Asghar Farhadi Quotes

I feel it’s important to talk about the complex issues affecting us. And these are complex issues. I think it’s insulting to an audience to make them sit and watch a film and then give them a message in one sentence.

It's not some big event that creates the drama, it's the little things of everyday life that bring about that drama.

We always have the movies that are more toward real life, but they don't have that much drama or suspense, or we have the full of drama or suspense, but they're far away from real life. Always when I was watching a film, films with good drama, I was thinking, "I wish they were more close to real life." But when I was watching real life films I was thinking, "Well I wish it had more drama." I've tried, in the movies that I worked so far, to get these two things closer and closer to each other.

The bigger confrontation is the one an individual has with itself.

Often times, music is used to evoke an emotion and it's become a cliche, so I don't want to do that, and actually what I do, is that emotional intensity that has developed throughout the film, I allow it to get released by having that music at the end with the credits.

I like storytelling, and for storytelling you need a drama. And for there to be drama, you need twists, and by twists I mean the ability to constantly change the trajectory of the story.

Classical tragedy was the war between good and evil. We wanted evil to be defeated and good to be victorious. But the battle in modern tragedy is between good and good. And no matter which side wins, we'll still be heartbroken.

It was important to me to make a film where I don't show the past but where the spectators can see the past.

I think that theater is the closest medium to music. It's very pure. It's for the elite of the society. It's not for everyone in the society.

I always feel that a viewer has an expectation about every moment of the film and where it's going, so if I act against that, I've created a twist. In fact it becomes a kind of game with the expectations of the viewer. This is the superficial appearance. In the layer beneath there is a hidden theme. The result of each twist is that the judgment of the audience member is challenged.

When I decide to write a story, I don't think too much about what I want it to be, I just let things come naturally and this is how it turns out. It's just how my subconscious works.

I see screenwriting as a bit like a math equation which I have to solve.

Sometimes we feel like life is like theater, really.

Poetry, especially traditional Iranian poetry, is very good at looking at things from a number of different angles simultaneously.

The first theme that every audience can get easily everywhere in the world is the theme of judgment. You are constantly judging if this character is doing something wrong or right, or the other character is doing something right or wrong.

Iranian filmmakers are not passive. They fight whenever they can, as creative expression means a lot to them. The restrictions and censorship in Iran are a bit like the British weather: one day it's sunny, the next day it's raining. You just have to hope you walk out into the sunshine.

In my opinion when you speak about relationships between people, you are actually talking about everything in their world because everything is contained in that relationship.

One must never tell a child what it is they should display acting.

It's a mistake and misconception to think that one has to state everything clearly and simply for the audience to be able to follow the character, and this is what is bringing American cinema down from its position in the classic golden period. There's this misapprehension that the audience is not smart.

It's been interesting to see how similar audiences in the East and West are, actually, and how it makes you realize that when politicians emphasize the differences between our cultures, it's usually because it benefits them more so than us.

The fact that I do place music at the end of my films is not to accentuate the emotion. It serves an opposite purpose which is to remove them from the emotional space and allow them to enter a space of thinking, because I believe that when the audience is watching the film they're watching it with their feelings.

I'm always careful about the thing I'm writing to make sure a viewer can imagine it happening to themselves.

I tend to jot down moments, lines, interactions that don't really make any sense. I try and explain these scattered notes to my close friends, and they become more and more logical. I see screenwriting as a bit like a math equation which I have to solve.

I would have had the same narrative, regardless of the atmosphere and the restrictions.

When we talk about self-confrontations, we are speaking about moral issues rather than social issues.