Asghar Farhadi is an Iranian writer-director who won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for both his 2011 feature A Separation and his 2016 feature The Salesman. He has also won a Golden Globe, a Cesar, the Golden Bear at the Berlinale and the Palme d’Or at Cannes, among many other accolades. His latest film, A Hero, is out now in theaters and premieres on Prime Video on January 21. (Photo by Duchili.)
I watched Mike Mills’ C’mon C’mon and I liked it. I loved the simplicity and the everyday lives that was streaming into the film. Although I’m not American, the relationship between the main character and his nephew was very believable to me. In cinema, we don’t see that much of the real life of children. Usually the children in films don’t feel real; it feels like their world is made by adults. But in this film, I saw a child that reminded me of my own childhood.
I saw the film at the Telluride Film Festival on a big screen with very good quality projection and sound, and the director and the actors were there as well. I really liked the actors’ performances in the film.
C’mon C’mon was not the first film by Mike Mills that I’d seen. I watched Beginners on a monitor, and based on that film and C’mon C’mon, I feel like this director has a very specific route and path. It feels like the movies he makes are coming from his inside and his subconscious and his heart.
When I watch a movie in the theater, I try to forget that I’m watching it at a festival or in a theater in my town. I try to get rid of all preconceptions. And when I watch the film, I completely forget that I’m a filmmaker myself. I think this is the best way to watch films: as an audience.
One of the problems with watching movies these days is that the audience brings a lot of preconceptions with them, and that is not good for movies. When I sit down to watch a film in the theater, I try to just enjoy the film and find what the world of the film is. These days many, many people watch movies like a CT scan; they only see the skeleton of the film.
When I go and watch a movie in the theater and I see people eating popcorn and taking their phones out, it annoys me so much that I prefer to watch the film on my small monitor. Many times I watch movies on the airplane, back to back. When I like a film, I usually go and watch it again, but maybe not the whole thing, just parts of it. I go back to find out what they have done to make me feel this way. The final scene of Scorsese’s The Irishman is something that I’ve watched over and over. I couldn’t believe the last shot – where we see the character in a half-open door – how strong such a small, simple thing is.
