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An interview with Abbas Kiarostami, director of Taste of Cherry

"Human beings and their problems
are the most important raw material for any film"

The following interview with Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami and the review of his film, Through the Olive Trees, first appeared in October 1994. These articles discuss the specifics of that film, but give an indication of Kiarostami’s general outlook and his attitude toward film-making. He is unquestionably one of the contemporary world’s greatest film artists.

David Walsh: How can film or art in general contribute to the lives of ordinary people?

Abbas Kiarostami: First of all, the people in the village are very distant from the cinema or the artistic world. When they only see a couple of films a year, it cannot have an impact on their lives as such. The biggest impact of cinema on the viewer is that it allows his imagination to take flight. There are two possible results of this. Perhaps it will make his ordinary day-to-day life more bearable. On the other hand, it may result in his day-to-day life seeming so bad that as a result he may decide to change his life. We become more aware of the day-to-day hardships. As Shakespeare says, we’re more like our dreams than we are our real lives.

DW: You are choosing to make films about ordinary people, poor people. That itself is quite rare today.

AK: I get my material from around me. When I leave my house in the morning, those are the people I come into contact with. In my entire life I’ve never met a star—somebody I’ve seen on the screen. And I believe that any artist finds his material from what’s around him. Human beings and their problems are the most important raw material for any film. So as a result, when I’d made the film before this, I couldn’t put out of my mind the problems of the lead actor. Which is why I returned to make the third film. I had many interviews in Cannes and people asking me why I had made a trilogy. I gave many answers every day. But I found the most important answer on the final day: my link to these people never was cut off.

And every time I finish a film in the village and I leave, I realize that there are dozens of other subjects that I haven’t covered. It’s difficult for me to forget these people. So that initially when I finished this film, I thought that it was a trilogy and that was that, but in the past few months, I’ve thought about it and I’ve decided to make the next film there.

DW: What was the interest in making a film about a film?

AK: It wasn’t my intention to make a film about a film, I just wanted to tell a story. Because I knew that it was very dangerous to make a film about a film. This is very familiar to people, and
many, many filmmakers have done it before. But I couldn’t find any other means for telling this story. And afterwards I wasn’t at all dissatisfied with the way it worked out.

DW: How does the presence of the film crew change the lives of the people in this village, or does it?

AK: I’ve made three films over a period of five years in this village. All in all, these are very intelligent people, and they soon realized that cinema is just this created world, that it’s not real. Initially, it was hard for them to believe that local people like themselves could be in a big film. It was very hard to come to terms with that. They always thought that actors had to be from the big city. Two days before I came here, I showed the film to the actors. Initially, they would laugh at themselves on the screen. But once the film was over, they behaved just like all other actors or viewers. And they were saddened by what they had seen.

DW: Is there any ambiguity in the final sequence?

AK: Yes, it is both ambiguous and it is not. Because if you follow the story you see that the situation in the film is so complex, it’s not possible for the couple to get together. Because the social norms and customs are very powerful and ingrained, and they cause a problem. But I didn’t want to have a very bleak ending to the film. So I added in my own dreamlike ending. And in a way I was wishing for something brighter. I’m reminded of this sentence of [screenwriter] Jean-Claude Carrière’s: we should continue dreaming until we change real life to conform to our dreams. So the ending of the film is more dreamlike rather than something that is possible in reality. Because those two people have become very close to nature. And they’ve metamorphosed into small white flowers. And they grow slowly closer together and they almost become one.

See also:
"Despair, hope, life" - David Walsh reviews Taste of Cherry [11 April 1998]
Through the Olive Trees, a film written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami [October 1994]