I carry my own film guys with me now. People think that's a huge expense, but with technology like it is these days, it's not. You can film videos and everything with a Canon Mark II, and shoot a movie. They're doing it for next to nothing, by comparison. I can do ten videos for a project for the price of one mainstream video in the past.
I just stick to my job, which is acting. Things like posters, publicity material, and promotions are entirely the film-maker's prerogative. I don't get into all of that.
When you go to a film festival as an audience member, it's so much fun. But when you bring your own film there, you carry so much stress and excitement.
My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera's eye may entirely change my idea, even switch me to different subject matter. So I start out with my mind as free from image as the silver film on which I am to record, and I hope as sensitive.
The media we surround ourselves with allows us to manufacture our own experience every day, which is a perception of the world that is our own invention entirely, whether it is on social media or what we choose to absorb. This was very different when I was a kid, like generations before us we were exposed to things that were not entirely on our terms. We had to wrestle with and find the relationship with the world around you. It was literal experience, unlike the form of protracted psychic masturbation that is the digital world we live in.
Whenever I'm doing any film, there's always three different things. There's the script, which is really just a blueprint. And then, you shoot the movie and it's an entirely different experience than you would expect from reading the script. And then, there's the whole post process and the editing, and it becomes something else entirely.
One of the things I particularly enjoyed doing was taking raw sound from locations during the film, like the candy machine, and writing pieces of music to go with them, which is totally unnecessary within the context of the film, because they have their own logic.
I now have a home recording studio, which I can operate entirely on my own, as well as a portable version of the same which allows me to record anywhere I like and simply swap out the hard drives for use in the home studio.
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.
What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves. They've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.
After I did 'Ala Modalaindi,' I wanted to prove that a girl can also carry a film on her own.
I'll carry on, carry over, carry forward, Cary Grant, cash and carry, carry me back to Old Virginia, I'll even 'hari-kari' if you show me how, but I will not carry a gun!
Anything we take in the Universe, because it has in itself that which is All in All, includes in its own way, the entire soul of the world, which is entirely in any part of it.
My stupid ambition is to make a film that's not like any other - one that has its own kind of logic and hooks viewers without making them think too much. It's a film I'd love to see, one in which after 10 minutes the audience isn't able to predict the whole thing.
We all have a cross to carry. I have to carry my own cross. If we don't carry our crosses, we are going to be crushed under the weight of it.
I think there is a big question in how much music a film needs - a lot of films are overloaded for my taste, so that the story can't carry its own weight.