An exclusive, engaging, and insight-rich conversation with Shahab Hosseini
My first meeting with Shahab Hosseini was in Bahman, four years ago, at the home of my dear friend Shirin Jahed, the distinguished Iranian television director to whom many well-known figures in Iranian cinema and media owe a great deal for her talent and creative vision.
Thanks to Ms. Jahed, we celebrated the birthdays of Shahab Hosseini, my longtime friend and companion Abbas Yari, and myself—all of us born in Bahman—with a cake and a few candles. From that very first encounter, I found Shahab to be modest, gentlemanly, and warm-hearted. How wonderful it was to hear him speak, in a calm and witty manner, about life, art, the troubling cultural climate, the dominance of shallow tastes, and the diminishing vitality of reading culture. We became friends with remarkable speed and ease. Some time later, during one of Shahab’s trips to the United States, we arranged to meet. He came to our home with great warmth and sincerity, and together we recorded a long, delightful, and illuminating conversation for Cinema Without Borders, which at that time had not yet been born.
For me, after more than sixty years of work in media, festivals, and cultural programming—and after serving on the juries of many international festivals—his analysis and understanding of cinema struck me as deeply mature and thoughtful. Read the first part of this warm and lively exchange below. In the next parts, even more points will be raised that will surely be new to you.
Bijan Tehrani: During your childhood and teenage years, were you drawn to cinema or to artistic work?
Shahab Hosseini: To be honest, my childhood and adolescence passed under critical circumstances, during the Revolution and the war. So outside the family, the conditions of society were very clear. Because of that, we began creating a series of inner worlds for ourselves, and within those inner worlds we dreamed—and of course every act of dreaming involved inventing stories. The images that remain from our childhood games were mostly based on those mentally processed dreams we had at the time. Perhaps one reason we were unable to realize more of those dreams in practice was that our country was at war. In our inner world, through films, music, and books, we tried to live alongside our interests. Perhaps the manifestation of that today can be seen, for me and some of my friends, in the profession of cinema.
BT: How did your family respond to your enthusiasm for the world of art and acting?
SH: My father was a high school teacher, so he dealt with many teenagers and understood their temperament well. Because of that, he knew how to treat us. At a time when pursuing our interests may have been somewhat difficult, my father still believed that each of us had to choose for ourselves what we wanted to do in the future. He never imposed his opinion on us. Perhaps he wished I would choose another profession because in those days it was considered better for boys to become doctors or engineers—professions that brought great pride to families. But when I said that I wanted to enroll in the acting classes of Hamid Samandarian, my father did not object. In fact, he also helped me pay the tuition, and it was practically from that point on that I began to truly experience the atmosphere of theater and the world of acting.
BT: Apparently, you began your career in radio?
SH: Acting began for me with student theater productions. I was not a theater student myself, but I had close relationships and friendships with theater students. I met them in those classes, and at the master’s level it was Ms. Mina Ebrahimzadeh who invited me to the theater. That was the first time I experienced theater, and it led me to participate in a student festival as well. After that, with the help of some friends, I worked in radio for a while as an actor, and that was a valuable experience for me.
Then I came to television and hosted several programs, and all of these experiences helped me mature in my work and in my future. Acting, in a professional sense, began for me with television series, and my first film was Rokhsareh, directed by the late Amir Ghavidel. He was a highly skilled and gifted man, and I will never forget him. From then until now, this path has continued.
BT: At the beginning, didn’t acting in cinema—with the lights, the lenses, and the camera—make you anxious?
SH: Well, at that time I knew nothing about cinematic technique. I only had passion, and I was in love with acting. I was so intoxicated with acting that I did not pay much attention to its different technical aspects. I was deeply drawn to the role and acted instinctively. That enthusiasm and concern convinced directors to work with me. In a way, the final result was satisfactory enough for them.
That effort, along with a certain amount of luck, gave me the chance to act under the guidance of good directors. Later I realized that it was entirely a two-way relationship, because an actor must also have creative power of his own, and if something occurs to him, he must present it, must live the role. Naturally, the way an actor proposes ideas changes over time. Early on, the involvement of emotions could sometimes create misunderstandings, but as a person matures, he chooses dialogue, interaction, and reason, and tries to offer sound arguments for his suggestions. In those cases, if the actor’s suggestion is logical and correct, no director will resist it—in fact, he will welcome it. Fortunately, this kind of interaction has always existed in my career.
From the beginning of my work, I have always reminded myself that if a director trusted me and entrusted a role to me, I should work in such a way that he would never regret that trust and never feel that he should have given the role to another actor.
That is why I have always worked with love, and my relationships with the crew have also been good.
BT: When you are offered a role in a film, with what technique do you approach the character?
SH: I think acting often borrows from one’s personal life experiences and returns to one’s way of thinking. What matters is how the actor sees life, what kind of understanding he has of the world he lives in. A person’s way of thinking cannot be separated from his work. In some other professions, it may make little difference what beliefs or reasoning the owner of a company or shop has. But in acting, you cannot separate the thought behind the work from the person’s own thoughts. It depends on how he defines the profession for himself.
I have always seen acting as becoming one with the character I portray. I never judge him—neither good nor bad. I feel that this is the character of the story, and that character must be lived credibly before the camera. Now, depending on the drama of the film, that character proceeds through a series of actions and reactions, and those must be performed in a believable way at the very moment one is giving that character an identity. That character surely believes he is doing the right thing.
You could say that acting should be a fusion of the actor’s body and the soul of the role. For that reason, an actor cannot empty himself out unless he dissolves the role within his own being. The role must dissolve in the fluid inside him. It is like a cook preparing the ingredients for a drink. I believe the existential element of an actor should be like water—clear and pure, with no fixed color, smell, or taste of its own. With that quality, he can combine his ingredients with anything. By combining water and coffee beans, for example, he can make any kind of coffee; or he can brew tea, because each ingredient—like each role—has its own qualities, characteristics, color, and aroma, which the actor must discover. That is how I define the temperament or emotional state of an actor.
I always feel that I establish a heartfelt connection with the roles I play.
First of all, I do not regard acting merely as a job. I bring it into my life. It is as if each of the roles I have played belonged to a person who once lived in this world and is now gone, and perhaps has come to me in a dream and told me of the concerns he had in this world—things he unfortunately did not have the chance to accomplish, or had done partly right and partly wrong—and asked me, as an actor, to show his path and his state of being. That is usually how I feel about roles. I begin to live with these characters. I must understand them and, without judging them, even become positive or negative in their place when needed. I do not judge the role I play. I feel that at that moment, the character certainly believes in what he is doing and thinks he is doing the right thing.
For me, it is very important to understand that person, with all his traits, in order to perform the role. I need to know what kinds of actions he has. In fact, I become him. For example, if I am playing a jealous man, I look at how much jealousy exists within me. I open up my own jealousy and add that spice of jealousy to the role. Or if the character is witty, I draw from my own drawer of wit. I try, as much as possible, to use my own natural qualities as tools through which the role can become one with that character and reveal him as himself.
I believe that acting in a role makes it possible for the person you are portraying to be shown correctly and naturally. For example, if you yourself are an outwardly expressive person, you cannot play an inward person outwardly just because of your own temperament. You must properly recognize that person’s nature and distance yourself from yourself in order to play that role inwardly. Sometimes, roles are almost in harmony with your own temperament. You feel they are not very far from you—for example, that person expresses anger the way you do, or shock, or sadness in a certain way. To me, it is a kind of love affair; otherwise, if you want merely to strip actions of emotion and treat technical matters in a purely physical way, your acting becomes empty and boring.
BT: You have given brilliant performances in roles involving people with psychological difficulties. How do you approach such characters?
SH: I played one film with that kind of feature, called My Brother Khosrow, directed by Ehsan Biglari. In the rest of the stories, the nervous dimension of the roles was due to circumstances created within the story; the characters were not psychotic. As for My Brother Khosrow, I should say that I had no prior experience with schizophrenia or with the bipolar condition that some people have. But with a great deal of curiosity, I followed the meaning and details of the illness to understand how it worked. I would say that perhaps someone who has two different kinds of personality is bipolar, or someone whose inner and outer worlds are not in harmony and who cannot reconcile them. In any case, for that role I tried to show that person’s lack of balance, because in the end, whatever the names of mental illnesses may be, what remains is a lack of emotional equilibrium. Everyone may call it something different, but ultimately it is imbalance.
For example, in The Painting Pool, directed by Maziar Miri, I played a man with autism. In that film, what I discovered was that when I look at someone who has a particular developmental condition, from my point of view he might seem unusual, but if I look from his own point of view, he does not see himself as unusual at all. He thinks he is simply living his normal life, that he is speaking naturally, thinking naturally, and so on.
That was my discovery, and I came to think that as an actor I should not try to imitate an autistic person. I had to play a human being who, inside himself, is thinking naturally, but whose means of expression—his body—because of the characteristics associated with autism, cannot react beyond a certain point, cannot assist him any further. That is why, from the outside, he may seem unusual.
Or in A Separation, directed by Asghar Farhadi, many people said that I had played the role in a nervous way. I would say, why do you judge it that way? In that very film there are two scenes in which we do not see Hojjat as nervous at all. One is when he speaks to Nader at the bank with courtesy and respect. The second is in the hospital hall, when Nader and Simin greet him, and because Hojjat still does not know what has happened, he rises politely and says, “Hello! Welcome…” Only gradually, when he understands the whole situation, does he suffer a nervous collapse, because that event need not have happened to him. The point is that if I am to show the pain of a role, I cannot simply imitate it. I have to do something so that either that pain already exists in my personal experience and life, or, if it does not, I must go and find an equivalent for it so that I can feel it to some degree, understand that character through his looks, behavior, and actions, and ask myself: “What is this person’s pain?” Then I can find the proper and proportionate response to portraying him in performance.
(To be continued)
