A true defining film of bravery, The Seed of the Sacred Fig starts off as a normal family dynamic that unravels into something more serious set against the uprisings in Tehran. Offscreen Central had the opportunity to speak with editor Andrew Bird about humanizing all characters, maintaining tension, and using cell phone footage to open up the confined spaces.

Jillian Chilingerian: Hi. So nice to meet you. I’m very excited to talk about this film today. It’s one of my favorites of the year, and it’s one that I have not stopped thinking about.
Andrew Bird: That’s nice to hear, happy to tell you what you want to know.

Jillian Chilingerian: The stories I’ve heard of the making of this film, are a statement of bravery and just boldness of filmmaking. Let’s start there with your part in all of that.
Andrew Bird: Well, I was fortunately in a safe place in Germany. I was working from home, but of course, I had to be very careful about who I told anything about this project. It was clear that people’s lives were possibly on the line with this project. Very few people around me were aware of what I was working on and at the same time, there’s a huge responsibility to do justice to what these people are all risking to make this film. Mohammed worked previously on a film 10 years ago, which at the time was also a big risk that he was taking because of his not being able to make films in Iran. I was aware of how dangerous it could be. I remember back then, actually sitting in his apartment in Hamburg, working on the film and there were a whole bunch of us in the same room. I was at one computer, the sound designer was next to me, already working on the sound design, and the producer was behind us, on the sofa, making phone calls all day. Mohammed’s wife was bringing us tea and biscuits all the time and I was with Mohammed and a translator and suddenly there was a ring at the doorbell, and everybody just froze. I’ll never forget that feeling in my gut as well. Somebody said, Well, how could they know? It was just somebody delivering some pizza, they’d rung the wrong doorbell. It was nothing but just that moment of fear, it made it very clear to me how much is on the line for all of them.
Jillian Chilingerian: Oh my goodness, that sounds like so much emotion and a lot to put into the conditions of wanting to make this film and put it together.
Andrew Bird: It’s a bit scary when you’re immersed in the work, you don’t think about that. You get on with doing what you’re doing. I guess, like any form of work where your head gets completely involved in it. I had very long days in front of the computer, anyway, because we had very little time to get this film together. It’s not something that you dwell on, you’re aware of it, but it’s, it doesn’t, it doesn’t numb you or anything.

Jillian Chilingerian: I had watched the trailer, but I always try to not get too much into a film before I go see it. There’s so much unraveling of where the story goes, and you’re engaged to see what’s going to happen. At its core, it’s a story of this family led by this patriarchal figure who is dealing with the complexity of his job that slowly, over time, causes a lot of paranoia, and we get to see how that impacts the women of his family. I think a lot of cultures, can relate to how when you are in a younger generation you think differently from your parents.
Andrew Bird: Well what I appreciate about Mohammed is that he’ll develop a character like the character of the Father, and that character will be very human as well. There’s no real black and white, and that was something that was always in my mind when I was editing, he’s just a man doing a job, and he’s caught in the cogs of this system, and he can only do what he does, and he’s trying to do the best for himself and his family. It was always important not to discredit this person or to make him feel evil, to make all the four lead characters in the film feel genuine and feel like real people, and to have sympathies, or maybe some antipathy to them, but regard them as humans. Also to keep the story as tight as possible and to keep it moving forward, because I do feel that it’s a very tense story and we didn’t want it to sit back too much. We wanted to keep the viewer on the edge of his or her seat. That seems to work when I watch the film in theaters, with audiences. People are just so quiet and so tense, which is great because that’s what we hoped we would achieve with it.
Jillian Chilingerian: You’re hanging on to every word that’s being said in every movement because it could go anywhere, but it again, it’s so tight that you’re wondering, like, what’s the path for each of these characters?
Andrew Bird: I’m a big fan of films that start somewhere and then end up somewhere where you would never have anticipated the film going at the beginning. So I was very happy with the script for this and also, I mean, we made a bunch of changes in the course of the edit, we took out stuff where we felt we were slowing down the momentum of the narrative too much, and we changed the ending quite a lot from the way it had been in the script.

Jillian Chilingerian: We start in the city, and by the end, we are on the outskirts in a different place that we don’t recognize. It’s interesting to see the trajectory of how much we get to travel geographically within the film and feel that. It’s chilling to watch, and you’re definitely on the edge of your seat mapping out how can they get out.
Andrew Bird: They move from the very confined space of the apartment in Tehran to the outside world, but it’s ultimately an equally confined space in this garden, in this house, and even in the ruins where they end up at the end of the film. I was constantly amazed at the thought of how trust works between people, and how nobody in this society can be open to anybody else, and it’s something that’s affected my life since I mean that just the idea of living in a society like that, where nobody can trust anybody else, and how does that impact society as a whole, and on every individual?

Jillian Chilingerian: This claustrophobic and confined space, the addition of a lot of the cell phone footage of how the two young daughters are getting to see the world that is happening on the streets in their community. I love that extra addition to it because I think it symbolizes how phones have been so integrated into our society, capturing things that probably have been happening for a long time, but nobody had that footage. This movement getting an additional side of that story, and what’s happening to a lot of the women that are getting mixed up into it.
Andrew Bird: Initially, we were always very aware of the fact that Mohammed was shooting this film in secret, that they weren’t going to be able to run around with a camera and the film crew on the streets of Tehran, and we had a little concern that the whole thing might feel too much of a stage play inside the apartment. We wanted to do everything that we could to avoid that feeling and at some point, Mohammed talked on the phone to me about the possibility of using some cell phone footage. At that point, he was thinking of maybe using a few shots from that as chapter splitters. I was very open to the idea of using this cell phone footage because I thought it would be a good idea to help us to open the space up a bit and to feel less confined. We didn’t want it to feel like a film that was shot under the circumstances it was being shot in and I proposed using these when the girls are in the room and they’re looking at their cell phones using that as a kind of springboard to moving into the original footage that they were watching. Mohammed wasn’t too keen on the idea at first, but then I tried it out, and he saw it, and he was happy with the way that it worked. Mohammed had somebody send me something like 400 different clips of the demonstrations, of the protests, of the reactions to the protests of women taking off the hijabs and burning them and he gave me an entirely free hand on how to work with them, which I think helped, in a way, because me not having any real knowledge of the local culture. I was able to choose elements from those clips that maybe have a more universal feeling to them, or a more universally readable that’s generally something that I brought to the project was having an awareness if I was seeing it as a viewer, and some of the stuff that was maybe to Iran specific, that people probably in Iran would all understand, but we in the West wouldn’t understand at all. I was able to filter that out a little bit more.

Jillian Chilingerian: We get to see from the mom, the dad, and the daughters where they all get their information from their perspective on what’s happening. His is all coming from work of villainizing the people, the mom is from the news, and then theirs is right from almost the source of these people that are out there seeing it and showing a different side of things. As you’re saying, it’s almost become universal how we’re all receiving information and how it helps us form our different perspectives based on generation.
Andrew Bird: The father’s caught up in his world. He trusts the state and believes what he’s seeing on TV. He doesn’t get what’s happening with his daughters and I feel for him when that happens, the conversation that they have about, she wants to dye her hair blue, what’s happening? Yeah, I get that somebody caught up in that system of belief and then in the world that he’s in, just wouldn’t grasp what’s going on.

Jillian Chilingerian: Those last 20 to 30 minutes, my jaw was clinched the whole time, because I don’t know where this is going to go. Everyone was very quiet, because this movie, as we mentioned, like, starts around this family, and you never expect that’s where we’re going to get to in the end. It balances so many different tones, but there’s also this straight line of following the father and how the gun goes missing, and he gets very paranoid. Mapping that out and figuring out how to keep the audience engaged with those different turns because, by the end, it does feel very thriller almost like a horror film, but grounded in realism.
Andrew Bird: I’ve talked a lot about the Father, but I think the character that I probably identify with most, and I think probably most of the audience identify with is the mother. She is the character that goes through the biggest transformation in the film, she moves from being a materialist adherent to what her husband is working and doing to somebody who starts putting those things into question. I think that’s where we want the audience to go as well, to start questioning these things. She was the character that we followed the closest in terms of the development and the turning points in the story, to see where that would take her. We always knew it was going to be a different film once they got out of Tehran, once they got onto the road, Mohammed always joked about how he wanted to make an action movie or do an action scene. He would phone me and say, Is the car chase working? Is the car chase working? I want to do that. I want to be an action director, which is very far from all of his other films. The hope was to keep it tense, but it’s not just the action scenes that are tense to me. I think the most tense scene in the film for me is the interrogation of the mother in front of the camera. I find it very gripping, even when I watch it now and I know what’s going to happen.

Jillian Chilingerian: In that scene, where they’re watching their happy family memories on the camera, and then the father warps it, basically, by doing this interrogation. I love that you bring up the mother because this film spoke to me in a way that as children, our mothers are always willing to protect us, and we always want to protect our mothers, I love that you can see those basics like, there’s so much human happening in this film, where there are so many high stakes and so much going on, but there’s like, so many universal themes, which is how we view people or engage within our families?
Andrew Bird: It was quite an adventure and related to what was happening with Mohammed and him having to leave the country and us not being in touch with each other for two weeks in really a decisive phase of the project, and not knowing if he was safe or not. It felt to me like a miracle that we got the film shot without being discovered there. It felt like a miracle that Mohammed got out of the country alive and safe and arrived here in Germany safely, felt like a miracle that we got the edit finished in time that we got into Cannes. It’s been an amazing ride, actually, more than for me personally, there’s the ride that you go on in the film, but there’s also been this personal journey that I’ve gone on with the film. With the whole Oscar campaign and the American release, and, people like yourself seeing the film and responding to it in the way that you do. It’s a gift to me.

Jillian Chilingerian: One more question to go back to the family dynamic, when you mention things you wanted to tighten up or get rid of, like, making sure that each of these characters has their throughline so that when you get to the end, you get a perspective for all of them. How did you figure out how much time we should spend with them? The father is at work, the mother is alone in the house, and we see the daughters even when their friend is injured. We get a full understanding of who this family is.
Andrew Bird: Sometimes it’s a question of trying to balance that when you see the film, and you don’t necessarily always know that at the moment when you’re editing the scenes. I can remember that there’s one particular scene when the friend has been injured, and the mother ushers the friend out of the apartment, and then with the girls in their room, and the younger daughter is on her bed, and she has headphones on and she’s listening to music, and the older daughter is on her exercise bike pushing out all this, all this pain and suffering that she has. That’s a scene that I know we went back to and completely re-edited it from a different perspective. I think the first time I cut it from more from the perspective of the younger daughter so we were kind of inside her head with the music loud and we revisited that once we’d seen the whole of the film, to shift the emphasis of the scene onto the other daughter because we felt her emotion was stronger, and we needed to push her more into the into the center of the audience attention.
Jillian Chilingerian: Everyone in this film was so great that I couldn’t imagine going through these performances and figuring out those parts to emphasize.
Andrew Bird: I mean, it certainly wasn’t a film where I had to struggle with the performances of the actors and the actresses. They were all magnificent from start to finish.

Jillian Chilingerian: Well, thank you so much for this time to dive more into your work on the film.
Andrew Bird: Well, thank you for your interest!

The Seed of the Sacred Fig is now playing in theaters.
You can read our review of the film here.