Asghar Farhadi Quotes

People think that the directors direct actors. No. Really, what the director's doing is directing the audience's eye through the film.

Movies are movies: they take you back in time, and how it still is for some.

No matter how tight the shot is, if I'm narrating it too much, there's a barrier between you and the experience, because the process of reading a book, or watching a movie, or watching a play is that you're watching a dream.

Hitchcock makes it very clear to us. There's an objective and a subjective camera, like there's a third- and a first-person narrator in literature.

So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They were naive, they were that something completely different. They were completely Art-less.

Hollywood films are alienating to the spectator because they use too much dialogue, too much explication and leave no space for the viewer. They depress me.

I'd say Rob Reiner's 'When Harry Met Sally' is my all-time favorite. It made me realize there's a way of telling a story where the audience is so in love with the characters that they forget you're even telling a story.

That's what film can do in a way that TV and other long-form storytelling can't. It gives you this very immersive moment.

There's no reason my films can't work as hard as VR does to hook an audience and never let them go, so I think that that it turns the volume up a little bit on storytelling. The same way when I was doing commercials and then I went and shot 'Go,' and 'Go' has a level of pace that is unlike any of my other movies.

Theater is still a medium which attracts young writers. You'd think that it would be all over by now, with television and film. But it's not.

Film has changed the way we look at the past.

I'm not a big fan of there being voiceovers in movies. I really prefer it when the film tells it story.

It's much better to write a book and stick to the research - that's history. In cinema, emotional truth and psychological truth is much more important.

There's something about film that offers this opportunity to stick to a very, very clear single protagonist's point of view, and I like that.

I love theatre because of the audience. It feels risky. But I love film because it travels to the whole world. To an audience I don't see.

Of course theater will always be associated intimately to literature, but the themes or whatever have to penetrate you by the senses. Theater is a sensuous experience, and that's its main difference from film or any other dramatic art.

The wonderful thing about cinema is you can bring a 3D world to life.

I had felt for some time that audience involvement with a film should begin with its first frame.

Cinema is a director's medium; it's his story and his vision. If it's a good story, people will connect to it.

The whole point of making a film is to tell a story.

If I just concentrate I can walk into memory's store and find the right shelf with the right film and disappear into it.

I'm a slave to my imagination in terms of making narrative films.

However much I may like to talk about or be interested in a more philosophical or moral agenda, [film] is, ultimately, about narrative. And it's about telling stories that are engaging and dramatic.

I just want to make films that are personal, but interesting to an audience.

The whole point of making a film is to tell a story. That seems to be forgotten. Many films today just rely on special effects and they have an explosion every five minutes. Who needs it? It's rather repetitious.