I think that all stories – if you make movies about zombies and aliens – it has always to do with your personal story. If not directly, it is about your fears, your obsessions, things like that.
If today I have to make a political statement, it is, ‘I love beauty.’ I think beauty makes people better.
You see a picture and you understand perfectly, immediately, the basic thing that’s happening. It’s probably more accessible because we are in a culture of images. People are used to seeing stories that way. They understand looking at pictures.
You know, the cynicism that is in the politics, it is not for my soul. It makes me – out of me, an extremely bitter, cynical person that I hate to see in the mirror, really.
You have to be narcissistic to be an artist. You have to think you are the centre of the whole thing; otherwise, why do you create? The only thing is to recognise it, and then you make the best of it.
Comics are just another medium to express yourself. It’s not cinema; it’s not literature; it’s just something else. It has a specific requirement, which is that images are used to tell the story. There are lots of crappy movies, with guns and action and Arnold Schwarzenegger or whatever.
The information I have about Iran is second hand.
In any case, it’s the cowardice of people like you who give dictators the chance to install themselves!
Any medium can only live up to the strengths of the people working in it. If it’s been used to tell bad or boring stories, it’s not a problem with comics; it’s a problem with the writers of those comics.
I don’t think of myself as a rebel; I just say what I think.
When you make a book or you make a movie, it is almost like hitting on somebody. It’s not because you want to seduce people that you will seduce them; you can hit on somebody and it doesn’t work. But when you hit on them and it works, then it’s really cool.
I think animation is like running a marathon, and making a movie is like a 100 meter sprint. The question is: are you a marathon man or are you a sprinter? I realized that I was more of a sprinter than a marathon man. With a long, long project, I get bored easily.
This clash of the culture, East and the West, us and them, Muslim and Christian, does not exist.
With live-action I think we’d have lost the universal appeal of the Persepolis story. With live-action, it would have turned into a story of ‘the Other’ – people living in a distant land who don’t look like us. It might have been exotic, but also a “Third-World” story.
I am absolutely not a feminist, I am against stupidity, and if it comes from males or females, it doesn’t change anything. If it means that women and men, they are equal, then OK, certainly I am a feminist.
The first writing of the human being was drawing, not writing.
Revolutions just spread blood. Evolution – this is something that changes in the long term.
I like to be sad once in a while. You need it for your equilibrium.
I’m not a politician. I don’t know how to solve the problems of the world. But as an artist, I have one duty: to ask questions.
The novels have done so well because the drawings are abstract, black-and-white. This adds to the universality of the story. “Persepolis” also has dreamlike moments, and the drawings help maintain cohesion and consistency.