“Where Is the Friend's House?``Kiarostami's movie magic that directed ``Amateur Actor''

Actors who can only act the truth

However, when you read the shooting notes included in `` And the Movie Continues ,'' you realize that you cannot simply dismiss this as the director's arrogant behavior in order to make a masterpiece. In fact, the directors use tricks to have amateur actors act in various scenes, not just the scene where the boy cries. It's not so much to push them as to get them to act without making them think they're acting.

For example, there is a scene in which Ahmad's mother is diligently washing clothes in the garden of boy Ahmad's house. In order to reshoot the scene from a different angle, the director asks the woman playing the mother to wash the clothes she had previously washed, but is met with an unexpected refusal. The woman insists that she will never be able to wash her clothes again. She is certainly right in saying that the clothes you just washed are now clean, so there is no need to wash them again, and that you should bring your dirty clothes with you if you want to wash them. But this is a movie. In the same scene, she wonders if it would be strange to wash different clothes as soon as the cut changes, and asks her to wash the same clothes, but her pleas do not reach her. No matter how many times they tried to negotiate, the directors were not satisfied, so they had no choice but to purposely stain the clean clothes they had just washed and ask them to wash them. Although the woman was disappointed, she reluctantly started doing the laundry.

This episode is by no means unique to women playing mothers. For people in the village who have no acting experience and are not familiar with television or movies, the act of lying, and the filming of a movie that involves repeating it over and over again, can't help but seem ridiculous. . Kiarostami and his friends realize this fact from the audition stage.

“Where Is the Friend's House?” (C) 1987 KANOON

Even if you ask a child, ``When a friend asks you to lend me this eraser, pretend you refuse,'' the child in question simply cannot say the line ``No.'' When I asked him why, he replied, "Because I could lend you an eraser." They don't understand the play ``For example/instead of.../imagine/think this.'' For them to perform, everything has to be real and The Truth.

If the boy doesn't do a good job of pretending to be afraid of dogs, he tells the boy the lie that it's a really scary dog ​​that might bite someone to death, and shows genuine fear in his eyes. If a thoughtful play is difficult, I will pose a math problem and film myself thinking about it. It's not just children. I asked an old man to climb the stairs and get out of breath, but the person playing the role refused and said, ``I can climb up the stairs without getting out of breath.'' So, I tricked him into running up the stairs before the performance, and showed him the exact footage of me tiring him out. That is the magic that creates authenticity in Kiarostami films.

Pour-Ahmad, who wrote this filming record, also wrote a reflection on how movie makers sometimes become so absorbed in their work that they end up viewing the people around them as nothing more than ``tools for making movies.'' . Because of our own weaknesses, we sometimes end up making children sad even though we are making films for them.

I don't know what the director himself was thinking. However, several years later, Kiarostami filmed `` And the Life Continues '' (1992) in the same village of Masleh (Kokeru village in the film), in which he features an old man who was once forced to run up the stairs. The old man complains to the actor playing the director, saying, ``The movie made me look older than I really am. It's not fair. Is this really art?'' It looks like he's taking revenge for what happened in the previous movie. However, the situation is more complicated because all of the lines were directed by Kiarostami, who himself was reluctant to say them.

What does it mean for people to act?