Transcriber: Eszter Cselényi Reviewer: Denise RQ
I used to introduce myself
as an Iranian physicist turned documentary filmmaker,
but ever since the Americans and the Israelis
as part of the nuclear negotiations,
started assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists,
I am just a filmmaker.
(Laughter)
And as a film maker, the main tool of my trade is story telling.
Today, I'm going to tell you a hand full of stories, some of which are true,
the rests are the fruits of the fertile imagination of an Iranian filmmaker,
stuck between East and West, Iran and England,
torn between science and art, and torn between his head and his heart.
I used to think that existing in this no man's land of uncertainty,
this what I call ambiguous, delicious ambiguity, is unsettling,
but I've come to realize that uncertainty is in fact
the main driving force behind all creativity.
I would even say it's behind all human existence,
and I am going to convince you in this talk
that you should embrace uncertainty.
So, let's begin with a film I made back in 1996
about a woman and her love or her typewriter.
(Music)
[Mad about machines]
Woman: When I was a little girl,
I really wanted a typewriter, and my father bought me one.
(Types)
Host: So why would you want a typewriter at that age?
Woman: Well, I couldn't play the piano.
(Laughter)
Later, I wouldn't be bothered to learn, but I did want to type.
And I just did.
I wanted a typewriter.
(Types)
(Music)
TA: I bet we all have piano-typewriter kind of stories lurking in our childhood.
I am going to tell you about mine.
I grew up in pre-revolution Iran under the rule of the Shah.
I went to school where most of my teachers were political activists,
frequently arrested by the secret police, the SAVAK.
For a bunch of kids,
we were politically informed, pretty savvy,
books banned by the government would be smuggled into class,
and you'd take them home one by one.
As you walked,
you'd look over the shoulder in case you'd have been followed.
For a 12-year-old boy,
it was quite an exciting and interesting life in uncertainty,
but I was never fully part of the inner circle of the activists,
the kids who were destined to be revolutionaries in 1979
because I'd discovered another love.
I'd fallen in love with cinema and television.
It was the early '70s and I was hooked on American imports on television
like Star Trek and Mission Impossible
all beautifully dubbed in Persian.
Mr Spock and the Klingons, fluent in Persian.
(Laughter)
Captain Kirk would deliver those profound thoughts
at the end of each episode
in words used by our poets, Rumi or Omar Khayyám.
In the summer, I would sleep in the garden under the cherry tree, jasmine in the air,
and I would stare at the sky and the stars, wondering about space.
But I would eavesdrop on conversations inside, by the grown-ups.
And every now and then, during the conversation,
they would whisper one word: 'mossadegh, ' 'mossadegh.'
As a young boy, I had no idea what this was, what this word was.
Is it a person? Is it a place? What is that?
But the word stuck in the back of my mind.
All of this came to an end when in 1975 I went to England to school,
and suddenly I was confronted with a whole new culture, a new language,
a new tribe to absorb: the British.
I was obviously much better at maths and physics
because English was still an early kind of stage for me,
and so, I ended up doing physics at Nottingham University
where I suddenly discovered the great Richard Feynman,
I read about Stephen Hawking and watched documentaries,
and of course, the genius Carl Sagan.
But I didn't discover these people through books
but through science television documentaries.
I was hooked on every single documentary made about science and scientists.
And so, this is me.
(Laughter)
in 1982.
I've put this picture for no other reason except to say I had hair
(Laughter)
I was handsome
(Laughter)
and this was my shake of our revolutionary face.
And as a revolutionary, when it came time to do my final graduation project,
instead of doing something in the lab,
I convinced the Science Department, the Physics Department,
to let me make a film.
And they let me make a film as long as it was about physics,
so I mad a documentary about an imaginary journey into a black hole.
The clip you're about to see has never been seen publicly,
it has been, but not released publicly.
It's very amateurish, it's my student film.
It's embarrassing.
And one of the things to note in this film is that I take myself very seriously,
this was my Captain Kirk moment,
and, well, the buttons are all upside down jam containers,
there is a warp speed dial on the wall, that's actually an air freshener.
(Flying spacecraft engines)
(Dialing sounds)
Air freshener.
(Laughter)
And more buttons to be sure.
TA [as a young man]: There are many strange and interesting ideas
associated with black holes,
for instance, black holes serving as time machines,
carrying us to the remote past or the distant future.
Or gravity tunnels, providing interstellar or intergalactic subways
that would enable us to travel to inaccessible places
much more rapidly than we could in the ordinary way.
Or how about this?
The black hole the size of a nucleus of an atom
solving all our energy problems.
TA: Now, of course, none of that has happened yet,
but clearly the space suit of the future is a woolly tank top and a silk tie.
(Laughter)
This film got me a really good physics degree
and provided me with a dilemma: physics or film?
And this was a tough decision to make because as an Iranian,
you're destined to be highly educated.
We really rate education. We have to have a PhD.
In fact, the parents of Iranian girls would not let you marry their daughter
unless you have an MSc, a PhD, an MBA, or at the very least a BMW.
(Laughter)
I chose film and I went to film school where I discovered Woody Allen,
and I watched every single Woody Allen film I could get my hands on.
And I discovered that my love life is just one long Woody Allen film
without the jokes.
(Laughter)
I watched this over and over, I fell in love with Manhattan and Woody,
I made my own film out of this.
Look.
(Laughter)
It's a silent romantic comedy, a totally rip-off of Manhattan
and it got me into television.
It got me my first job, which, believe it or not was a film about astronomy.
A film about amateur astronauts, charming eccentrics
with their feet on the ground but their heart in space.
Man: Let's get it aligned properly now with these aluminium pegs,
Mother: Well, we are interested in the fact that we are his parents,
so we are interested in what he is interested in.
But apart from that it is a very cold occupation.
Father: I mean it's usually cold when it takes place, you say. And...
Mother: It has to be a clear night.
Father: He can start at 10 o'clock and go until 3 or 4 in the morning,
when we think, is he still stuck out there?
It's the fascination of looking upon the worlds, I enjoy all of the planets.
I like individuals really, a different thing is going for each one.
The Jupiter, you've got a wealth of detail in the belts and zones,
the fact there is something always happening there.
Mars, you've got your seasonal differences,
polar caps, dark markings, you see it rotating.
Venus, you've got the phases similar with Mercury.
With Saturn, you've got those splendid set of rings; fantastic.
TA: And so, this sat me off on a directing career.
For the '90s, I ended up making lots of films
about the English and their eccentricities.
I became the go-to guy for affectionate, quirky films about the British.
This is a film about a psychic car park attendant,
during the day he looks after the car park and finds cars,
and at night he is an exorcist.
(Laughter)
Britain's only black ventriloquist.
And this film is about community gardens, we call them allotments in England,
inner-city gardens with interesting people growing their own vegetables.
So there's this Iranian filmmaker foraging in the back gardens of the British psyche
searching not sure for what.
So how do I work?
Well, I don't plan my films.
I never overresearch my characters. I meet them very briefly.
I just scratch the surface and leave the rest.
I rely on serendipity and the discovery of the story during the telling of it.
And, although I don't have a structure in mind for the film,
I have one thing in mind for sure.
I know exactly how you're going to feel at the end of each film.
The emotional arc. So it's an instinctive thing.
A magazine once asked:
"After many years in Britain do you feel more Iranian or more British?"
And I said my head is British, but my heart is Iranian.
And I would not have them the other way around.
Relying on this not finding things out is a great joy during filmmaking.
I find that people would share more when they think you don't know much.
Because they tell you, because they think you don't know much.
And sometimes, just sometimes during filming, during an interview,
the cameraman has just got the perfect frame,
the light is coming at the right angle through the window,
the curtains are blowing,
the sound recorder's got the perfect position for the mic,
the interviewee feels good, you feel good, everything is right.
And just for a brief moment, some magic happens,
some amazing thing you never expected,
and you capture a moment of humanity,
you capture an insight into a soul of somebody else.
It's a miracle of filmmaking, it's why I do what I do.
And it's the moment where you ask an old lady
why she wanted a typewriter when she was a kid.
You never thought she was going to say: "Because I couldn't play the piano."
I couldn't do physics, I couldn't play physics,
but I could make film about physicists.
And, again, it's the feeling that drives the process.
By the end of the '90s,
I was done observing the British and their quirks at home.
I was more interested in British foreign policy,
in what the English, and in fact, the West was doing in the world.
So after 9/11, when we invaded Afghanistan
just to smoke out one man and his gang,
I was interested in what the ordinary Afghan civilians felt
about foreign armies on their land once again.
So I just took off literally seven--
might have been four weeks after the bombing began,
and landed in Afghanistan
in a refugee camp controlled by the Taliban
and I wanted to speak to ordinary Afghans.
(Pashto) Kid: A few planes have hit an American building
and America has got upset.
Innocent people were killed.
We didn't know it and I don't know which country did it.
Now because the planes hit its building and people were destroyed
America has decided to go to war with the people of Afghanistan.
TA: If you want the truth, speak to a child.
I was in Afghanistan, it was only a matter of time
before I hop back across the border and back home,
in my own childhood streets, amongst my own people,
but now feeling it stranger.
I decided to make my first film in Iran,
a film about Iranian newspapers, reporters, and journalists,
and the challenges they face in being journalists in Iran.
This was the film about one newspaper made for PBS.
And being in Iran, it finally made me think back to our history,
and it brought me to probably to the most important film I will ever make.
It's a film about this man,
the man whose name I heard when I was a kid.
Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh.
He was our first democratically elected Prime Minister in Iran back in the '50s.
He had the audacity to nationalize Iranian oil
which was controlled by the British.
British petroleum, you know it now.
And Time named him 'Man of the Year' for this audacity,
but Churchill and Eisenhower didn't take kindly to this,
so they organized a military coup to overthrow Mossadegh
and reinstalled the Shah to do their bidding for them.
The coup was called Operation Ajax.
After the coup succeeded and the Shah returned, he was arrested
and put on trial for treason, imprisoned for three years
and then kept on the house arrest for the rest of his life
until he died in 1967.
He was potentially the father of a future democratic Iran.
An Iran in which a young boy wouldn't have his teachers arrested
or be scared of reading a book.
Most of you will not know much about him,
but by the time I make my film about Mossadegh,
called "Coup 53,"
you will,
but, I know exactly how you're going to feel at the and of this film;
the rest are so many questions.
It's a mountain of questions.
My research is huge, I don't know where to start,
I'm scratching the surface on lots of things.
This is my very sophisticated, research filing system in my spare room.
But I had the pleasure and honor
of running into a meeting with the great Walter Murch,
the film editor, legendary Walter Murch.
He is the man behind the "Godfather" films,
"Apocalypse now," "the English patient,"
but last year, he edited his first of a featured documentary
about the Higgs boson, the God particle.
I interviewed him in a session at Sheffield Documentary Festival:
"From the Godfather to the God particle."
And we become friends and I'm fortunate enough
for him to be able to share some of his wisdom.
Occasionally, he sends me emails, reassuring emails,
about how to go about this monumental task of making this film.
And I'm going to share one of his gems of wisdom
which is in fact the title of this talk.
The thing about slides is
- and I'm sure presentations gurus'll say: "Don't put lots of texts on the screen," -
but I don't want to change Walter's text.
This is what he says:
"Begin every project with 10,000 questions,"
- and this could apply to any project not just a film -
"begin every project with 10,000 questions and one certainty.
End every project with 10,000 certainties and one question.
The goal of a film is to discover what - for that particular film -
is the one unanswerable question.
Your gift to the audience.
Any project that is truly alive will have a question at the end of it;
in fact, the existence of the question is what determines its aliveness.
A film that answers all its questions will have achieved perfection,
but it will be the perfection of the tomb."
Perfection is boring.
It's the flaws, it's the not knowing,
it's the questions that makes life interesting.
So I have actually prepared a not-to do list for you.
It's for every day, this is my suggestion to you to live in uncertainty.
Don't ever read a film review before seeing the film.
Don't Google or Facebook your date before the first date.
Find out about them when you meet them live the human moment,
don't research anything about your destination before going on vacation.
Don't use Google street view.
You might miss something amazing on the way towards the thing
that you've already seen online.
What I'm saying is
- what has been said more profoundly by the German poet -:
Live the question. Be in the question. However many there are.
Thank you.
(Applause)