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When I find the character, I try to spend time with them and get to know them very well. Therefore my notes are not from the character that I had in my mind before, but are instead based on the people I've met in real life.
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
Time
Instead
Life
Character
People
Find
Wells
Notes
Well
Mets
Real
Based
Trying
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Mind
Spend
More quotes by Abbas Kiarostami
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
I think life is so difficult to catch, it's so furtive, that a copy, a film, can in no way catch it and represent it.
Abbas Kiarostami
The one-word cinema wasn't possible for me anymore. I'd hit a wall, a dead end. Therefore I thought I'd turn back.
Abbas Kiarostami
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
I never reflect or convey that which I have not experienced myself.
Abbas Kiarostami
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
I think I'm no different to my friends who are doctors or businessmen or architects - we all started watching films of the golden age together. But whether I'm making films or writing poetry or doing photography, it's very much rooted in my sense of unease. And that's really where everything goes back to.
Abbas Kiarostami
The digital camera has given me total freedom and a different way of filming.
Abbas Kiarostami
The film [Close Up] made itself, to a large extent. The characters involved were very real, I wasn't directing the actors so much as being directed by them. So it was a very particular film.
Abbas Kiarostami
This concept that you refer to in Buddhism is something I've been nurtured with through the history of my country for 700, 800 years - Persian poets and philosophers haven't said anything different with regard to experiencing life in the moment, as opposed to the belief of permanence.
Abbas Kiarostami
I think I really produce my best work in Iran.
Abbas Kiarostami
My way of expression is full of complications and mystery because that's my perception of life.
Abbas Kiarostami
As film-makers, it is very important for us to find common ground between cultures, and maybe that's less the case for politicians who benefit more from finding the conflicts and differences between us.
Abbas Kiarostami
Unfortunately, cinema critics are very few in America, 400-500 people, but there are more critics of Iran.
Abbas Kiarostami
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.
Abbas Kiarostami
In my mind, there isn't as much of a distinction between documentary and fiction as there is between a good movie and a bad one.
Abbas Kiarostami
Anything I've not experienced I do not look to for a subject. I have to feel it.
Abbas Kiarostami
In my films, I try to give people as little information as possible, which is still much more than what they get in real life. I feel that they should be grateful for the little bit of information I give them.
Abbas Kiarostami
I have somewhat lost my enthusiasm in the last years. Mainly because film students using digital video these days have not really produced anything which is more than superficial or simplistic so I have my doubts.
Abbas Kiarostami
Good cinema is what we can believe and bad cinema is what we can't believe. What you see and believe in is very much what I'm interested in.
Abbas Kiarostami
