“I only make notes, I don’t write dialogues in full. And the notes are very much based on my knowledge of person.”

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.

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.

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 think you don’t support people based on one or two cases of situations.

In the ’80s, I was putting out an album virtually every year, I think mostly based on fear – that if I didn’t, people would soon forget about me.

A successful branding program is based on the concept of singularity.

I can’t have composite characters. I can’t attribute dialogue to someone based simply on my memory and not based on notes taken at the time that the words were spoken.

After going through a lot of procedures and spending a lot of money … the doctor said, ‘Look, based on what we’re seeing here, I just don’t think this is going to happen for you.’

You come to see that everything you think you know about yourself, everything you think you know about the world, is based on assumptions, beliefs, and opinions-things that you believe because you were taught or told they were true.

All delusions begin in the mind. All delusions are based on various ways we’re talking to ourselves and then believing what we are saying.

When you stand in your own authority, based in your own direct experience, you meet that ultimate mystery that you are. Even though it may be at first unsettling to look into your own no-thingness.