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Whether you consider me a master filmmaker or not, I do it with my intuition and my vision, my experience as a storyteller.

Abbas Kiarostami

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Abbas Kiarostami
Age: 75 †
Born: 1940
Born: January 1
Died: 2016
Died: January 1
Actor
Cinematographer
Contributing Editor
Film Director
Film Editor
Film Producer
Graphic Designer
Illustrator
Painter
Photographer
Teheran
Master
Consider
Masters
Vision
Whether
Experience
Storyteller
Filmmaker
Intuition

More quotes by Abbas Kiarostami

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It was a film that I knew, that I had seen, that I was familiar with, but I wasn't anxious about it at any point during the screening. I snoozed twice, and this is something I couldn't have imagined that I would feel detached, as I did with this film [Certified Copy].
Abbas Kiarostami
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I don't like reverse-angle shots - I find them very fake and very untruthful to the viewer.
Abbas Kiarostami
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Maybe more than a teller, I am a story listener. I really enjoy listening to stories. I remember them and keep them in my mind. All of my films are a collection of small stories that have been told to me.
Abbas Kiarostami
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I don't generally derive my stories from novels. I try to turn into film things I have felt or experienced.
Abbas Kiarostami
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There are certainties in existence, but love is something much harder to define than light and dark, life and death. I think saying you are like someone in love sounds right.
Abbas Kiarostami
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The experience of life teaches us that being like someone in love is more real, because everything is uncertain.
Abbas Kiarostami
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I think that in life, being is nothing but an illusion. If we acknowledge that and accept the fact that we are in between states, that we are moving, and this movement is the nature of our lives, and we stop having aspirations for being in a definite state, we know life better and are able to enjoy it better.
Abbas Kiarostami
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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
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I wasn't searching for a common denominator - I started wondering about the challenge of working in other cultures. What I reached was the sudden acknowledgment of the universal aspect of filmmaking.
Abbas Kiarostami
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My last experience of film-making was Tickets, a three-episode film in Italy, the third of which is directed by myself. It's not for me to judge whether it's a good film or a bad film, but what I could say is that nobody had a cultural or linguistic issue with what was produced.
Abbas Kiarostami
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In order to be universal, you have to be rooted in your own culture.
Abbas Kiarostami
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My car is my best friend. My office. My home. My location. I have a very intimate sense when I am in a car with someone next to me. We're in the most comfortable seats because we're not facing each other, but sitting side by side.
Abbas Kiarostami
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This [the earthquake] was a very big influence on me, and the issue of life and death from then on does recur in my films.
Abbas Kiarostami
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My films have been progressing towards a certain kind of minimalism, even though it was never intended. Elements which can be eliminated have been eliminated.
Abbas Kiarostami
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It's not so much a question of whether we've shot it through 35mm or digital video what is important is whether the audience accepts it as real.
Abbas Kiarostami
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Directors don't always create, they can also destroy with too many demands.
Abbas Kiarostami
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I don't ask my students to have studied film or any education in general. What I ask them is to come and sit and tell me a story, and the way they choose it and tell it, for me, the best criteria for whether they are right for making films. There's nothing more important than being able to tell your story orally.
Abbas Kiarostami
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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. I have a picture from the end of the shoot, and in it I have lost all my hair.
Abbas Kiarostami
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I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater. Some films have made me doze off in the theater, but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks.
Abbas Kiarostami
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Anything I've not experienced I do not look to for a subject. I have to feel it.
Abbas Kiarostami