Rahim (Amir Jadidi) is in jail for a debt he hasn't been able to pay. During a two-day leave, he tries to convince his creditor Bahram (Mohsen Tanabandeh) to withdraw his complaint in exchange for paying back part of the debt. Presented with a missing purse whose contents could solve all of his issues, Rahim is faced with a difficult decision that will ultimately have consequences he couldn’t have imagined.

This simple idea is the catalyst for A Hero, the latest film from A Separation and The Salesman writer-director Asghar Farhadi. Those two earlier projects won Oscars in their respective years for Best Foreign Language Film, and Farhadi finds himself in the conversation again with this new work. Iran’s official submission for the (now-renamed) International Feature Film award, A Hero earned the Grand Prix at 2021’s Cannes Film Festival, and is riding a wave of festival praise as it makes its debut in US theaters before landing on Amazon Prime on January 21.

Farhadi knows how to put his characters through the moral ringer like no other, pushing Rahim to the brink as he questions whether the ethical cost of self-preservation is too high. As the story unfolds, the media circus gets involved, while the organizational side of the prison Rahim is detained in, and even a charity organization, all want to take his story and use it to their best advantage. Pulling this humanist tale out into an even broader scope, Farhadi is navigating similar territory to some of his previous work while also reaching even wider, to great success.

In a landscape of cinema that predominantly paints in black and white, Farhadi navigates the complexity of emotions, intention, empathy and morality that we all deal with in a way that feels decidedly human at every turn, allowing us to empathize with all sides. A Hero is a gripping fable that rattles the nerves so effectively, building up a level of tension that is almost unbearable by the final act. You want to look away, but you can’t dare.

Farhadi and translator Rayan Farzad joined Letterboxd senior editor Mitchell Beaupre to talk about creating a world full of dimension in a story where no character is either villain or hero.

You’ve described your writing process as one that takes a lot of time. You get a kernel of an idea in your head that you can’t let go of until you eventually need to put it on the page. What was it about the concept for A Hero that burrowed into your mind and gave you no choice but to write it out?
Asghar Farhadi: The concept for this story came into my head when I saw the play by Bertolt Brecht called Life of Galileo. In that play there are two lines between Galileo and another character about making a hero. This idea of what happens in a society when they turn somebody into a hero, that was something that stayed in my mind.

At the time I wasn’t thinking of writing something about it, but it was always something interesting that I liked to think about. There are certain things that stay in your mind, like a magnet that just grabs everything that is around its orbit without you even knowing how you want to express the idea in the future.

For example, in About Elly the early disappearance of the woman is a crisis, but the more the story progresses we see how every person, every character looks at the crisis from their perspective. We start to see this crisis from different angles in life. In real life it’s the same thing, even if it’s a small crisis. Then always this first crisis causes the next crisis to happen. It’s like a stone that falls into the water, and it causes these ripples, and then the ripples hit a wall and it causes another ripple coming back. When I start writing the storyline, it’s important for me to find out what the first crisis is of the story.

In A Separation, the first crisis is what they should do about the father after they get separated. Then that crisis causes them to bring the woman into their house, and that woman starts another crisis. It just goes back and forth, back and forth. All of these crises are like domino pieces—you hit one of them and they all start to fall off.

The important part is that I always find the crisis first, and then I start thinking about how all of these different characters will respond to this crisis, and that creates many different layers. Who are these characters? We understand them by the conditions that they’re in, the situations that they’re in. There’s never been a case where I already had a character in my head, and then I put that character into the crisis, or the situation. I always have the crisis first.

In About Elly, it’s about this group of people who go into the north of Iran and then one of them disappears, and they have to find out how to talk to their family about that. That’s when I ask myself about this woman who disappears, and what kind of character she has. Based on the crisis of her disappearing, I start to define her.

You’ve spoken about how in your childhood you had a very black-and-white understanding of the world, and you’ve also stated that the biggest investment that artists have comes from their childhood. How do you feel that your childhood influences the films that you make now?
I’m not sure about the things I’m about to say, so this is sort of a guess. I spent my childhood in a culture where there is a line that would tell you: “This is right, and this is wrong. This is the correct thing to do, and this is not the correct thing to do.” Most of my childhood I spent with this suffering, wondering if what I was doing was correct or not. Because I could never understand that between the good and bad there are a lot of colors, maybe my approach to writing is a reflection, or a reaction to what happened to me as a child.

This is something that translates into my life as well. Sometimes my students or my audience asks me if I believe there is not a bad person in the world. I say no, I think there are people who are kind of naturally bad, or there are people who have deep problems—emotional, psychological problems. But if we bring those people into our films, and we give them time to explain what they’re doing, then they no longer become villains—even if they’re still doing the bad things that they do.

There are a lot of movies made about this in the history of cinema. 12 Angry Men, for example, by Sidney Lumet. At the very beginning of the film, you feel like these are bad people, but as they have the discussions in that room you gradually, one by one, find out they’re not very bad people. They become great. There is a famous quote that goes something like, “There is a reason for every action that people do”, and that’s a key for me when I’m writing.

I believe that’s true in real life as well, that it’s the small mistakes we make that cause big problems, not the big mistakes themselves. When we are about to make big decisions, we already know that it’s a big decision. Because of that, we put a lot of thought into it. However, when it’s something small we don’t think about it as much. We just do it without really thinking. A lot of the slight mistakes people make in this film are just small ones with their words. It seems that the language that’s supposed to connect us together actually causes a misunderstanding that then blows up into something much bigger.

Something as simple as making a mistake with your choice of words, or having a misunderstanding like that, calls to attention the fact that while A Hero is a very modern story on the surface, it’s ultimately a timeless fable at its core.
I didn’t think about that consciously while making the film, but most of the stories I work on have this core that is like a piece of classical literature. It has the elements of the classic fable, but with the modern materials of today. Even the structure of the films are a classic structure.

Culture is always changing over time, and as your stories are so rooted in culture and how people interact with one another, do you feel that the inevitable shifts in social environments over the years can be seen in your films?
There are lots of changes that have happened in Iranian society over the years. Some of them are very positive, and some of them are very negative. You can probably see that through my movies when you watch them one by one. I think the biggest change that is happening over the course of my films comes from my age. As I’m getting older, I’m making more movies with this idea of something that happened in the past, and now we are looking at how those ripples have come through to today. That’s the idea of most of the films I’m making these days.

There is a Spanish proverb that goes like this: “We don’t know what kind of past is going to happen to us”. This is an idea that sticks with me and is always coming with me. In A Hero there are these things that happened to the main character in the past, like getting separated and being bankrupt, and he is now seeing the consequences of that in his present.