Words also are filters. They have to be translated. Even in the original language, there is interpretation and some ambiguity. If there's a cultural difference between the writer and the reader, that might come out in words. But with pictures, there's more efficiency.

I wrote the plot [for the Persepolis ]and Vincent [Paronnaud] and I wrote and discussed the shooting of the script. Vincent then took care of the production design, the actual shooting, and what was going on within each scene. It's very difficult, though, to draw a line between who did what. Because Vincent would say something, and I would add something, and at the end you have this film, yet no clear idea of who did what.

I wanted to make a real love story with a bad ending, because a love story that ends good is the life of everyone - you and I, for example. I always say to people, You know, if Romeo and Juliet got married, nobody would care about them. Imagine Romeo and Juliet, six kids yelling, mama, mama, papa, papa.

There are things that I love in Iranian cinema and things that I don't. In Iranian cinema, you have to use metaphor because you are living under a dictatorship.

With live-action I think we'd have lost the universal appeal of the Persepolis story. With live-action, it would have turned into a story of 'the Other' - people living in a distant land who don't look like us. It might have been exotic, but also a "Third-World" story.

In all the dictatorships, there's such a non-understanding of what human beings are. I mean, if you believe in the Bible, you have the story of Adam and Eve and God tells them, "Do whatever you want. The only thing you shouldn't do is eat the apple." What do they do the first thing? They eat the apple. So if you know a little bit the psychology of human beings, you have to understand that if you say something you should not do, then everybody wants to do it.

You see a picture and you understand perfectly, immediately, the basic thing that's happening. It's probably more accessible because we are in a culture of images. People are used to seeing stories that way. They understand looking at pictures.