“It’s true that the best way of knowing yourself is to put yourself into different situations.”

In order to be universal, you have to be rooted in your own culture.

I’m still very grateful to digital cameras in general, but I didn’t have this feeling with the RED one.

In my experience as a director, I think there is obviously something of the way men – maybe that’s a common point with Shirin – the way men see women in the film, and the way these two characters see each other.

I think, just as footballers play better at home, maybe film-makers, too, create better at home, even though the rules of football are the same wherever you go.

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.

There are certainties in existence, but love is something much harder to define than light and dark, life and death. I think saying you are “like” someone in love sounds right.

I think violence can never be justified. At the same time, nobody’s culture or beliefs should be insulted, that’s not something I can accept either. But I cannot justify or accept any violence at all.

The day we run out of petrol is the day Iran will be free.

I remember when I came out of an exam thinking I had done well and then I had a clue that maybe one answer was wrong, I remembered that I rather stop knowing, stop thinking about it, appreciating life instead.

Unfortunately, cinema critics are very few in America, 400-500 people, but there are more critics of Iran.

I don’t generally derive my stories from novels. I try to turn into film things I have felt or experienced.

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

I didn’t just see myself as a film director here [in Life And Nothing More], but also as an observer of people who had been condemned to death.

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.

Close-Up has affected later films that I’ve made.

I was mentioning with the digital camera, maybe this new fashion of filmmaking gives a closer look of what life may be like. But it’s still nothing but a copy.

Basically, I enter into it knowing we are collaborators.

My process in making a music video is pretty much a formula of talking to the artist.

I am really, truly a hopeless romantic, myself, and I am also obsessed with past lives, knowing someone from a past life and knowing that right away, when you meet them.

And it will fire them the more, and cause them to work for us with zeal, without knowing that they do so.

There is no way of influencing men so powerfully as by means of the women.

Positivity and forward thinking. I work on that one every day, and every day I get a little better. Better at knowing that there is no obstacle that I cannot overcome.

A perspective that allows you to consistently make decisions based on the right set of criteria.

I like to work fast. I despise not having the right tool or, worse, knowing I have it but not being able to find it.