Jafar Panahi on the visual justice of ‘It Was Just An Accident’

This absurdly engaging morality play is born from Panahi’s own experiences in captivity, and from several other prisoners he spoke to both during and after the fact. It’s been a long road to making this film, which happens to be Panahi’s first after the ban on him directing movies in Iran was finally lifted in 2023, after well over a decade. His early works, like the 2006 sports drama Offside—about women and girls not being allowed inside soccer stadiums—were not only banned in Iran, but were among several reasons the filmmaker was imprisoned for the first time in 2010, and barred from making movies. This didn’t stop him, though. He went on to make the self-portrait This Is Not A Film (2011) under house arrest, the social comedy-drama Taxi (2015) while driving a cab through Tehran, the self-reflexive No Bears (2023) about directing a film remotely and in secret, and many more. While he could have technically made It Was Just An Accident with permission from the Iranian government, he chose to once again film it covertly, to avoid the process of seeking permission and approval for the story from the powers that be. However, this would have meant severe compromise—the kind that Panahi doesn’t seem capable of.

With fake script pages on set in case the cast and crew were investigated, and dummy hard drives in case of confiscation, It Was Just An Accident became his umpteenth act of cinematic dissidence. The result is both wryly funny and ludicrously enthralling. As the film rolls out across North America, we had the chance to speak to Panahi in New York, albeit after a travel delay when it seemed like he might not get a U.S. visa in time, owing to the recent government shutdown. If it’s not one authoritarian state, it’s another, so there’s much that American audiences can likely learn, both from the film itself, and from its director’s insight.

The following interview was conducted with the help of a Persian interpreter. It has been edited for clarity and length.

Siddhant Adlakha: On your guerrilla productions, I believe you have fake scripts on hand in case you’re stopped by the authorities. What goes into those scripts?
Jafar Panahi: The sequences in those scripts are exactly the way that they are in this film. So I gave my actors and my team another script that had exactly the same sequences that we were shooting. So if (the authorities) would raid us at any particular point, we could say, “Look, here's the script, and this is the sequence we're shooting.” But in this fake script, the plot was that someone has robbed a home, and people have heard the sound of footsteps behind closed doors. And now, based on the footsteps, they are going to identify the robber, and they also doubt whether or not this is the same thief, and they want to put the thief on trial. So we took it out of its political context, and the topic of the film became a robbery of money and jewelry.

SA: So there's almost an alternate version of the movie that exists for appeasement?
JP: Yes. We had not presented it to the officials of course, but we had given it to our team in case something happened. And I wanted all the blame to be on me, and not on my actors and my crew members. It would be for them to say, “This is the film script that we were given, and we saw that there is nothing illegal or sensitive about it, so we agreed to cooperate and collaborate.”

SA: This is a very political film, but you've long said that you are a humanist filmmaker first. So, I wanted to ask about the moments in the film that are funny, despite the topic being so heavy and dark. That balance of tone, does it evolve throughout the process? How do you adjust the tone of a scene to be funnier when the topic is so brutal, and so close to your heart?
JP: I have said that my film is a social film with political content, or with a political subject matter, because I have definitions for each—for political films and for social films. This is not a political film in my viewpoint. This is a social film, or a socially engaged film that is about a political matter, or a political topic with a human perspective. There are certain senses of humor that evolve through a film, of which we are not aware of in advance, and there are some that we intentionally put in the film.

For instance, yesterday when we were watching the film (in New York) during the scene where a character is digging a grave, he has a moment of doubt, and he sits down to smoke a cigarette. The audience started laughing, and I asked, “Why are people laughing at this scene?” If you show this film in Iran, nobody's going to laugh, because it's a very normal thing. If you have doubts, and you don't know what to do out of a sense of frustration, you sit down and smoke a cigarette. This sense of humor comes through some cultural differences.

SA: So much of the movie depends on sound, so I was curious about your approach to the characters’ observations of the sounds in the film.
JP: Bringing out these senses depends on context. The topic of this film is recognizing, and yes, identifying a person based on sound. When sound is that important to the plot, then it’s the foundation of the rest of the film. And sometimes sound overshadows the image, or sound creates images outside the frame. Because I don't use music in my films, sometimes sound replaces music. We fill in the gaps of music with sound.

SA: A lot of your actors are non-professionals and first-timers, and you don’t always rehearse with them beforehand. How do you end up keeping them in the moment?
JP: The most important issue is casting is it has to be a good match physically before we start shooting. We do not rehearse when we go on set during the process of finding where the camera needs to be, and where the camera needs to go from one point to another. During that process of mise-en-scène, we try to give (the actors) some initial dialogues, and we give them freedom to say these dialogues the way they feel them, as opposed to word for word.

When you tell a non-professional actor to re-say the dialogues as you have given them, the actor just puts all their focus on memorizing the dialogues, as opposed to understanding them and saying them. But when the actor does not consider themselves captive to dialogues, then they can be more natural in front of the camera, and you have a more realistic sense as an audience.

SA: During that process, when you have these lengthy wide and master shots of the actors interacting with each other, and there's all this chaos, how much of that is you letting them control the movement of the scene, and how much of it is instruction about where to stand, where to move, and where they end up in front of the camera?
JP: It's all been designed, but the actors also had some freedom. Where and how these shots happen determines who gets the freedom and how much. At the beginning of the film, when the other characters have not yet entered, the shots are minor. But when they come together, then the shots have more freedom of movement. The shots get longer. And then, based on the situation, we determine why a certain shot has to be a certain length.

For instance, the sequence in which the character of (the interrogator) has been tied to a tree, which continues for 13 and a half minutes, why does it have to be like that? The reason I had for myself was that in the other shots, this one character is being talked about, but is absent. Either he's in a box, or he's not involved in the conversation, as if his share was taken by the other characters and actors. Now that he is present, he's not sharing his time with anyone, and we focus on him. Therefore his share of the camera is only his. But all of these things have been pre-designed and thought about in advance. The same way that we allow characters to each have their own words, as a form of justice, we also have to have visual justice.