Interview

When I met Hooman Majd, he had just finished a 12-year run (1986-1998) at Island Records and was the newly installed head of Palm Pictures, Chris Blackwell's film venture. I was about to start preproduction on my film Black and White (1999), and it took no more than a long lunch to know that I was about to embark on the best experience of my career with a movie executive. As the son of an Iranian diplomat under the shah, Majd, now 51, had grown up as a cosmopolitan citoyen du monde, living mainly in the United States and England but traveling wherever his father's job took him, including northern Africa and India. The cultural diversity of his background (in addition to a life as a Muslim exposed mainly to Christians and Jews) produced a remarkably shrewd, curious, and tactful mind and an openness to abrupt changes in strategy (on my part) that made directing a film about hip-hop and white fascination with blackness far more pleasant and less volatile than it would have been in more conventional studio hands. His contacts-and relatives-in Iran cut across all political boundaries, and he has served as a translator and guide to current president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in each of his American visits. Majd's new book, The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (Doubleday), is in equal measure memoir, history, and political analysis. It is written-elegantly-from a perspective whose breadth virtually no other observer of Iran could hope to match.

JAMES TOBACK: Your book, The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, combines personal memoir and sentiment with a rigorous contemporary political analysis. Had you always conceived the book in this way?

HOOMAN MAJD: Yes, absolutely. There are so many books on Iran, whether they're memoirs about the early days of the revolution [of 1978-79, in which the shah of Iran was displaced by the Islamic republic led by Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini], which are not that relevant to today's world, or policy books written by academics or journalists in a very dry style. I wanted this book to be something that people could read almost like they were reading a novel, but also to get all the information that they might be interested in knowing about a country that is obviously very much in the news today-and also very dear to my heart because of my own background.

JT: I sense a division of mind and heart in the book, which is to say that you clearly write as an American, but also very much as an Iranian. How do you think of yourself in a nationalistic sense?

HM: Well, that's a question that has come up throughout my life. I was born in Iran, left at a very young age-less than a year old-and grew up and was educated in the West. I grew up thinking of myself as an American but also, because of my parents and the Iranian culture that was in our home, as an Iranian. So if there's any such thing as dual loyalty, then I have it-at least culturally.

JT: Given that sense of division, how do you feel about the tense state of American-Iranian relations right now?

HM: It's incredibly frustrating. It's probably more frustrating to me as an Iranian living in America than it is when I'm over there. Inside Iran, people are actually quite well educated about America. There are things they don't understand, particularly in the government, but the people, by and large, know the American sensibility quite well, and the reverse is not true. There's a lack of knowledge about Iran and the Iranian people. Part of the reason I wrote the book is this lack of understanding.