TEHRAN -- “We never make a decision; the stories make the decisions for us,” director, screenwriter, and actor Iraj Tahmasb told the Mehr News Agency on Tuesday.

“When the stories come after us, they bring the characters with them,” he added.
Tahmasb, who directed, acted in, and wrote the screenplay for the film “Bad Guy”, which is currently on screen, talked about his own character and actor Hamid Jebelli’s character in the film.
Commenting on the fact that audiences were probably surprised by his recent movie, he said, “We did not feel like playing the same routine characters. If a movie is not new and follows the same old themes, it becomes a boring affair.
“We do not actually intend to make the audience laugh, but the stories we choose are comic. For example, many like to make the audience laugh and they do everything to make this happen. But for us, how the story is told is more important, and the stories we choose are automatically comic.”
On the comedy “Bad Guy”, he said, “The comedy in the movie happens due to a situation which anyone could experience. A large sum of money suddenly appears in front of you and it is hard to make the right decision. So it causes laughter and the comedy lies inside the story.”
On his use of flashbacks in the movie, he explained, “The central theme of the film is friendship. A story happens within this old friendship. The flashbacks help us transfer the emotional feelings inside the story to the audience better.”
He stated that he does not like to make a film that people want to see just one time, saying, “We don’t make our films to be watched just once. We would like to make them in such a way that people watch them over and over again.”
On the role of women in the movie “Bad Guy”, Tahmasb said that the story begins with a friendship between two men and ends with friendship between two men, adding, “If women were important in this story, we surely would have used them at the end of the story, too. But the foundation of the work was on men and their friendship, and it ended with the same issue.