Whether you consider me a master filmmaker or not, I do it with my intuition and my vision, my experience as a storyteller.

I never intended to write poems, nor to be a photographer, nor to be a film-maker. I just took many, many pictures and I would put them in an album, and then some years later I decided to show them and suddenly I was called a photographer. Same thing with my poetry. They're notes that I'd written in a book and it may be considered poetry.

I think Woody Allen is Woody Allen, and no matter where he goes he still makes his Woody Allen films.

I only make notes, I don't write dialogues in full. And the notes are very much based on my knowledge of person.

I'm not sure that my films show the reality of life in Iran; we show different aspects of life. Iran is a very extensive and expansive place, and sometimes, even for us who live there, some of the realities are very hard to comprehend.

I think that in life, being is nothing but an illusion. If we acknowledge that and accept the fact that we are in between states, that we are moving, and this movement is the nature of our lives, and we stop having aspirations for being in a definite state, we know life better and are able to enjoy it better.

I prefer the countryside to cities. This is also true of my films: I have made more films in rural societies, and villages, than in towns.