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Abbas Kiarostami
Often your films don't provide us with complete information about the characters or the story, and you've been quoted as saying that one reason is because-I'm paraphrasing--the viewer is part of the creative process. It's up to us to make sense of the material, and each of us will do that differently. How does this idea-each individual coming to his or her own understanding of a film-match with the idea that we're all basically the same since we share a common humanity?
It's a difficult question. People do have different ideas, and my wish is that all viewers should not complete the film in their minds the same way, like crossword puzzles that all look the same no matter who has solved them. Even if it's "filled out" wrong, my kind of cinema is still "correct" or true to its original value. I don't leave the blank spaces just so people have something to finish. I leave them blank so people can fill them according to how they think and what they want. In my mind, the abstraction we accept in other forms of art-painting, sculpture, music, poetry-can also enter the cinema. I feel cinema is the seventh art, and supposedly it should be the most complete since it combines the other arts. But it has become just storytelling, rather than the art it should really be.
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There are some filmmakers who say what you just said and proceed to make films that don't tell stories-that really are abstract, with form and color and movement but without pictures conveying a narrative. Has that approach ever interested you?
Every movie should have some kind of story. But the important thing is how the story is told-it should be poetic, and it should be possible to be seen in different ways. I have seen movies that didn't attract me or make a lot of sense while I was looking at them, but there were moments in them that opened a window for me and inspired my imagination. I have left many films in the middle because I felt I already had an ending. I felt quite complete and fulfilled with the movie, and if I stayed longer that feeling would be ruined, because it would keep telling me more and forcing me to judge who is the good guy, who is the bad guy, and what's going to happen to them. I prefer to finish it my own way!
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I want to create the type of cinema that shows by not showing. This is very different from most movies nowadays, which are not literally pornographic but are in essence pornographic, because they show so much that they take away any possibility of imagining things for ourselves. My aim is to give the chance to create as much as possible in our minds, through creativity and imagination. I want to tap the hidden information that's within yourself and that you probably didn't even know existed inside you. We have a saying in Persian, when somebody is looking at something with real intensity: "He had two eyes and he borrowed two more." Those two borrowed eyes are what I want to capture-the eyes that will be borrowed by the viewer to see what's outside the scene he's looking at. To see what is there and also what is not there.
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It depends on the experiences and the mental capacity of the viewer. I myself don't know for sure. It depends on what the viewer's urge is-to fill out the gaps in the story, or to think about something more spiritual. Many viewers have found my movies much more beautiful than what I actually made, and that comes from themselves, from the way they approached the film. They have used my movie to bring out information they have inside themselves. In my movies I want to tap that inside, hidden information that you probably didn't even know existed inside you.
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A sentence from [Romanian-French philosopher E.M. Cioran] helped me a lot: "Without the possibility of suicide, I would have killed myself long ago." The movie [Taste of Cherry] is about the possibility of living, and how we have the choice to live. Life isn't forced on us. That's the main theme of the movie.
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