The Buddhas had to be destroyed by the Taliban to get the world thinking about Afghanistan.

The question in their minds was, why did the outside world, and particularly the Western world, produce all these landmines, and send them to Afghanistan? This business must be stopped. It's a dirty business to produce such a horrible device.

When we began filming, these people had legs, but as we were filming, they had been injured and they were brought to the hospital to have their legs amputated, and that's where we found them and asked them to come and be part of the film.

From my films, you can at least learn about Iran, you can get a sense of the history and the society. But no such films have been made about Afghanistan, so you really can't know much about it.

From 7 in the morning to 11 at night, I was reading. I don't think one can find any other time in one's life to be left alone so much to read in peace like that.

I'm not playing myself. It's a symbolic situation, where I want to introduce a fascist behind the table. I couldn't have had anybody else do that; for it to be successful, I had to do it myself.

Afghan society is very complex, and Afghanistan has a very complex culture. Part of the reason it has remained unknown is because of this complexity.