Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami, pictured in Paris

Sitting in a café on a rain-sodden afternoon in central Paris, I am struck by a bold slogan that is stripped across the top of La Terrasse, one of the countless magazines devoted to cultural life in the French capital. The words of the great Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini are making a typically combative effort to lift our collective spirits: “La culture est une résistance à la distraction”. But it occurs to me that in its 21st-century guise, culture has never seemed more vulnerable to distraction, competing as it must in a ferocious and promiscuous marketplace of images and ideas.

Pasolini’s words come from a different time. Today’s culture twitters and teases its way into our consciousness, so that we barely notice. Ease of distraction, a desire for instant gratification, ever-shrinking attention spans: these are the symptoms of an artistic scene that has sacrificed much to make itself more accessible to a greater population. There are few artists working today who demand of their audiences the concentration and commitment that might just force them to dig deep inside themselves, and change the way that they look at the world. But there are some.

Abbas Kiarostami is prominent among them. The body of work created by the 68-year-old Iranian film director, photographer and now opera director has won him awards that, by their very titles, connect him to an artistic tradition that seems already to speak of a bygone era: the François Truffaut award; the Pier Paolo Pasolini award; the Federico Fellini gold medal; the Akira Kurosawa award. He won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1997 for A Taste of Cherry, a slow, contemplative tale of a middle-aged man who has resolved to commit suicide, and searches for an accomplice to bury him in his already-dug grave.

More existential dilemmas followed in subsequent works: that of the city engineer Behzad in The Wind Will Carry Us, who travels into rural Iran and gradually, but unsentimentally, discovers new social values; those encountered by the protagonist of Ten, a beautiful woman driver whose front-seat conversations with friends, relatives and strangers are recorded with the utmost simplicity by a digital camera in the dashboard.

Whether in long, lyrical takes that portray the Iranian countryside in elemental splendour, or using simple equipment that records the demotic clatter of everyday life in Tehran, Kiarostami’s uncompromising style puts him in a strange limbo: it is unsettling enough to make his films prohibited in his native country, but not explicit enough to force its authorities to stop him making films altogether.

It was something of a surprise to learn, last year, that Kiarostami had turned to opera. And not just any opera, but Mozart’s Così fan tutte, a romantic comedy that skips around the delicate tensions between flirtation and fidelity in a manner that would appear to be inimical to this director’s more austere concerns. His production made its debut at the Aix-en-Provence festival last year and opened at English National Opera on Friday night.

Kiarostami should have been in London to supervise the production at the Coliseum, but he never made it: he withdrew suddenly from a visa application process at the British embassy in Tehran which he likened to being “trapped in the very circles of hell itself”. He described his treatment as “disgraceful”, adding that it would be “tempting to brand [the actions of the embassy] Kafkaesque, yet to do so would be to imbue them with rather too much intelligence”.

A few weeks later, across the Channel, his mood is more muted when discussing the incident. “It is painful. I feel sorry for what happened,” he says via an interpreter at the offices of the French company that produces his films. “But that kind of thing is not only happening to me. And it is not only happening in Iran. It is a general tendency – it happens to artists, academics. I feel very clearly that it is an action against culture.

“If you are a businessman or a politician in Iran, you can get a visa as quickly as you ask for it. But artists are the biggest victims of this system.” Diplomats, he says, are not what they were. “Think of what diplomacy has given us: [Pablo] Neruda, [Miguel Angel] Asturias, Octavio Paz. And it was not that long ago.” He speaks softly and quietly, and without any apparent rancour.

On to the happier business of Mozart. The commission from Aix was a surprise. “I didn’t know much about the opera. I hadn’t seen it. But then I read a translation of the libretto, and what immediately attracted me was the central subject of the relationship between men and women. Its themes are universal, geographically and historically. It is an 18th-century text that still applies.

“In fact just before we met, I was talking to a friend about his personal life, and as I was listening to him, I kept thinking of the opera, and I wanted to tell him – ‘go and listen to it, you will find an answer!’”

An answer? This is remarkable to hear from an artist who finds many more complications than resolutions in the dilemmas of the human condition. Mozart was that good?

“I was very surprised myself to see how straightforwardly a work like this can present concepts and answers to real issues,” he replies, clearly smitten by Mozart’s genius. He says he is eternally grateful for the chance of “spending two months all alone” with the composer.

Did he get on with opera as an art form? “I was guided by the music,” he says simply. “That is where the poetry lies.”

At Aix, the production received mixed reviews. Kiarostami uses film as a backdrop to the action, contrasting present-day scenes with the period dress on stage, but many critics found his trademark longueurs excessively uneventful, particularly in the final act, when the audience sees nothing but a projection of the orchestra behind the stage.

I ask if he was trying to complicate the work by adding extra layers. Weren’t they a distraction from the main action?

“I am not sure I am the right person to say anything about the simplicity or complexity of my reading.” he says sternly. “But the spectators who come are watching a work that was written two centuries ago. You can’t pretend that this gap in history doesn’t exist.” The screened backdrops, he says, act as a reminder to the audience that it is present. “You don’t have to forget about yourself to get involved in the story.”

But don’t many opera audiences go to the theatre precisely to lose themselves in the action?

“But [the opera] is a matter of portraying emotions. And how can we relate to those emotions if we forget about ourselves? How can we even pretend that we can ever forget about ourselves? Maybe we wish it, because then time would disappear, and we would be frozen and never get old. But even when we sleep and dream, our lives are going on. We never truly forget about ourselves.”

If Kiarostami’s take on Mozart sounds philosophically challenging, it is nothing compared to his forthcoming film Shirin, which receives its UK premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival next month. Here, the director focuses entirely on the faces of an audience of women who are watching a screening of the traditional Iranian fable of Khosrow and Shirin. The film constantly pulls the spectator in opposite directions, not knowing whether to concentrate on the story told on the soundtrack, or on the faces emoting in response to what they – but not we – are seeing.

It is not an easy film to watch, and I ask Kiarostami if he ever worries about alienating audiences.

“When you make a film like this, which is an experimental work, you can’t worry about the audience. I worked in the most simple way: three months of shooting, six months of editing, working on my own, as if it were a painting. There was no commercial pressure. In this way, you can afford to make a film under your own conditions, and then see if the audience responds.”

Does he find himself experimenting more and more as he grows older? “Yes, because I have less and less time,” he replies simply. He talks of his “disconnection” with the wider film industry. “The evolution of cinema as an art form became disrupted. The obligation of story-telling was not an internal evolution, it happened for commercial reasons. Now, there are fewer and fewer directors who dare to experiment.”

I ask him whether he feels that his work has a specifically Iranian dimension. “In order to be universal, you have to be rooted in your own culture,” he says.

Does he feel in any way an ambassador for a country that is frequently misunderstood and poorly represented in the west?

“I don’t know whether it is fortunate or unfortunate, but I have no such thing as national pride. I don’t feel proud that I am Iranian. I happen to be who I am. I feel like a tree. A tree doesn’t feel a duty to start doing something about the earth from which it comes. A tree just has to bear fruit, and leaves and blossoms. It doesn’t feel grateful to the earth.

“I don’t feel any duty to correct all the misrepresentations about my country and my culture. I am who I am, I do what I do. Who am I to have such a duty? Besides, think of the number of people who see my films, compared to the people reached by the mass media. What can I do?”

But it must be terrible to have his films banned in the country from which they come, I say. It is as if the fruit from the tree cannot even drop on to its home soil.

“We have ended up accepting it,” he says resignedly. “I only feel grateful that [the authorities’] power is limited to not releasing the films. The good thing is that their power doesn’t go any further than that. The people who really want to see them can do it illegally. The fruit is blown away. But others can catch it, and eat it.” A slight pause. “The wind knows where to take it.”

The elemental metaphor, self-consciously echoing the name of his previous film, is delivered soberly, and without drama. It it still difficult to believe that Kiarostami is so evidently enthralled by the feckless frolics of 18th-century high society. I ask if he is tempted to direct another opera.

“Not only tempted. I would love to do it again,” he says with genuine enthusiasm. “I am so sorry that I have missed this opportunity to come to London. I feel like three weeks have been stolen from me. I only hope I have another opportunity. I would find it very hard to refuse.”

I tell him that there is a nasty little shocker called Don Giovanni that he could be perfectly suited for.

“OK, so if I am asked to do it, I’ll tell them you had the idea first,” he says deadpan, and lets a rare, wry smile play across his face.

‘Così fan tutte’, English National Opera, until July 5, tel: 0871 911 0200. ‘Abbas Kiarostami: A Photographic Overture’ at Purdy Hicks gallery, London SE1, closes on Saturday , tel: +44 (0)20-7401 9229