Nima Dehghan on his career-part one

Your studied theater. So you started your work before you went to university. When did you decide to study theater? We know that when we are young ,we change our opinions  very quickly.

It became clear to me long before college that I wanted to study theater. My father was a military man, and we lived in Bandar Abbas .Before I became 18 years old , we came to Tehran. When I was 6 or 7 years old, I liked another job, and I still like it.

 

 What kind of job?

 

Gardening. Because there is creativity in that too. I always like to make something. I don’t remember my age, but I have clear memory that my parents took me to the City Theater Complex to see a children show, which I later found out was “Hassan and the Magic Bean,” but I don’t remember the name of director.

 

- Ardeshir Keshavarzi.

 

Yes, right. I remember that Jamshid Hashempour’s films were very fashionable at that time. When I saw this theater, I recognized him in the audience and I was very scared because I had seen him dead in one of the movies and now I was confused as to why he was here. They told me that these are artists and they don't die. That day I said to myself, so I will become an artist and not die. The dream of being an artist took shape in my mind. Naturally, my family wanted me to become an engineer. I studied mathematics in high school. I took the math entrance exam for a year and failed, and then I convinced my father to focus only on art and only after that I was accepted to university. I mean, this dream was with me since childhood, but there were no working conditions and realistically, it started at the beginning of university.

 

You chose the field of dramatic literature at university, but you became a director.

 

When I entered university, everything was interesting to me for the first year, but after that I don’t know what happened to me. My whole life had become reading books, and I was in the City Theater library from morning to night, and I had a notebook in which I wrote down what books I had read and what parts of them were useless. I didn’t realize that the authors of some of these books might be great theater masters, and it wasn’t like me to write the aphorisms of those books. It seemed that I become a library staff and I didn’t have to show my card to get a book. The second year of college passed like this. I became an extra for Davood Rashidi’s show “Richard III” or Mehrdad Rayani Makhsos’s assistant in the play “Sound and Fry.” I also performed a play in the small theater of the Faculty of Art and Architecture. That year, I read so many books and didn't study that I was suspended for both semesters. But suddenly, somewhere, I asked Mehrdad to give me a play to present to the Fadjr  Theater Festival.

- Was Rayani  Makhos was your teacher?

 

Yes.

 

- The play of "Pigeon to the power of two" ...

 

Yes. You could say it was my third serious work. The first was " The Poet" by Dario Niccodemi, which I performed in a small house. The second was "Aroos Toghi," which we performed at the Kanoon and won second prize, and I had a few public performances at one of the cultural centers and the Bowling Abdo, and I participated in the Unima Puppet Festival. Then I realized that child work is hard and I shouldn't get into this job at all.After reading these books, I said to myself, "What's the point of reading all this? You have to work! You have to become a director and form a group." Until something special happened and in my third year of college, I made a difficult decision.

 

What decision?

 

I said to myself, either I will be accepted into the Fadjr Festival. or I will get a bachelor's degree or I’ll give up. You know that the FITF was important at that time because by participating in the festival, you could get a turn at a public performance. In 2000, with the play " Pigeon to the power of two " at the age of twenty-one or two, I was accepted the Fadjr Theater Festival and survived the bad times.

- Yes, your generation started theater at a good time... You started with " Pigeon to the power of two " and then...

 

I performed one of my own writings; "Night Meetings"  and Ashkan Khatibi  played in ti. The story was about the meeting of death and people. It had three episodes. I think I was the first one to bring the projectors to the floor. Let me share a memory that shows why we always remember Mr. Pakdel fondly. How he managed us as newcomers. As a young director who wanted to work at the City Theater Complex, they gave me hall number 2. He helped us to slowly grow and move to bigger halls. Maybe I was upset at the time, but now I understand how much these decisions were beneficial to us.  I remember Hossein Pakdel got into a heated argument with me in his room. It was about our brochure, which was being printed because of something we did, and Mr. Pakdel got into a heated argument with me. After the argument, I went to the theater to turn off the lights. Mr. Pakdel was one of those directors who always stood in the corner of the theater and monitored the progress of the work. At that time, Mr. Afshinnia was the lighting designer. I told him energetically that I wanted some of the projectors in my work to be on the floor and not on the ceiling. Mr. Afshinnia got angry and said we wouldn’t do that. Suddenly, Mr. Pakdel, who had been arguing with me until a few minutes ago and I had developed a feeling of hatred for him, blurted out to them that he was the director; he was the king of the stage and the thinking of this show. You should provide him with whatever he wanted. Until that moment before, I had hated him and suddenly I fell in love with him. He said, "You are the director here and your respect is needed, but the story is different. That is, he separated the spaces. In the show "Night Meetings," anyway, except for one or two lights, the rest lights were on the ground."