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.Mehrjui started his own literary magazine in 1964, Pars Review. The magazine’s intention was to bring contemporary Persian literature to western readers.
