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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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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
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Teheran
Lost
Evening
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Scripts
Didn
Notes
Wink
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Filmed
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Close
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Shoot

More quotes by 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.
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The starting point and the ending point are nothing but two arbitrary choices. You make them as in soccer games, where they chose that it's 90 minutes, not less and not more. But the choices are the responsibility of the filmmaker. You have to choose to join the story at an arbitrary point, and you leave it at an arbitrary point.
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When we start shooting I don't have rehearsals with characters at all. So, rather than pulling them towards myself, I travel closer to them it's very much closer to the real person than anything I try to create. So I give them something but I also take from them.
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Having an international voice is not really about whether we speak Persian or any other language.
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I think Woody Allen is Woody Allen, and no matter where he goes he still makes his Woody Allen films.
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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.
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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 really enjoy listening to stories. I remember them and keep them in my mind.
Abbas Kiarostami
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I really haven't seen The Report in a long time. I don't have a copy, but I'll have to see it again. I think it would be good to put both these men next to each other.
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I didn't just see myself as a film director here [in Life And Nothing More], but also as an observer of people who had been condemned to death.
Abbas Kiarostami
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Close-Up has affected later films that I've made.
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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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
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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 have no advice for anyone on how to live.
Abbas Kiarostami
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I can only display what I've been nurtured with, which is this worldview which has become my view. If I displayed anything different from it in my work, I wouldn't deserve this heritage.
Abbas Kiarostami
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Of the hundreds of points to enter and exit that are offered to me, I have to choose the one that I feel is the least wrong, the least fake. It is fake, it is a moment that I choose to erupt the story, but I make it as smooth as I can. What enables me to do it is the skill of filmmaking.
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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I prefer the countryside to cities. This is also true of my films: I have made more films in rural societies, and villages, than in towns.
Abbas Kiarostami
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People have curiosity, they have intelligence, they have interest in understanding their peers. But producers and directors of cinema have decided that the seats in the theaters have been made to transform people's minds to lazy minds.
Abbas Kiarostami