Abbas Kiarostami Quotations

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.

I was mentioning with the digital camera, maybe this new fashion of filmmaking gives a closer look of what life may be like. But it's still nothing but a copy.

I don't like reverse-angle shots - I find them very fake and very untruthful to the viewer.

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.

My films have been progressing towards a certain kind of minimalism, even though it was never intended. Elements which can be eliminated have been eliminated.

People have curiosity, they have intelligence, they have interest in understanding their peers. But producers and directors of cinema have decided that the seats in the theaters have been made to transform people's minds to lazy minds.

Having an international voice is not really about whether we speak Persian or any other language.

Whether you consider me a master filmmaker or not, I do it with my intuition and my vision, my experience as a storyteller.

My last experience of film-making was Tickets, a three-episode film in Italy, the third of which is directed by myself. It's not for me to judge whether it's a good film or a bad film, but what I could say is that nobody had a cultural or linguistic issue with what was produced.

A digital camera does have many advantages and I was a believer that digital video would be a big influence on film-making.