I was fifteen years old, attending Mir Afzali High School. Back then, sixty-two years ago, young lovers were terribly shy and utterly incapable of expressing their feelings. So I made a business out of writing love letters for the boys at our school—letters so passionate they could melt the heart of even the most hard-hearted beloved. And every one of those beloved girls happened to be a student at Gohar Girls’ High School, just across the intersection.
My prices varied according to the desired effect. For five rials, your sweetheart would smile at you. For ten rials, she would write back. And for two tomans, you might even have a chance of meeting her privately. Since nearly all the boys at our school were poor, I had very few customers willing to pay two tomans. Then Mehrdad appeared.
Mehrdad was the only rich boy in our school. His mother drove him to school and picked him up in the family Mercedes-Benz. He was the only student whose clothes had no patches, and his shiny new shoes were unlike anything the rest of us had ever seen.
Mehrdad was certainly not the most handsome creature on earth. In fact, he bore a remarkable resemblance to Christopher Plummer’s Dracula! He was pale, with perpetually bloodshot eyes and two frighteningly long canine teeth. As fate would have it, this vampire had excellent taste. He had fallen desperately in love with his cousin Mahtab, who attended Gohar Girls’ High School and looked like a miraculous combination of Audrey Hepburn, Kim Novak, and Marilyn Monroe!
Unfortunately, Mahtab showed so little interest in Mehrdad that even my most expensive two-toman love letters failed to make the slightest impression on her heart. Mehrdad had heard about the success of my love letters with other boys at school. He approached me with an extraordinary proposal: he would hire me exclusively for ten tomans a week until I succeeded in winning Mahtab’s heart for him.
Being hopelessly in love with cinema myself, I decided that the best way to cure Mehrdad’s romantic incompetence was to expose him to the greatest love stories ever brought to the screen. My ambition was to transform him into such an irresistible lover that Mahtab would fall madly in love with him and throw herself at the feet of this fifteen-year-old Dracula. That was the beginning of our arrangement—and of my daily trips to the movies. For someone like me, who worshipped the silver screen, those days were like entering a paradise running at twenty-four frames per second. We would watch the same movie two or three times in a single day.
Our exciting cinematic journey began with Love in the Afternoon. I spent hours coaching Mehrdad to imitate Gary Cooper, teaching him to turn toward Audrey Hepburn and say: “Everything about you is wonderful, darling!” And when Audrey replied: “But I’m terribly thin, my ears stick out like a rabbit’s, my teeth are crooked, and my neck is ridiculously long.” Mehrdad was supposed to answer: “Yes, you’re right. But those are exactly the things I love about you. They all suit you beautifully!”
The next film we watched was Sabrina. I tried desperately to teach Mehrdad to speak with Humphrey Bogart’s romantic sincerity when he tells Audrey Hepburn: “All my life I’ve followed other people’s directions. Save me, Sabrina. You’re the only one who can help me.”
For an entire month, we went from one cinema to another, watching thirty-one romantic films. But there was a serious problem. Mehrdad simply could not connect with me when I played Audrey Hepburn, Natalie Wood, Marilyn Monroe, or any of the other enchanting actresses of the day opposite him.
Whenever I tried to demonstrate the seductive gestures and flirtatious techniques I had learned from these stars, instead of inspiring Mehrdad to become a convincing lover, we both burst into uncontrollable laughter.
At night, I would stand before the mirror trying to transform myself into Marilyn Monroe. Eventually, I realized that not only was I incapable of falling in love with my own reflection, but I was also destroying poor Marilyn’s reputation as a seductress.
I finally told Mehrdad that we needed a real girl to play Mahtab. I would direct the two of them so that he could learn to deliver his romantic dialogue without sounding like a robot. It was Mehrdad who suggested Leila. Leila was the sixteen-year-old daughter of their household servant, and she also tutored Mehrdad in mathematics at home.
We went through an elaborate operation to persuade Leila to skip school so she could accompany us to romantic movies and prepare for her role. After all, what sixteen-year-old girl could resist the innocent temptation of an afternoon at the movies, especially when it came with a salami sandwich and a bottle of Coca-Cola? The three of us signed a formal agreement in which Mehrdad and I promised never to come closer than half a meter—about twenty inches—to Leila.
And that was how my first experience as a film director began, with Mehrdad and Leila as my leading actors. During our very first rehearsal in Mehrdad’s bedroom, I made a discovery that nearly took my breath away. I had found a priceless treasure! There, gathering dust in a corner, was an eight-millimeter Kodak movie camera, along with an eight-millimeter film editor and sixty rolls of unexposed film.
Mehrdad’s father had brought everything from Germany, and apparently the equipment had been sitting untouched for almost a year. Until then, I had managed, at least in my imagination, to insert myself into a group photograph alongside John Ford, Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini, and William Wyler. But I had never dreamed that one day I would actually get my hands on a real movie camera. I immediately began shooting my own Iranian version of Romeo and Juliet.
Of course, it might have been more accurate to call it a comedy. Romeo kept delivering his lines in the wrong order, while Juliet was so shy that she stammered through her dialogue. Yet something extraordinary began to happen before my eyes. I was witnessing the birth of a genuine romance between my two actors. Mahtab’s name was no longer mentioned.
And when I realized that neither of them particularly liked the dialogue I had written, I abandoned my ambition to become Alfred Hitchcock and transformed myself into Vittorio De Sica instead.
Following the principles of Italian Neorealism, I allowed my actors to say whatever came naturally from their hearts. As the final term of the school year approached, I transferred from Mir Afzali High School to Elmiyeh High School. Mehrdad, unable to bear our separation, persuaded his father to transfer him to Elmiyeh as well. At Elmiyeh, I was in charge of the school’s wall newspaper.
Unlike the ordinary school newspapers, which consisted of one large sheet of cardboard, mine filled an entire wall with twelve separate sheets. And instead of the meaningless compositions that appeared in other school newspapers, I included political articles copied from the left-wing newspapers my older brothers brought home, along with film reviews.
It was there that I published an announcement about the film I was making, although I carefully avoided mentioning the names of its actors. In those days, Baharestan Square, near our school, was a gathering place for demonstrations against the government. I was fascinated by Sergei Eisenstein and the extraordinary structure of his films.
One day, I begged Mehrdad to let me borrow his camera so that I could film one of the demonstrations in the style of my beloved Eisenstein. Mehrdad, still grateful for my services to his romantic life, offered little resistance. That night, I stayed awake until morning, mentally reviewing every shot of Battleship Potemkin.
Unfortunately, when I arrived to film the demonstrations, I discovered that there was neither a staircase nor a baby carriage with an infant tumbling down the steps. Still, I did everything I could to ensure that the late Eisenstein would not turn in his grave at the thought of having a disciple like me. Meanwhile, filming on Romeo and Juliet finally came to an end. In the very last shot, Mehrdad no longer sounded like a robot.
Instead, with the romantic tenderness of Gary Cooper in Love in the Afternoon, he turned toward Leila, his new Audrey Hepburn, and declared: “Everything about you is wonderful, my darling Leila!” And Leila, following Audrey Hepburn’s example, replied: “But my neck is terribly short, I’m missing a tooth, and I stutter!” Mehrdad then delivered the film’s final Gary Cooper-inspired line: “Yes, you’re right, darling. But those are the very things I love about you. They all suit you beautifully!”
If Mehrdad and Leila’s story had a happy ending, my own fate was tragic. As luck would have it, the developed films of my homemade Romeo and Juliet and my personal version of Eisenstein’s revolutionary cinema fell into the hands of Mehrdad’s father before anyone else could see them. He exploded with rage.
At first, he wanted to throw their servant and her daughter Leila out of the house. But when Mehrdad threatened to run away from home, his father backed down. Instead, he directed all his anger toward me—the communist infiltrator who had penetrated his respectable family! There was, however, one complication.
His own son was involved, and those supposedly treacherous and obscene films, which threatened to corrupt the nation’s youth and overthrow the monarchy, had been shot with his family’s movie camera.
For that reason, he decided not to involve his friends in SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police. Instead, he took the matter to our school principal and the chief of the Baharestan police station. And there, a conspiracy worthy of a Costa-Gavras political thriller was set in motion.
One afternoon, about two hours before school ended, I was summoned to the principal’s office. I was instructed to leave school immediately and walk home with Abbas, one of my classmates who also lived in my neighborhood. When we stepped outside, the streets were strangely deserted.
Just before we reached Baharestan Square, two policemen suddenly appeared and began beating us with their batons. They kicked and shoved us all the way to the neighborhood police station. Throughout the ordeal, they showered us with insults, accusing us of having dishonorable intentions toward respectable young women. Now, Abbas did have a reputation for chasing girls.
But I had never been the kind of boy who followed girls through the streets, made suggestive remarks, or harassed them on buses. Unfortunately, my attempts to explain this only earned me more blows. With every word I spoke, the beating became worse. All I could think was: “Dear Costa-Gavras, where are you when I need you? What a wonderful subject I would make for your next film!”
When we arrived at the station, they kept Abbas in the police kitchen and took me to the police chief’s office. The chief was a captain who bore an astonishing resemblance to Clifton James, the overweight sheriff from the James Bond movies. The moment he saw me, he began making offensive and entirely untrue remarks about my family. Then he slapped me hard across the ear and demanded: “Who taught you to make communist films?”
Fighting back tears, I answered: “Eisenstein.”
“Is he Armenian?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Give me his address!”
“I don’t have it. He’s been dead for a long time.”
“You little bastard! Are you making fun of me?”
And with that, he began chasing me around the room. Fortunately, he was so overweight that he couldn’t catch me. He called for the policeman stationed outside his door, who rushed in and grabbed me. The two of them began beating me together, determined to force me to reveal Eisenstein’s whereabouts. I tried desperately to escape their grip, crying as I ran around the room and shouting, for no particular reason: “Viva Zapata!”
The captain apparently believed that “Viva Zapata” was some kind of insult, because he responded with a magnificent collection of the foulest curses imaginable. Eventually, both men grew exhausted. The captain ordered that I be sent to the prosecutor’s office the following morning on charges of harassing respectable women. The next day, I discovered that Abbas had been released.
A policeman arrived, handcuffed me, and escorted me toward the courthouse. Whenever I was frightened, my nose began to itch uncontrollably, and this time it was itching more fiercely than ever. Fortunately, I was so thin and scrawny that I could slip my hand out of the handcuff, scratch my nose, and slip it back in before the policeman noticed. I had recently seen Judgment at Nuremberg, and I imagined that a similarly grand trial awaited me. I was mentally preparing a magnificent speech in my own defense.
But instead of a dramatic courtroom confrontation, the entire affair ended when my father was required to sign a written undertaking promising that I would never again harass respectable women. The smack I received on the head from my father was not my final punishment. Mehrdad’s father had forbidden me from ever entering their home again.
And since I could no longer get my hands on their movie camera, I experienced, for the first time in my life, what it meant to be banned from filmmaking.
