Start [the movie] in color. Color is always attributed as fun, and black and white is very sad.

To speak behind others' backs is the ventilator of the heart.

I'd heard so many stupidities about my country since I left Iran. People had watched this stupid movie Not Without My Daughter [in which Sally Field plays an American who rescues her daughter from her estranged in-laws in Iran]; I heard so many things like that. I did not make Persepolis for Iranians. It was my answer to the rest of the world, to say, "Let me give you another point of view."

I think that all stories - if you make movies about zombies and aliens - it has always to do with your personal story. If not directly, it is about your fears, your obsessions, things like that.

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.

It's true that, in Iran, women have half of the rights men do. And yet 66 per cent of students are women.

This clash of the culture, East and the West, us and them, Muslim and Christian, does not exist.