The starting point and the ending point are nothing but two arbitrary choices. You make them as in soccer games, where they chose that it's 90 minutes, not less and not more. But the choices are the responsibility of the filmmaker. You have to choose to join the story at an arbitrary point, and you leave it at an arbitrary point.

Cinema seats make people lazy. They expect to be given all the information. But for me, question marks are the punctuation of life.

The one-word cinema wasn't possible for me anymore. I'd hit a wall, a dead end. Therefore I thought I'd turn back.

As soon as people enter a theater they must become moron consumers who must be fed information.

In real life, when someone's partner calls them, they can tell from the first word their partner says what their mood is.

I often say to my students in workshops that if they are trying to find literary inspiration, they should not go and read novels, because novels are more appropriate for series. Where as they should read short stories - that's the right format for you to be able to actually display the narrative in a film.

Having an international voice is not really about whether we speak Persian or any other language.