“There are no rebels in the cinema business.”

I don’t act in the way other actresses act, in terms of building or creating a character. I don’t transform myself into the role, I invest myself in the role.

I didn’t see my character, Core, as a cannibal but as somebody who is extremely passionate and who doesn’t have any conscience. She takes her passion to its complete extreme.

I do not consider myself beautiful.

But I’ve always attracted attention, it’s true, ever since I was very young.

I knew her work very well and I knew that if she offered me a role in her movie, it wouldn’t be something stupid. So I agreed to do the film before I read the script.

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

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.

The Iranian government as a whole has no relationship with my films. They’re not particularly interested, perhaps this kind of cinema is not very interesting to them.

Cinema seats make people lazy. They expect to be given all the information. But for me, question marks are the punctuation of life.

Cinema gives you the opportunity to be both a grandparent and a grandchild whereas in life you cannot be both at the same time.

Good cinema is what we can believe and bad cinema is what we can’t believe. What you see and believe in is very much what I’m interested in.

I am not ready to fit into the mould of commercial cinema.

I like watching film, I go to the cinema, but a lot of times I go to see kids’ films.