Dariush Mehrjui

Dariush Mehrjui
Dariush Mehrjui, 2012
Born	(1939-12-08) December 8, 1939 (age 77) Tehran, Iran
Nationality	Iranian
Occupation	Film director Screenwriter
Years active	1966–present
Spouse(s)	Faryar Javaherian (separated) Vahide Mohammadi Far
Children	Maryam (from Faryar Javaherian) Safa (from Faryar Javaherian) Mona (from Vahide Mohammadi Far)

Dariush Mehrju'i (Persian: داریوش مهرجویی ‎‎, born on 8 December 1939 in Tehran, also spelled as Mehrjui, Mehrjoui, and Mehrjuyi) is an Iranian director, screenwriter, producer, film editor and a member of the Iranian Academy of the Arts.

Mehrjui was a founding member of the Iranian New Wave movement of the early 1970s. His second film, Gaav, is considered to be the first film of this movement, which also included Masoud Kimiai and Nasser Taqvai. Most of his films are inspired by literature and adapted from Iranian and foreign novels and plays.

Dariush Mehrjui was born to a middle-class family in Tehran. He showed interest in painting miniatures, music, and playing santoor and piano. He spent a lot of time going to the movies, particularly American films which were un-dubbed and inter-spliced with explanatory title cards that explained the plot throughout the films. At this time Mehrjui started to learn English so as to better enjoy the films. The film that had the strongest impact on him as a child was Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves. At the age of 12, Mehrjui built a 35 mm projector, rented two-reel films and began selling tickets to his neighborhood friends. Although raised in a religious household, Mehrjui said that, at the age of 15, "The face of God gradually became a little hazy for me, and I lost my faith."

In 1959, Mehrjui moved to the United States to study at University of California, Los Angeles' (UCLA) Department of Cinema. One of his teachers there was Jean Renoir, whom Mehrjui credited for teaching him how to work with actors. Mehrjui was dissatisfied with the film program due to its emphasis on the technical aspects of film and the quality of most of the teachers. Mehrjui has said of his educators, "They wouldn't teach you anything very significant...because the teachers were the kind of people who had not been able to make it in Hollywood themselves...[and would] bring the rotten atmosphere of Hollywood to the class and impose it on us." He switched his major to philosophy and graduated from UCLA in 1964.