Movies often have an incredible way of coming out in the right place and at the right time in history. The independent film The Stoning of Soraya M. is one such film, coming out at the most impeccable moment, a time of great uncertainty. In the land of the film’s subject matter, Iran, the country’s currently experiencing an uprising in the streets in reaction to the hotly contested recent presidential election.
One Iranian in this country who has been leading the charge for freedom in her homeland is actress Shohreh Aghdashloo, who fled the country in the midst of the country’s revolution which transformed the country into a violent fundamentalist Muslim theocracy.
She has had a successful career in Hollywood for the past 20 years. Aghdashloo has appeared in TV series like 24 and House Of Saddam and in films like The Exorcism Of Emily Rose, X-Men: The Last Stand, The Nativity Story, and House Of Sand And Fog, the last which garnered the Iranian-born actress a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nod. The 57 year-old first discussed with us how her role in The Stoning of Soraya M. was the one she waited her whole career in America to do.
“Cyrus Nowrasteh, the director/writer, he wrote the film with his wife, Betsy Nowrasteh,” Shohreh recalls, “And that’s why I call Betsy my ‘American sister’. She was the one who picked up the book in France. They turned it into a screenplay together and Cyrus approached me and told me about the screenplay, the subject matter, and I took a long pause and I said, where were you? I have been waiting for you for over 20 years, then he took a long pause and said, why? I said I had seen a real one on tape and since, I’ve been wondering who, what, when, how are we going to shed light on this.”
In the film, she plays Zahra, the aunt of the film’s title character, an Iranian woman arranged to be married to a brutal, abusive husband who is sentenced to death by stoning for her defiance of Iranian law. Shohreh says she was deeply motivated to play the role after stumbling onto a smuggled videotape of an actual stoning in Iran years earlier.
“This one smuggled out of Iran early eighties by some opposition group and were copied, a thousand copy, and was spread amongst all the Iranians who were involved with the Iranian show business and film industry outside Iran,” Aghdashloo recalls, “ The one I saw involved two young men and they were being stoned for being homosexuals. One was 18 and the other one was 19. The worst thing I have ever seen in my life.”
“I thank the guy who gave the tape to me,” she continues, “He said, very nonchalantly said to me, don’t watch it in the evening, watch it in the morning, and I listened to him. I took my daughter to school in the morning, my husband went to work at 11:00AM, I put it on, it took 1 ½ hours, and I had not realized all the time, like my audience are telling me now, I sat on the edge of my chair, watching it, not believing it, and it’s horrible to watch. People who say that the stoning scene in this film was horrific, I ask them to see a real one and see how ugly and how devastating the real one is. This is just a mild version of it.”
Aghdashloo shared that despite how much she feared for her safety working on the film as it was shot in the Middle East in Jordan not very far from Iran, she felt the story, which is all too common in Iran even today, had to be told as a means of bringing a human face to the fight for freedom in the Islamist state.
“The worst fear is the fear of unknown,” she believes, “This is the fear I’ve had since the beginning but never hesitated to do it. I decided that I’m going to put aside my fear no matter what happens to me. That’s not important here, the story is. I felt the same way my character did, Zahra, I have to get out this story, I have to shed light on it. But I was afraid of the ignorant people who are not familiar with their own holy book and they think that we were hurting the religion or is against their religion. No, this has nothing to do with religion. This has been happening since the stone ages. We’ve been through hundreds of years. We’ve been through Judaism, Catholicism, Christianity, and other nations, other countries, other people, other religions have dealt with it and I guess this is our turn now. I never thought we would end this way.”
“Never nothing like this ever happened during the Shah’s reign in Iran and I never thought that Iranians have to do something about this,” Shohreh adds, “But now, it has, more than a job, more than portraying a character, it has turned into a duty for me to bring it to light and let more and more people to see it. And I have a strong feeling that if, numbers talk usually, that the numbers of people who, I would not only love the people to watch this film, but I would love for them to do something about it. And the least they can do is get on the site www.stopstoning.com, leave the remarks, don’t leave the site, get back to it, check it time to time, and I’m sure if the site is hit more than a million times, then we can do something. Altogether, we can bring an end to this form of barbaric method of punishment.”
While the story in The Stoning Of Soraya M. is based on actual events, Shohreh says the people behind the film had little to go on as far as up close and personal accounts of what happened during and after the events in the film.
“We didn’t have anybody to talk to,” she claims, “In fact, I don’t know what happened to the rest of the family. Vaguely, we know that Ali, the husband, took the sons to the city and Zahra took care of the girls for a few years and she died four or five years after of natural causes. I have Soraya’s picture of when she was 10 years old.”
So far, the film has gotten plenty of attention, particularly at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
“Well, every verdict we’ve had, either private screenings or public screenings, like in Toronto Film Festival, which we were the second runner-up for people’s choice next to Slumdog Millionaire, all the Iranians who come and thank us one by one,” Aghdashloo says, “They would say, thank you for making this. Of course, Iranian women are more eager for this subject matter to get out and then, with puffy eyes, would come to me, hug me, kiss me, cry on my shoulder, and tell me, thank you for making this, thank you for taking this risk. They knew it involves some risks, of course, for its actors.”
The risks, of course, included a film shoot which was far from smooth.
“You can imagine it wasn’t a smooth shoot by any means,” Shohreh recalls, “It was filmed in the mountains of Jordan, close to Petra, beautiful, beautiful, stony village and it was very hard. You know, with tragedies, actors tend to have fun, they tell jokes, try to keep themselves up because if you get seriously involved with the character, then you get stagnated, you are not able to move and work properly. Therefore, we tried everything we could to laugh and have fun time, but the only time we were not able to do so was on the days that we were shooting the stoning scene. It took us six days to shoot it and it was devastating.”
“Even the scene, everything was, of course, fake with all those fake stones and rubber stones and so on and so forth,” she adds, “But the look of it was very real, especially because the villagers who were very kind, very nice people, very hospitable, got to play in the film as extras and they got to throw the stones. So setting scene when Soraya is being stoned, it was between the takes, I opened my eyes and all I can see was just angry men with angry faces in the air asking for stoning. I thought, wow, what a great acting experience. It is so hard to tell the difference between reality and cinema and I bet every method actor would give an arm and a leg to be in my place to play this role because it was a great acting experience.”
The question one poses to Shohreh when watching a film as intense as this is where does a woman’s strength come from to endure such barbarism thrown at them.
“Well, you don’t only become more powerful when you have nothing to lose, but also, she’s a very strong character and courageous,” she replies, “And I keep saying this, she’s a product of Shah’s reign. According to herself, she was once somebody in this town. She was married to the mayor of the town. Most probably, all these people were at her disposal when she was the wife of the mayor of the town, so she still has the same feeling and gathers all her strength and she has the power to prevent this stoning, but, of course, a bunch of men in this male-oriented society have decided that she should be stoned and they stone her to death.”
“But most probably such thing had not happened in the village, so Soraya is really born after the revolution,” Aghdashloo continues, “She’s a product of post-revolution in Iran and another thing is every time I watch a film or read a story, I tend to find out what the metaphors are for, what the symbols are for. They’re coming from the Middle East being used to censor materials for we have to look for metaphors and symbols. This is although based on a true story, but filled with metaphors. And Soraiya is the metaphor of all those voices, young women born in post-revolutionary Iran.”
Aghdashloo explained for us the many distinct traits of Iranian culture that are found throughout the film.
“For example, at the beginning, when she tells the reporter that something happened in the village that he should know, the devil himself visited this town and she starts biting her hand,” Shohreh notes, “That means the evil eye, I hope that evil eye will go away from here and would not touch us, simple things like this. The way that she plays with her chador, the way she wears her chador, very symbolic. It’s important who you talk to when you wear your chador and how you wear your chador. If you are intimate with the person, you let the person see half of your face, like I let the mayor see my face when I’m talking to him and say, I don’t believe one day I wanted to marry you.”
“I’m trying to seduce him and yet, at the same time, I’m bringing him into this private moment of ours so he would do something for me,” she adds, “But when asked my character to shut up, what she does, she just bring her chador on her lips, which means you, be quiet, and then she leaves. So there are a few moments here and there that chador plays a very symbolic role and I was myself surprised because I had not planned for that at all. When at the end, I’m trying to stop them, I turn my chador into a shield. In the moment I did that, Jim Caviezel got out of his car , the director came up to me, and said, wow, how did you think of this? And I said, it was a spontaneous act, this is my instinct. And this is at work and nothing else.”
We posed to Shohreh the notion that the film has many elements that are quite Shakespearean.
“All the elements of Shakespeare are there. This plot is very much like the Henry VIII and the Anne Boleyn’s plot. Same thing, Henry VIII wants a divorce, Anne Boleyn does not want a divorce. She wants her daughter to be the queen of England and she does become the queen of England, the first Queen Elizabeth. And she refuses to ask for a divorce and she sends a musician to her chamber.”
“And later on, history proved that the musician was gay, but he sends a musician to the chamber and accuse her of having an inappropriate relationship with a musician and have her beheaded, same plot. It was very Shakespearean, you’re right, I guess tragedies are the same everywhere in the world, whether Roman Empire or Greek.”
Last but not least, we touched on the subject that was to be expected for a film as timely as this, Shohreh’s reaction to the current uprising in Iran.
“Yes, I’m very, very, very excited about it all,” Aghdashloo exclaims, “I’m dying to find out about what the recount is. Although they haven’t done anything in the last thirty years to build my trust, but, still, I want to see what happens. Whatever is happening now is very healthy.”
“We already lost very young person over this and there might be more, but still, it’s very healthy that Iranians have decided to take their destiny into their own hands and coming out, shouting, demanding for what they’re asking for,” she continues, “I’ve never heard this before from the face of the streets in Iran, transparency, law, they are referring to now. So it’s scary, it’s dangerous, but at the same time, very healthy and very promising. I have a feeling that Iran is at its dawn of democracy.”
However, despite her excitement, Aghdashloo, who has lived in the United States for 20 years now, has no plans to return to her home country even it does achieve the hopes of becoming democratic.
“I would love to visit Iran, yes,” she says, “I’m afraid not to live. My daughter is American, she was born here at Cedar Sinai Medical Hospital (laughing). I have a house and I pay mortgage (laughing).”
