Interview: Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud – Persepolis

The thrill of meeting Marjane Satrapi reminded me of being 6 years old at Disney Land when I met the living, breathing Cinderella. Except Cinderella was an actress with a blond wig and Marjane is the real woman behind her autobiographical graphic novel, turned movie, Persepolis. The distinctive mole on her nose and her dark sultry eyes rose off the page and appeared in front of me, smoking and speaking with a French accent. Marjane is based in France though she originally from Tehran, Iran.

The film centers around her childhood years, a tumultuous time for Iran as a new, repressive regime took power and engaged in a war with neighboring Iraq. This portrait of Iran, as seen through the eyes of a girl, is rarely, if ever, shown to the public. The silence and anonymity of the burka are thrown away as we see inside the home of a progressive Iranian family who is fighting a loosing battle against oppression. Their ideals of equality and freedom provide Marjane with such confidence and intelligence that it becomes clear to her parents she is a danger to herself. The 14-year-old punk rock rebel Marjan is sent far away to Europe.

Persepolis is an animated film, featuring the voices by Catherine Deneuve and Deneuve’s daughter Chiara Mastroianni. The film, which remains true to the style of her graphic novel, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It is co-directed and written by Vincent Paronnaud, a fellow comic book artist.

“Persepolis” is an unforgettable and personal look into the lives of citizens living under the control an extremist minority. As told through the eyes of a precocious little girl, the film makes it impossible to walk away seeing Iran’s people as the “enemy” our President claims them to be.

Question: Can you talk a bit about repression and oppression of woman that’s shown throughout the film?  Can you talk about the strong woman in this movie and what that says to American audiences? 
Marjane Satrapi: I don’t think is has so much to do with the womanhood as the humanhood. I’m much more of a humanist than a feminist. I am against the macho culture. That is the biggest enemy of democracy actually. In a patriarchal culture the chief of the family is the father and so the family doesn’t have the right to say a word about the word of the father. This is the culture that I am against. It happens that in the macho culture the person who wakes up the kids is the mother. The one who says to the son, “You are different from your sister and you have your rights,” is the mother.  So I have seen in my life, lots of macho woman and lots of macho men and I have seen the contrary also. So I don’t think it’s a question of gender. It’s the story of a woman because I’m a woman. It is really a humanistic movie. If the main character was a boy the repression would not be less, it would be different. The boys in my class, they had other problems. They were considered a soldier at the age of 13. They didn’t have the right for a long time to wear short sleeves, etc., etc., etc.  So if there is one issue it is that it is a universal movie, it is a human movie. It talks about humanity, and an example of that is the collaboration of Vincent and I. He is a man; he is French; he comes from another background. I am a woman; I am Iranian; I come from another background. We understand exactly the same things, from the same subject. Many times when people say, this is typical of a film made by a woman; I say no it is not true because he has done half of the movie with me.  And he is not a woman. It was a really a collaboration.

Q: This is your first feature. What was it like to work with a cast that is so well known, Danielle Darrieux, Catherine Deneuve, and give them direction? How was that for you, working with these legends?
MS: Well, these people become legends, because they are such great actors. It’s not that we wanted some famous people to work on our film.  We chose these people from the beginning because we made something and we wanted the greatest. We sent them the script and they loved it and said okay. For me the most impressive person to work with was Catherine Deneuve; because she is a very impressive person to start with.  She is a lion.  She has this incredible presence. But at the same time you have to forget about these things because it’s not easy, I can tell you, to give orders to Catherine. It was very hard not to be shy but we couldn’t be shy because we wanted the best.

Q: How did your collaboration begin?
Vincent Paronnaud: (translated from French by Marjane): We’d known each other for a long time and were friends so Marjane proposed to me to make the project. From a technical point of view it was very hard to describe. The fact that we wrote the script together and had talked and talked about everything from the beginning, helped. We had to create lots of codes because we were working in animation but we didn’t have any references for it. So, it was made as if it were a real movie. We had to work with people who came from animation and had to work in lots of new codes. That was very difficult.

MS: From the beginning we knew what we didn’t want. We didn’t know what we wanted and there was a huge distance between what we didn’t want and what we want.  We had to do a lot of research.  We were not liars so when people would say, “What do you want to do now?” we were like, “We don’t know.”  We were still researching and people like you to tell them, “It’s going to be like this and that,” so that they have a frame but we didn’t know because we had to create the whole code ourselves.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about the abstract and realist style?
MS: We wanted to make a very personal story so whatever was historical, or was something the main character didn’t see we made it like the ‘Chinese’ shape or maybe with puppets to make a difference of narration. Then there are flashbacks, so either your name is Federico Fellini you can film different kinds of narration together and you have a great movie or your name is not Federico Fellini, you might make something extremely vulgar.  So something that posses like a handicap, like animation in black and white or going from one type of narration to another, actually adds something, a unity to it.  The whole movie was a question of rhythm. We built the script and it was two times bigger than it was by the end.  We always work this way, we make it big and then just cut and cut.  The thing that we did that was great and was hard for people to understand was that with animation, when something is done, it’s done.  It’s 12 images per second so you have one minute of animation, you cannot through it away. But we permitted ourselves to do something that no one permitted us to do. Until the end, we changed everything.

Q: About the animation.  It doesn’t seem like it’s CGI –  it looks very hand drawn.
MS: What is CGI?

Q: With computers.
MS: It is hand drawn. The fact that we used hand-drawn things meant that we were never in a fight against a machine. We tried some stuff on computer but it didn’t work, it was not what we wanted. Plus another thing, neither he or I are computer people.  We don’t know how to write an email, there are things we don’t know how to do.  We cannot go in a studio and direct people when we don’t know what we’re doing.  We have a relationship with the paper and the pen and the ink.  The movie looks like the person who makes it.

VP: We have 20 years of work to help us. It’s possible that we knew things in an instinctive way, the choices that we made.  We have worked a lot without getting paid for graphics, because we come from an underworld background.  It helped us in the movie because we had to create a whole universe without a lot of time but since we are use to hard work, that helped us.

Q: If this movie is as successful as we all believe it will be, you won’t be underground anymore.
MS: We will be and you know why? On this movie for example we had money, we had a big studio, 100 people, etc. but the way we worked, that was exactly like when we were making our comics in our corner. We didn’t count the hours, we were searching, searching, searching. You know, it’s a question of attitude. We are not going to change. It looked like a gypsy camp in some ways; things hanging everywhere and people were drinking, we were smoking all the time, that was the way the studio was. We didn’t have this thing that everybody had a corner. For being a professional you don’t need all these clean things, it was really open. We never said to people, “You have to come at eight!”  Some people they like to work during the night, we don’t care. They can do whatever they want to if the result is there.

Q: How important is humor? 
MS: I think humor is a question of intelligence. People who don’t have any humor, I always suspect them of being dumb. Life is short and we’re all going to die. Life is unbearable so if we don’t laugh at it, it’s too much.  People around the world, they cry for the same reason because their father is dead, blah, blah, blah. But they don’t laugh for the same reasons. For me, laughing with somebody is the height of understanding the other one because you go to that obstruction of language. Normally you cry by yourself but if you laugh by yourself, you’re crazy. You laugh with other people. So, it’s also something about communication and from the second you laugh with people everything is fine. So both of us, we like very much to laugh so the movie looks like us. I hate this thing that, “You are the subject, you don’t have the right to laugh,” and that is a lack of acknowledgment of what happens in real life. During the war, for example, the people dealt with the war by making jokes about the most terrible things that happened. That’s the only way to cope with it. So this happens in real life. It’s not because you are condescending or being cynical.  Cynicism is something else. Humor is a polite way to talk about things without putting all the weight on the back of people, saying, “This is it, now carry.”  With humor you are polite enough to say, “I give it to you, but I give you a little help so you can carry it much easier.”

Sony Pictures Classics releases Persepolis in limited theaters today!