When you are making a film, you do not know how it is going to be received by the audience. In fact, if you set out to make a film thinking that it will make 100 crores, it never ends up making that much money.
The greatest drawback in making pictures is the fact that film makers have to eat.
My job is to make images and leave the decision-making and conclusion-draw ing to other people.
I never made films like kind of career moves, like making this film in order to make that film in order to end up in Hollywood.
Because even very young people are expert readers of pictures, you can convey very complex and subtle messages through pictures that you'd need loads of words to explain. Making a picture book is also a bit like making your own film - and you can make anything you want happen, however impossible!
I must say here in France I had more serenity or security as I was working because I knew I was making the film the way I wished and that the film would be seen, ultimately, which is not always the case in Iran. In Iran, you always work having in mind this worry of will I be able to carry on my project as I wish and will the audience see the film.
I am myself a professional creator of images, a film-maker. And then there are the images made by the artists I collect, and I have noticed that the images I create are not so very different from theirs. Such images seem to suggest how I feel about being here, on this planet. And maybe that is why it is so exciting to live with images created by other people, images that either conflict with one's own or demonstrate similarities to them.
In practically every film you experience, you can see the director following the text. Illustrating the words first, making the pictures after, and, alas, so often not making pictures at all, but holding up the camera to do its mimetic worst.
In Iranian cinema, all the lying takes place before making the film. In order to be able to make the film, you have to lie.
I've always painted or drawn pictures or taken still photographs; now I shoot movies. It's just about making images, really.
In my opinion, the continued popularity of these gross distortions of Iran in the U.S. seems to reveal more about certain aspects of America than about Iran. It seems that the popularity of these memoirs is largely due to the fact that, while claiming to do the opposite, they regularly reinforce the dominant representations of Iran in America by constructing an exotic, backward, and barbaric Iran principally based on U.S. archives.
The original interest in making pictures that don't directly depict came around '97 or '98, when I felt there was such an acceleration of images in the world, and that was before Flickr and so on. So I felt a need to slow down how one consumes photographs. With the abstract pictures, I was engaged in trying to find new images, but in practice, it was a bit like throwing a wrench in the spokes. The omnipresence of photography is at a level that it has never been in the history of the world. I feel really curious to now reengage and see what the camera can do for me.
I think film is about images. Cinema needs good images. I think that if you don’t have good images, it’s not going to be a good film. I think all films should be really visual.
Some people have told me they remember the film that one of my images is derived from, but in fact I had no film in mind at all.
There have been innumerable films about film-making, but Otto e Mezzo was a film about the processes of thinking about making a film -- certainly the most enjoyable part of any cinema creation.
I was making a film [Dream of Life] about Patti [Smith], but I was taking pictures, too.