If you're not making epic, archetypal films on some level, I think you're wasting a great potential of cinema.
Cinema really lends itself well to big, archetypal stories, you know, classic old stories and you need kind of a weird, big terrain like the Japanese plains for Samurai movies or the West. You need that for these giants to walk around.
First of all, on a cinematic [level], the film answer to that is that Roger Corman was creatively responsible for a lot of cinema history.
I ask of cinema what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs.
We really are living in the era that all this sci-fi literature and cinema was centered around, but it's not anything like what we envisioned it to be. It's almost like there's too much choice.
At that time, when I started, in the '50s, cinema was very classical in its aims.
I don't try to make a place in history at all! People put me in the history of cinema because my first film, La pointe-courte, was so ahead of some other filmmakers. Many filmmakers have made resurgent work, and I was just a little ahead of the time.
The boundaries between contemporary art and cinema are so rigid. It's unbelievable. The film critics don't know my artwork and the art world doesn't know my films.
The future of cinema and communications is all about collaboration and the decentralized control of storytelling. We're all part of the story; we can all contribute and participate.
I didn't go to the cinemas a lot as a kid.
The Iranian government as a whole has no relationship with my films. They're not particularly interested, perhaps this kind of cinema is not very interesting to them.
The one-word cinema wasn't possible for me anymore. I'd hit a wall, a dead end. Therefore I thought I'd turn back.
Campaign may invite a certain skepticism about democracy, but it will surely restore your faith in cinema verite.
