themselves should decide what angle to view the film from, and what relationship is established with the characters. Second, I would like the film to give the capacity to the viewer to judge, in that moment, to make a call. My aim is for the viewer to move from a position of a passive, consuming viewer, and be transformed into a judge. Which is why at the opening of the film A Separation, the position the camera occupies is the position of the judge. These are the larger goals towards which I’m moving.
I think you may have already achieved that.
[Laughs]
How will you know when you’re satisfied? Will it just be a feeling, or is there a reaction you think will come?
This is not a movement that’s mine alone, my emotion in a certain direction. It’s a movement of mine and my audience’s. It’s my audience and I both moving in a certain direction, together. By seeing my films, they too are becoming accustomed to this language, and this method of film, and moving in this direction as well. And that is why those who watched About Elly or A Separation can now watch The Past with greater ease, and understand it better. So they and I appear to me to have a fallen onto the same track now, and are moving forward together.
This track… do you feel that this is just through your own work, or are there other filmmakers whom you feel are…?
No, I think this is a development that occurs in other films and filmmakers as well. I can see it in other films as well.
Any other films in particular?
I can’t name a specific film, but this way of feeling cinema is something I’m observing right now.
I’d like to ask you in particular about the last shot in The Past. It seems to have the most perfectly timed teardrop I have ever seen. I was wondering how you achieved that. Is the actor just brilliant or was there a special effect involved?
It was the actor.
Wow.
It was one of those things that surprised all of us. If the whole world had tried to help us have that teardrop drop at that moment at that speed, we couldn’t have accomplished it. But suddenly it happened and we all felt as if somebody else was directing.
Did you want to have a teardrop and the timing just became perfect, or was it a complete surprise?
No, it was just the timing.
That’s incredible. I just find that very incredible.
Afterwards, when we were editing the film, I found out that this had actually happened. Someone’s written a book in France, titled The Teardrop That Saved My Life. It’s the story of a woman who had been in a coma, and there had been no hope of her coming out of it. The administration asks her husband to take her off of the machines, and the husband had evidently at first not agreed, but eventually had been convinced, and goes one day to bid her farewell. And in that very moment, they’re about to take the instruments off, she somehow manages to squeeze out this one tear, and so they don’t take her off the life support, and several months later she comes back. It’s afterwards while we were editing the film that someone told me about this.
How did you feel when they told you about this? Was it, “My god, I’m a genius?”
[Laughs]
Or “What a coincidence?”
I felt I am not alone making this film. I am making it together with someone else. I believe in God.
What are you writing right now?
For now I am thinking. I haven’t begun writing. I think at the end of this year I will start, and pick one of the stories that have been simmering in my mind.
How many stories simmer in your mind at any given time?
[Laughs] At present, I can say four or five… not stories, but ideas, in my mind. One of which is rising and showing its face more.
Is there one in particular that has been with you the longest, that you haven’t been able to start yet?
The one that’s taking shape now dates very far back, maybe sixteen, seventeen years.
I hope you crack it. I can’t wait to see it.
Our next interview will be about that film.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
