You’ve noticed that same joke told by two different people, once works, and the other time doesn’t, simply because how the person edits it. The silences, the pauses, what they neglect, what they emphasize – all of this matters.
ABBAS KIAROSTAMIThe digital camera has given me total freedom and a different way of filming.
More Abbas Kiarostami Quotes
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I have a picture from the end of the shoot, and in it I have lost all my hair.
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Film is very much a universal and common voice, and we can’t limit it to one particular culture.
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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.
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I do believe that a film like Ten could never have been made with a 35mm camera. The first part of the film lasts 17 minutes, and by the end of that part, the kid has totally forgotten the camera.
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Using non-actors has its own rules and really requires that you allow them to do their own thing.
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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.
ABBAS KIAROSTAMI -
I think, just as footballers play better at home, maybe film-makers, too, create better at home, even though the rules of football are the same wherever you go.
ABBAS KIAROSTAMI -
I think being someone in love is so hard to define, so temporary, because retrospectively we often deny the state in which we were in love.
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There were years when Hitchcock was like a master to me, but now I think he’s so artificial. I can watch films and say how technically beautiful they are, but I’m not impressed by any technicality.
ABBAS KIAROSTAMI -
I thought that choosing a non-professional was a condition for me, because it would allow Juliette to have a less-professional way of acting. It would challenge her performance as a professional actress.
ABBAS KIAROSTAMI -
I thought that I had been asked every kind of question possible.
ABBAS KIAROSTAMI -
The Iranian government as a whole has no relationship with my films. They’re not particularly interested, perhaps this kind of cinema is not very interesting to them.
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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.
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Anything I’ve not experienced I do not look to for a subject. I have to feel it.
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I think violence can never be justified. At the same time, nobody’s culture or beliefs should be insulted, that’s not something I can accept either. But I cannot justify or accept any violence at all.
ABBAS KIAROSTAMI






