"I can say that for me censorship didn't affect my work before of after the revolution." "But this is not true of filmmakers who naturally can speak about their own experience." "But to me what they refer to now as censorship in Iran should mostly be considered religious restrictions." "Censorship normally happens when there are no set rules." "Some people may decide to eliminate scenes from movies." "But right now, we do know that there are rules such as women may not appear without a headscarf, not even with a Ioose-fitting one." "also, there are strict rules about touching." "generally speaking, I can't say that we don't censor ourselves." "But I can say that we find out about the rules pretty quickly and then we are able to adjust ourselves to the circumstances and make our films." "I've really made the movies that I've wanted to make up to now." "I haven't made any of them simply because I wanted to circumvent the codes, and turn a banal story into a movie." "0veraII, I don't pick subjects involving husbands and wives in their apartment or room." "Because when you make a movie you have to believe the story yourself." "We put a series of lies together to reach a higher truth." "For exampIe, to show the truth of a family, we don't have to use a real family." "We may get the husband from somewhere, the wife from somewhere else, borrow a child and rent an apartment." "But the combination of all these elements should give us an exact definition of the family." "And the definition is quite clear to all of us." "It's a unit in which people have a relationship of total privacy and security with one another." "A child would not have any designs on the mother and the husband has no problems with his wife's hair." "But what if I Iooked through my viewfinder and realize that this is not a real family." "They don't have any real relationship to each other." "We work so hard to say that despite all those "lies"" "we try to demonstrate a concept, the concept of a family." "So I won't be able to define a family when I realize that I can't show it the way I've lived it." "I remember that my father could see my mother's hair." "As a child I never had a problem caressing my grandmother's hair." "So this is a family that I don't know, and since I don't know it, I won't touch it." "By that I mean to say that I have automatically avoided thinking about relationships between men and women within households." "Maybe this is why I unconsciously keep going to the villages to make films." "The problem of censorship has always existed." "especially when I'm outside of Iran, usually the first or second question asked has to do with censorship." "In the West, when I'm asked about censorship in Iran, I get offended." "They think we are some Third world country with some sort of of incredible censorship and we work under terrible conditions." "But when I think about it, I realize that we've always had to face the problem of censorship not just as filmmakers, but even as citizens of Iran." "We've always had censorship." "It starts in our families when we can't speak our minds because our parents decide what's right and wrong for us." "In the schools, there is even harsher discipline - all sorts of educational censorship." "And that continues until it finds its place in our professions- the filmmaker's profession, for example." "So in my mind, censorship is not something that bothers us terribly, because we found our ways to counter it." "In fact, the whole nation has learned how to deal with it, and we, as filmmakers, Iike everyone else in their profession have learned how to circumvent any imposing force and somehow manage." "This is a reality." "especially in our case, our cinema is a director's medium." "And the more a filmmaker comes under pressure due to the nature of his work, the more he is forced to come up with better solutions and find new means of expression." "I have an architect friend who tells me that some of the lots he has built on over the Iast 20 years have been crooked." "Whenever anyone asks him what buildings he has designed, he cites one of those as an example, because they were nonstandard and thus they forced him to come up with creative solutions to make something out of them." "That's how he managed to do something new in the field." "With respect to films or art in general, it's true that art is born of difficult or unfavorable circumstances for the artist." "I say this very cautiously, especially outside of Iran, because I think that I might be justifying restrictions or saying that censorship is not a problem." "people might think that I say those things out of fear, or perhaps because of a favorable attitude towards my country or government." "also, when I leave the country" "I really don't want to hear negative things about it." "I think, even if we have censorship in Iran, we should deal with it ourselves." "As my father used to say, if your head breaks, it better break in your own hat." "We shouldn't talk about it anywhere else because there's no advantage in it- nobody can untie our knots or solve our problems." "For that reason, I never speak about censorship outside of Iran especially for foreign reporters." "0ften I ask them: don't you have your own censorship?" "The government censors but also provides financial assistance." "Because of the positive outlook that I have had in recent years in my personal and professional life, I tend to say that I for one don't have much of a problem with censorship." "Not that I endorse it, but I simply say to the censors, you do your job and we'II do ours." "In the final analysis, it's our work that survives." "The festival reception abroad, as far as I can tell, has meant a kind of endorsement, and gives us seIf-confidence." "When you have seIf-confidence, you become more daring and try new experiments." "We don't enjoy a Iot of support at home." "Whenever a film has deviated a bit from standard conventions, it has met with the shortsightedness and limited knowledge of some critics." "These angry critics who normally have a stronger presence in the media attack the films fiercely." "They have sometimes managed to adversely color the perceptions of people or even the film producers." "0utside of Iran, they have paid more attention to some other aspects of the films, and have given us a bit more seIf-confidence." "I can't deny that, but I can assure you that this seIf-confidence has not made me change my filmmaking style and techniques to make them agreeable with Western critics' tastes." "Whenever I make a film, it's the content that determines the film's style." "I don't have the ability to change anything to make it more pleasing to the eyes of the West or critics or festivals." "Each film is made based on its own requirements." "It's not conscious, but now that one can see all my films as a body of work, it seems like they all talk about the same things." "Someone once said that every filmmaker basically makes only one film in his lifetime, but he cuts it down and offers it in cinematic installments to his audience over a period of time." "It's difficult to talk about the things that I Iike because you see them in my films." "It's easier for me to talk about things that I don't like." "What I don't like, you don't see in my films." "But in all, I don't like to engage in telling stories." "I don't like to arouse the viewer emotionally or give him advice." "I don't like to belittle him or burden him with a sense of guilt." "Those are the things I don't like in the movies." "I think a good film is one that has a lasting power, and you start to reconstruct it right after you leave the theater" "There are a Iot of films that seem to be boring, but they are decent films." "0n the other hand, there are films that nail you to your seat and overwhelm you to the point that you forget everything, but you feel cheated later." "These are the films that take you hostage." "I absolutely don't like the films in which the filmmakers take their viewers hostage and provoke them." "I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater." "I think those films are kind enough to allow you a nice nap and not leave you disturbed when you leave the theater." "Some films have made me doze off in the theater, but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks." "Those are the kind of films I Iike." "Someone told me that my characters are all abnormal in one way or another." "They all deviate from the norm." "From the child in the movie "The traveller", to" "Mr. Firoozkoohi in " The Report" to Hussein Sabzain in " CIose-up"" "or Hussein in "Through the 0Iive Trees" or all of my characters like Hussein in " The Experience" or the kids in " The Wedding suit"." "I realize that, without really wanting to, I'm drawn to unique people." "Since we can't put every single person in front of our camera, we have to look for special people or ordinary people in special circumstances." "What does their being special tell us?" "It reminds us we are like them and that's why one person makes a film." "0ne person acts in it, but it communicates with thousands." "In fact, both the filmmaker and the actor have something in common with the viewer- that commonly proves that if the actor for example is abnormal, then all those watching are also abnormal, because if they didn't have the abnormality" "within themselves, how can they recognize it in others?" "To talk about the differences between illusion and reality is such a vast topic that I don't know where to begin." "I can't tell you how I experience those elements in my work and in my Iife, when I discovered what part of me is reality and what part illusion, or why I've had this game of vacillation" "from reality to illusion and back to reality in my ordinary life, not necessarily as a filmmaker." "I have discovered that this is not limited only to filmmakers or intellectuals- everyone is involved." "The capability to dream is the most important human characteristic, shared not proportionately but enough for each." "Though all of us dream, only one of us can talk about our dreams." "The imagination is one of the most distinct and extraordinary gifts granted to human beings." "We are aware of our other senses, such as sight, taste and hearing, and we are grateful for them." "But we don't seem to know what immense possibilities are open to us through the imagination." "What is the function of dreaming?" "Where did it come from?" "Why do we have the ability to dream?" "And why must we dream?" "If it doesn't have a function in our life, then what is the reason for it?" "I finally found a reason." "When do we resort to dreaming?" "At times when we are unhappy with our circumstances." "And how extraordinary is it that no dictatorship in the world can control it?" "No system of inquisition can control one's fantasies." "They can throw you in jail, but you still have the ability to live your sentence outside the prison without anyone holding you there." "Through the imagination, you can pass over the insurmountable walls without leaving any trace of yourself, and you can always go back." "Now the question is, once out, why go back?" "That has to do with the credibility of reality - you have to go back and see what your reality is." "In fact, through dreaming, you have the opportunity to tolerate some of the unchangeable hardships of Iife." "You get out, you dream, you are refreshed and you go back." "It's like being in a stuffy room and opening a window." "You let the air come in and then you breathe." "In my mind, our dreams are windows in our lives and the significance of cinema is in its similarity to this window." "tell the cameraman that, since violence will never leave the American film, an important thing Tarantino has done is to find a way to at Ieast make fun of violence, and that brings down the tension of violence." "early on, I had no interest in making films for children." "I began to make children's films due to my employment at the Institute for the intellectual development of" "children and Young adults." "I began my career making commercials." "If I were still making them, you would've asked me about my interest in commercials." "As I was making films for children," "I gradually discovered them." "0ver 20 years of working with children" "I realized how nice and easygoing they are, and their viewpoints are often more accurate and more interesting than those of adults." "children are like the sages we read about in books." "They live like them." "They are extremely opportunistic in a good sense." "And that's what I admire about them." "although I don't make films for or about children anymore," "I think I have been affected by my years of working with them." "My films have a kind of childlike playfulness about them." "They reflect a very simple and almost childish philosophy of Iife." "I try to look at the world and life from a child's point of view."