All the different nations in the world, despite their differences of appearance and religion and language and way of life, still have one thing in common, and that is what's inside of all of us. If we X-rayed the insides of different human beings, we wouldn't be able to tell from those X-rays what the person's language or background or race is.

If I do continue to have the opportunity to work in Iran, that's very much what I'd prefer to do.

I had intended to make another film, called Pocket Money, which was to be about children at a school. I was very much intrigued by the story [of Close Up] - it came into my dreams and I was very much influenced by it. So I called my producer and asked that we put aside Pocket Money and start something else, and he agreed.

The experience of life teaches us that being like someone in love is more real, because everything is uncertain.

I think being someone in love is so hard to define, so temporary, because retrospectively we often deny the state in which we were in love.

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.

This [the earthquake] was a very big influence on me, and the issue of life and death from then on does recur in my films.