Films set in 90210 are ten a penny. But there's rarely room to make films about a different postal code, to show the lives of ordinary Americans who have to live with very limited material resources.
Different films have different places in people's lives. I don't get to see a lot of films, so I want to watch films I learn from.
I know how to make films and now I'm able to make films with the resources and the tools that match my imagination, and what filmmaker doesn't want to do that? I feel very fortunate to have that. I don't take it for granted.
The Cannes film festival is about big-budget films but also remarkable films made in different political regimes by film-makers with little resources.
The beauty of my job is I do all different kinds of film directing, not just surf films anymore. And I do stuff from commercials to short films to working on feature films, and none of it is based from where I live. It's all based elsewhere, so I can live anywhere and commute to where I need to go.
If you want to show cinema, make entertainment films. Sometimes they are very good, sometimes very bad, but the intention is always to make entertaining films.
This is something that I dream about: to live films, to arrive at the point at which one can live for films, can think cinematographically, eat cinematographically, sleep cinematographically, as a poet, a painter, lives, eats, sleeps painting.
What I want to do is make films that astonish people, that astound people, and I hope you want to do that too. It's easy to make money. It's easy to make films like everybody else. But to make films that explode like grenades in people's heads and leave shrapnel for the rest of their lives is a very important thing. That's what the great filmmakers did for me. I've got images from Fellini, from Bergman, from Kurowsawa, from Bunuel, all stuck in my brain.
I do think that animated films have the ability to touch you someplace. There is something about live action movies that is different because we know the characters are real people, so they always stay flawed for us somehow. But animated films touch us in a very clear, uncomplicated place. They have that ability. And an animated character can make an expression in a way humans can't do.
'90210' was looking at teenagers from a perspective that hadn't really been seen on television, though it had been seen in movies like some John Hughes films. I don't know if you want to say '90210' was real, but what the characters were going through was relatable - in a very glamorous environment.
A lot of times I'll make films that are mostly character-driven films - stories that involve people. Like, I make the joke: I like to make movies about human beings that live on Earth.
I've always noticed that films set in any sort of future very rarely draw on the present.
The biggest misconception about me and my work is that I only make political films denouncing human-rights atrocities, even though all of my films are about people fighting for their rights and their quest for justice. My films aren't depressing, are very human, and always offer a way forward.
Growing up, I wanted to write films and make films. Even as I took this detour and stayed in the music world, I still think in terms of 'What is in this room? What is the shot? Who are the characters? What is the conversation here?' My sense of pacing is very filmlike, it's not musical.
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.
Learning to make films is very easy. Learning what to make films about is very hard. What you’ve really got to do is focus on learning as much about life, and about various aspects of it first.
I was originally a painter, and I made films sort of as an extension of that, and then I started to try to make dramatic films because the early films were experimental films.