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July 4, 2014

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For Iranian actor-filmmaker, story is everything

ACTOR Peyman Moaadi is best known as Nader in the Oscar-winning foreign film “A Separation,” or “The Separation of Nader from Simin” in its original Persian title.

The Iranian film illustrates the conflicts between a middle-class couple, Nader and Simin, over a series of difficult social and religious issues including whether their 11-year-old daughter should stay or leave the country.

Born in New York, Moaadi moved back to Iran at the age of five after his lawyer father gained a PhD in the United States just before the revolution in Iran. His portrayal of the husband in “A Separation,” whose father is suffering from Alzheimer’s and wife wants to leave the country with their only daughter, has earned him numerous acting awards as well as offers from some of the biggest film studios, including in Hollywood.

Moaadi sees the middle class in Iran as a large and important group.

“It is the biggest part of the society,” he says. “The industry and government must be very considerate of them, and it is very important to write about this group of people, because they are very vulnerable, money-wise, and many things can harm their lives.”

His latest performance was that of a prisoner, Ali, at Guantanamo, starring with Kristen Stewart in the politically charged film “Camp X-Ray.” He got much praise for his performance when the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

“After that (‘A Separation’), I received a lot of offers, but I don’t do much because to me, the credit of an artist is not the project that he does but the ones he doesn’t,” Moaadi told Shanghai Daily when he served on the jury for the Shanghai International Film Festival in June.

“Also it is not that important for me to make a living out of acting. I need to be very much in love with my projects, whether it is acting, screenwriting or directing. If I don’t find anything interesting to do as an actor, I would go back to screenwriting.”

A skilled and natural actor, Moaadi only started his acting career in 2009, in “About Elly,” which started his collaboration with “A Separation” director Asghar Farhadi.

“My passion has always been filmmaking,” he says.

His more prolific identity, as a scriptwriter who wrote several  commercially successful Iranian films, is less known to those outside of the country. He has done other business to support himself and family before starting as a scriptwriter around 2000.

Farhadi invited him to play Peyman, a character named after him, in “About Elly,” while visiting the shooting of a movie he wrote.

It took the metallurgical engineering major a long time to finally make his directorial debut, “The Snow on the Pines,” which took him three years to write and has won him Audience Favorite Award at the Noor Iranian Film Festival.

“Filmmaking is hard and expensive everywhere in the world, and Iran is one of the hardest places to make money,” he says. “But it is also not as expensive to make movies in Iran. If you have a good story to tell, there isn’t much need for a lot of money. I don’t understand how some movies cost US$5 million. I wouldn’t know how to spend that money.”

He is interested in social issues, about “what is happening in the real life of people.” In “The Snow on the Pines,” he stays with a woman whose husband has left her for another woman, a good old story, and Moaadi is most interested in the choices presented in such a story.

“I wouldn’t have made the film if people all agreed to the same answer. When you see 50 and 50, you see drama, topic and challenge,” he explains.

The wife faces the option to take back the regretful husband, like many cases Moaadi has seen in his lawyer father’s work. The other choice is for the woman’s friend: She sees the husband with a mistress — does she tell the wife?

As a writer, Moaadi has a lot of experience working around Iranian censorship, which usually requires permission twice during the filmmaking process, “and sometimes it’s like 45 times.”

Yet Moaadi doesn’t see the censorship as a limitation to good films. He gives the example of “A Separation,” which had to make only minor changes because of censorship.

“I don’t want to defend censorship in Iran, because it is bad in many ways, but it is not only in Iran. It is there in all countries including the US, just in different ways. The most horrible censorship is financial ones. They won’t give you money if you don’t do this or that,” he says.

“Censorship in Iran presents its own red lines, and we as screenwriters know very well how to be smart and creative to find the way to write what cannot be written in a normal way. Nothing can stop you from telling your story. The censorship only makes you more creative and stronger,” he adds.

“The most important thing for me is drama,” he says. “A good story has its own structure and standard. It has its own timing and pace, good layers, and it must be precise and technically concise as well.”

By precise and concise, he means the film has to be locally successful in order to be an international success.

“If you try to make a movie for another country, it is likely that you will fail,” he notes. “The story must be correct and meet your own culture. Your parents and neighbors must be able to relate to the story. This is the magic of cinema.”

He considers that a big reason for the success of “A Separation” across the world is “because audiences anywhere can relate to the protagonists, who struggled to deal with family issues, as people from anywhere.”

Though many people considered the film to have open ending, Moaadi says it is not meant to be.

“The final problem was not the struggle between choosing mother or father,” he explains, “but for the daughter to choose which life she will lead in the future. Choosing the father means to stay and to face the problem while mother’s path is that I leave and find a place without the problem.

“The film has ended there. It doesn’t matter which one she chooses. The issue is the parents have put the kid in such a situation, making choices between father and mother. That is the catastrophe!” he says.

 




 

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