Director Jafar Panahi has a great deal in common with his “It Was Just an Accident” ensemble of characters, fellow Iranian dissidents who, like himself, have suffered incarceration, intimidation, interrogation, and even torture at the hands of the Islamic Republic. When Panahi introduces his disparate group of former prisoners, they’ve been reunited by the kidnapping of the man they believe is “Peg Leg,” aka Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), the interrogator who used to blindfold and terrorize them in prison. With the roles reversed, and their former captor unconscious in the back of a van, the first 80 minutes of “It Was Just an Accident” are a comedic and stressful journey through Tehran, as the group wrestles with their own conflicting emotions of what to do with the man who tortured them.
While Panahi’s clandestine shoot —filmming an unsactioned script out in the open in Iran’s capital for the first time since his 2010 arrest–– came with significant difficulties, one of them wasn’t working with non-and-semi professional actors. Panahi, while a guest on this week’s episode of the Toolkit podcast, discussed his run-and-gun shooting process and his comfort level working with untrained actors under these conditions. And the results speak for themselves, as “It Was Just an Accident” features several longer take scenes filled with the rhythms of the eclectic ensemble’s back-and-forth dialogue and Panahi’s seemingly effortless comedic timing and tonal balance, none of which ever feels hindered by the cast’s lack of training, nor the shooting conditions.
That would not be the case in the film’s final 15 minutes, as Panahi makes a dramatic shift in the climactic scene and the shift to the now-conscious Eghbal character.
“While I was working on this film, I kept thinking that all these characters are talking about a character who is absent himself,” said Panahi, interpreted by Sheida Dayani. “And now I had to have a shot that was entirely his, that that belonged to him, and the other characters had to be absent, and my only solution was to have a medium shot of him. It made it a little difficult.”
“A little difficult” is an understatement. Panahi was reduced to a single tight shot of the actor because Azizi would have to carry it with his character blindfolded, tied to a tree, and delivering a monologue that runs a Hamlet-like emotional gamut through his roles as brutal interrogator, kidnap victim, loving family man, and finally victim of the same authoritarian regime as the dissidents he’s brutalized.
Discussing the sequence with Panahi at the New York Film Festival, Martin Scorsese commented that the film’s success relies on the emotional gut punch of the scene, and the rawness with which Azizi is able to convey it with “the intensity of his body and his reactions” while being physically confined. To which, Panahi admitted it was the sequence he was by far the most concerned about heading into the movie, and the one they “put all of our energy” and focus into (along with the opening) in the lead-up to shooting.
While on the podcast, Panahi further commented on the degree of difficulty of the 13-and-a-half-minute performance while working with “all the stress that we have during shooting because every second counts and it’s vital.” Because there were already significant risks involved with such a long static shot out the open and with lights trained on Azizi at night, there was no additional time to rehearse or do multiple takes.
It would be the one role that required a full-blown professional actor. Azizi had stepped away from acting in mainstream projects for ethical reasons and has become accustomed to working on underground projects like “It Was Just an Accident” and the unconventional conditions that come with avoiding the authorities. Yet despite this background, the degree of difficulty was such that on the first night shooting the scene, Panahi faced his worst fear: It wasn’t working. The problem, though, wasn’t the performance per se.
“I realized that the actual problem is that I don’t know this interrogator,” said Panahi. “The reason was that I had been interrogated myself 15 years ago, and it was for a period of three months, so a long time had passed, and I had not really been able to connect with the interrogator [character].”
That night Panahi turned to his friend Mehdi Mamoudian for help. A human rights defender and journalist, Mamoudian had spent “a quarter of his life in prison” according to Panahi (and had to return to prison over the course of 2025), had previously helped with the film’s dialogue, but now could help unlock a character he unfortunately was all too familiar with from his countless hours of interrogation.
“He gave the actor all the details about what interrogators usually do and how they usually behave. First, they come and they play it dumb. Then they try to [say] ‘If you work with me here, I’ll work with you there.’ Then they might show some force. Then they might humiliate, then they might have hysterical laughs.”
Jafar Panahi accepts the Palme d’Or Award for ‘It Was Just an Accident’ onstage during the closing ceremony at the 78th annual Cannes Film Festival.Getty Images
Regardless of how many times he saw it in post-production, or out on the festival-to-awards circuit, Panahi said he still marvels at what Azizi was able to do with Mamoudian’s guidance of the character, saying there is not an “extra frame” in the entire 13-minute-plus performance.
“I know that it’s sort of expected to have a great performance by superstars in supporting roles, but this actor, even though he is not a superstar, he’s acting no less than them,” said Panahi.
It’s a shame in an age of the supporting acting awards going to actors in leading roles (just as long as they aren’t the principal protagonist), that Azizi’s name hasn’t been considered. As “It Was Just an Accident” only continues to pick up Oscar momentum since winning the Palm d’Or in May, there is no 2025 film so dependent on a supporting performance in what is the most vital 15 minutes of acting this year.
To hear Jafar Panahi’s full interview, with interpreter Sheida Dayani, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
