Independent cinema is more thoughtful, delicate. While Western blockbusters can have their own kind of delicateness, it's not delicate enough. You have to be ready to compromise to enter that field. I will do so only if it's worth it.
If you want to do what you want to do, you cannot work. So art is going to be finished, and this is the will of the Islamic republic: to not have any artists or art and close the doors of all the cinemas and music and everything.
There's an expression in Persian, 'to play with the lion's tail.' I wasn't what Iranian society wanted me to be - a good girl. I played with the lion's tail.
Iranian parents can't stop their children. They're just wild - they want to party, they want their rights, they want to paint, they want to dance. No one can stop these new generations coming. That's why Iran has to open up: it's like a pot full of hot water, vapour and steam.
Paris is a city that liberates you as a woman from all your sins that you think you are guilty of; it washes away all of that, and you are free.
I was born into an artistic family, and they understood me. But they were really worried, because some of the stuff I did was dangerous. If I'd been caught without the veil with a shaved head, I don't know what would have happened.
I don't believe I could live in Iran again. A tree, once uprooted from the earth, is very difficult to plant again.
In my life, my parents wanted me to be a musician, I was supposed to go to Vienna to study piano. But this train wanted to go in another direction.
