“When you take a tree that is rooted in the ground, and transfer it from one place to another, the tree will no longer bear fruit.”

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.

I think it was [Jean-Luc] Godard who said that life is nothing but a bad copy of film, but then our ambition must be to make better films and better shapes of forms that are given in life.

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

When I find the character, I try to spend time with them and get to know them very well. Therefore my notes are not from the character that I had in my mind before, but are instead based on the people I’ve met in real life.

In my films, I try to give people as little information as possible, which is still much more than what they get in real life. I feel that they should be grateful for the little bit of information I give them.

I’m not sure that my films show the reality of life in Iran; we show different aspects of life. Iran is a very extensive and expansive place, and sometimes, even for us who live there, some of the realities are very hard to comprehend.

I spend a lot of time doing carpentry. Sometimes there is nothing that gives me the contentment that sawing a piece of wood does.

People have curiosity, they have intelligence, they have interest in understanding their peers. But producers and directors of cinema have decided that the seats in the theaters have been made to transform people’s minds to lazy minds.

I do think that we are sometimes, as directors, guilty of portraying or asking our actors to behave in certain ways that are perhaps not very morally acceptable. I’m not the only one.

Directors don’t always create, they can also destroy with too many demands.

I do believe in [Robert] Bresson’s method of creation through omission, not through addition.

Using non-actors has its own rules and really requires that you allow them to do their own thing.

… it is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences.

For me, being with Obama or having dinner with Bill Clinton… it’s crazy. It’s mind-blowing, because where I come from is just another world. We were just ignored by politicians – by America in general.

If you’re not ready to do a non-stop dialogue with fashion, you should do another job.

Spirituality doesn’t exist on another level different from ordinary life.

If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

One of the funny things about the stock market is that every time one person buys, another sells, and both think they are astute.

The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.

I thought, briefly, that I would never feel as intensely connected to the world, to another human being, as I did at that moment.