A Taste of Kiarostami

A taste of Abbas Kiarostami, one of the greats, now gone:

"Cinema seats make people lazy. They expect to be given all the information. But for me, question marks are the punctuation of life. When it comes to showing human beings, complexity and concealment are a crucial part of the character. If I show more than my character shows, it doesn't make sense. And if the spectator doesn't accept that, there's not much I can do.

One of the characteristics of my new film, Like Someone in Love, is that the moments that the actors are listening to each other are more important than the moments that they talk, repeating what I have written. Since they’ve been rehearsed several times and don’t have anything new for me. But I haven’t predicted the moments that they are being heard.

The actor is not only one of the creators of a film, but he is its most important author. The only thing that I can’t predict is the process of acting. When I’m writing the dialogues I can’t see the performances. I just imagine myself saying these sentences to someone. And then an outsider comes and performs it in a way that I never imagined. This is actually what encourages me to work and make films. Otherwise the whole process becomes a mechanical transformation of words into image."