“I think Woody Allen is Woody Allen, and no matter where he goes he still makes his Woody Allen films.”

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.

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.