Abbas Kiarostami's latest film, Certified Copy, resulted from a meeting between the Iranian director and Juliette Binoche in 2007 when the French actress visited Tehran for the first time.
The actress was only the second Euro-American A-list star to visit Iran since the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979, following Sean Penn's 2005 trip to cover the Iranian presidential elections for the San Francisco Chronicle.
After a day of interviews, the star and the director sat down for a chat. Kiarostami recounted in detail an experience he had several years ago. After spending a day walking in a small town in Italy with a woman he had just met, the pair started pretending to be husband and wife as they drank coffee at restaurants and talked in a hotel room.
'And at the end he said, 'Do you believe me?' I said I did, and he said, 'It's not true!'' Binoche says, recalling that Kiarostami was tickled by the way she had been captivated by his story. 'I laughed so much. After that we decided to make a movie out of it because the story's so good.'
Having committed themselves to the project - they even fingerprinted a makeshift agreement - Binoche returned to France and found a producer: MK2's filmmaker-turned-svengali Marin Karmitz, who had produced Kiarostami's 2002 film, Ten. And so the director's first feature-length film set outside Iran was born.
The story which so perplexed Binoche four years ago has since been adapted into Certified Copy's narrative backbone. The film begins with British writer James Miller (played by opera singer William Shimell) meeting a French antique-shop owner (Binoche) in Tuscany after the launch of the Italian translation of his book about duplication in art.