‘A Hero’: Read The Screenplay For Asghar Farhadi’s Latest “Spark” That Became A Movie
deadline.comEditors note: Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series debuts and celebrates the scripts of films that will be factors in this year’s movie awards race.For Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi, A Hero was the culmination of a long rumination on a recurring phenomenon he’d noticed being reported in his nation’s media.“I had been reading stories like this in the press for some time,” Farhadi says of the genesis of his film’s tale, which centers on Rahim (Amir Jadidi), a man imprisoned for unpaid debts who, during a brief furlough, returns a newly discovered handbag filled with gold coins to its rightful owner rather than use the loot to replay his delinquent accounts.
It’s a good deed that nevertheless deeply complicates Rahim’s situation.“[I had seen stories] of ordinary individuals, who briefly made newspaper headlines because of an altruistic act,” Farhadi says. “These stories often had common peculiarities.
A Hero was not inspired by a specific news item, but while writing it, I had these stories in mind.”“At the beginning, I had a vague idea from these true stories,” adds the filmmaker. “I always work the same way: the spark can come from an image, a feeling, a succinct plot which will develop thereafter.
Sometimes all of this can stay in a corner of my mind, without my suspecting that it will one day lead to a screenplay. Time is an important ally.
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