Dariush Mehrjui was born on December 8, 1939 in Tehran. As a child, he was deeply involved in music and painting, playing piano and santoor and drawing miniatures. In 1959, he left for California to study cinema. But at those days, UCLA's cinema department was more interested in the technical aspects of filmmaking than its meaning as a form of art. He attended a number of film courses, namely with Renoir who taught him how to work with actors and he switched to Philosophy and was graduated from UCLA.
