Making ‘It Was Just An Accident’ Wasn’t Like Making Most Movies

Cinema history is dotted with films that faced notorious production challenges: the money-plagued interruptions that stretched shooting Orson Welles’ Othello over most of four years; hand–dragging a steamboat over an Amazon jungle pass in Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo; the general chaos in a Filipino jungle of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

But they have nothing on It Was Just An Accident, the latest film from Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi. Shot on the streets of Tehran, dodging the brutal stooges of that repressive regime, taking extraordinary measures to get the film made, smuggled out of the country, and seen by the world.

“When you are forced to, you will find a way,” the film’s editor, Amir Etminan, told me in an online interview from his Istanbul, Turkey home and studio. He spoke through interpreter Mojtaba Bahadori, whose documentary Etminan is now editing. “In independent cinema we really work with minimum equipment and the possibilities you have. On top of that, you’re talking about a project directed by Mr. Panahi, which means a very high security situation, an additional point on this kind of editing.”

The movie is a bleak comedy of sorts, explicitly mentioning Beckett’s existentialist Waiting for Godot and echoing its sense of fruitless flailing against inexplicable life. In this case, the characters ponder whether to kill what may be one of their Iranian regime’s torturers, inadvertently discovered by a lumpy mechanic named Vahid (played by Vahid Mobasseri).

The film chillingly details the tortures meted out by the torturer, nicknamed Pegleg, to the characters who were imprisoned for months or years for modest transgressions, part of a long history of rampant repression by a theocratic regime that routinely hangs hundreds of people every year.

Panahi himself has been imprisoned multiple times, despite his status as one of Iran’s most celebrated and awarded filmmakers on the global stage. And that possibility hung over filming of It Was Just An Accident, Etminan said.

“If you in general talk about cinema, there’s going to be two parts, entertainment and trying to intellectually stimulate you,” Etminan said. “In Iran, it has a third use, as an instrument to fight totalitarianism. As an Iranian citizen, I see it as a duty to fight for this freedom. What I’m doing is small compared to young people who were demonstrating who were shot down or killed or lose a part of body.”

He shrugged, “They wouldn’t kill me. Maybe put me in prison.”

To make the film, Etminan traveled to Iran with only a MacBook Air, a couple of small, fast solid-state drives to store camera footage, and a copy of Adobe’s Premiere Pro, which is not allowed in Iran because it’s not locally created software.

To edit, Etminan couldn’t use Premiere’s cloud capabilities, normally used to transfer footage automatically through the cloud, or to do shared or remote editing, because the project would be discovered by authorities who tightly control Iran’s Internet connections.

Instead, at each day’s shooting location, he also functioned as the digital intermediate technician, copying footage from camera memory cards to the hard drives, converting the footage into much smaller proxy files for editing on the MacBook, then giving Panahi multiple copies of the full footage to hide. Etminan then worked from a safe house, editing the footage each night, to further avoid detection or discovery.

Even on a MacBook Air – a fine computer but not usually first choice for film editors who want all the graphics horsepower they can find – Etminan said he was able to work around the Internet limitations and use Premiere to pull together the project.

“If you technically know what you’re doing, all of those things are very easy and very fluid to do it,” Etminan said. “Panahi asked where was my editing equipment, and I opened the computer and showed him.”

The setup is a far cry from his usual editing suite in Instanbul, which Etminan showed me through the Zoom camera. It includes three large screens, monitor speakers, and more. But perhaps the setup matters less than the actual cutting together of a compelling, if frustrating story of people haplessly immobilized by the terrors previously visited upon them.

“If (by editing the film) you mean the rhythm and duration in each scene, you have to talk about the real rhythm and tempo, plus the tempo and rhythm of each character, then decide how to cut the two together,” Etminan said. “In the end, as an Iranian independent filmmaker, I always say don’t make the tools limit what you do.”

In June, the film – a joint French/Iranian/Luxembourg production whose Persian name is Yek Tasadof-e Sadeh – won the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or. Specialty distributor Neon acquired U.S. theatrical rights and released the film in a handful of U.S. theaters on Oct. 15.

The film also is streaming this week in Los Angeles as part of The American French Film Festival. Arthouse-minded streaming service Mubi acquired online rights to the film in several territories, but no company yet has U.S. streaming rights.

For Etminan, the important part was telling the story, and getting it out to the world. Mission accomplished.

“This government is here for 50 years, and we (Persians) have thousands of years of history,” Etminan said. “The story of this film is about the day this government is gone and the people (of Iran) are going to judge the people who worked with the government. It would be good if they would change what they do. I hope they would change themselves for better.”