- Becoming A Filmmaker:
" The couple of movies I made in the beginning of my work were in fact rooted in my love for cinema and filmmaking and the films I had seen and the filmmakers I had admired. This kind of incentive for making films comes to an end at some age in life, and then one asks how long can I continue working like this, how long can I go on repeating myself? I knew I had to begin studying cinema and try to find a new understanding of it. I had to understand where I stood and where the good filmmaking in the world stood. I began to watch movies."

- Self Doubt:
" I was in the middle of making Tangsir when I started questioning myself about movies and the kind of cinema I wanted to do, but my new attitude could not show itself in that film, due to the nature of the work – Tangsir was a big budget movie, based on a bestseller, featuring Iran's number one movie star. I had to worry about the producer's money and the box office returns."

- Self Education:
" After that I decided to make a definite choice in my career. One option was to become a professional filmmaker in the commercial cinema, but I knew that was not what I wanted.
My study intensified, and took many shapes and forms, however the most important part of it was seeing movies and talking with people who could tell me something from their knowledge and experience."

- A Film For Children:
" I thought I had arrived at only some of what I was looking for in my first short, Harmonica, because my spiritual search was not yet finished. I made that movie immediately after Tangsir."

- Pause Before Waiting:
" Before embarking on Waiting, I paused for about a year without making anything. I can call that film my first experience in the so-called anti-plot, or anti-story filmmaking, where there is very little in the way of dialogue, and the visual language and natural sound carried the movie.
During this period, I studied certain filmmakers from whom I knew I could learn something. Fortunately, due to my experience in still photography, I knew very well how to look at pictures and learn from visual information."

- Discovering Antonioni And Renoir:
" I had realized that the kind of cinema in Tangsir could not be of much help in my development, and in the meantime, I was introduced to the work of some people who shook me out of my lull. One of them was Antonioni on whom I worked a lot after discovering him.
It was 1970, or before that when I saw his L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960). I felt close to it. At the time I was a professional still photographer, ands at the time, I also did a little painting. In Antonioni I saw a point I had seen in painting before: the Impressionist element. This was not my discovery of course; I was just coming to it, a little later than everyone else. The trace of the great painters such as Van Gogh, Cezan, Emil Bonnar, Matisse and Monet in Antonioni's work left a strange influence on me. I was not so much drawn to the realism of Rembrandt and Reubens and court painters. The Impressionist painting attracted me the most. It was another element telling me where I stood.
After seeing L'Avventura I felt really bad. When I saw Il Grido (Antonioni, 1957) I got worse. At the end of Renoir's The Rules Of The Game (Jean Renoir, 1939) I walked home on foot, alone."

- An Odd Interest:
" I made (fellow Iranian filmmaker) Kamran Shirdel miserable for four years, because every day, and a few hours a day I kept talking with him about Antonioni. It was odd and interesting for him too. He couldn't believe that somebody with my kind of job and my particular attitude to life could appreciate Antonioni, and I think it took me about four years more to be able to articulate for him my reasons for liking Antonioni. Another person with whom I talked a lot was (Iranian film critic) Parviz Dava'i."

- Translated Literature:
" In Iran, we thrive on translation. Most of our acquired culture, especially in the area of the contemporary arts and literature, comes to us through translation. I read everything which was translated and was available on cinema. Certain arts, such as painting and filmmaking, do not belong to any particular part of the world. I wanted to see how the artists have dealt with this global language in various parts of the world.
In addition to the translated texts, I used to buy foreign magazines and have my friends translate interesting articles for me. Shirdel, Dava'i, as well as Bahman Maghsoudlou, helped me a lot. I do not have any academic education, and I learned what I learned through feeling, and then I worked on it further through reading and watching movies."

- Visual Emphasis:
" I really shouldn't brag about it, but I think beginning with Waiting, I started to use Impressionism Style in my films. I think I am probably a little successful in Waiting, and in The Search 2, a film that was never shown. Of course I haven't seen Waiting for years now, but I still remember that I felt it was 95% close to what I had been looking for at the time."

- Controlling Accidents:
" The work of Henri Cartier Bresson is one of the pillars of my style of seeing, my vision of cinema. I had seen a lot of his pictures before, but I had not paid close attention to them. But later I found myself shaken by his work.
One of the characteristics of his work was that he did not set up anything in front of the camera, but he thought a lot beforehand about the picture he was going to take. For example, if he was going to work on the subject of accidents, he would think about it prior to taking any shots, and more important than that, he had an incredible sense of timing. It seems that just moments before something was going to happen, he had his camera ready. The impressionist culture which is also present in Bresson's work causes to shift the focus of the picture. For example, although the picture might be about an accident, the accident is not the center of gravity of the picture, but there is a cat somewhere falling down from a roof. It was this secondary meaning and impression that I understood from the art of impressionists. When I looked at a Van Gogh painting from a close distance, it was bricks of paint piled on top of each other, but from afar, the picture took a shape and gradually became, for instance, a wheat field."

- Fear Of Imitation:
" I wanted to use Impressionism and the art of collage in my films, but I had not yet found a way. When I saw the films of Antonioni and Renoir, and also, I almost forgot to mention, when I saw Mouchette (Robert Bresson, 1966), I shook all over. I had found what I had been looking for. But I couldn't copy them. That would have been a mistake, a dangerous one. I could easily be branded as Westernized, or sympathetic to the Western culture. Besides, I did not want to display my interests in an imposing or a derivative way, imported from the West. This was like seeing a modern French boutique in Sani-doleh Street, which is one of Tehran's oldest and most traditional streets. That boutique would be very unbecoming."

- A Persian Framework:
" When I saw the Westernization of our society and the growth of the imported culture in our midst, I knew that I could not possibly succeed if in order to express my new interests I didn't find a framework suitable to our own culture. So, I was back to square one again, this time to place my new findings in the cinema and the arts of our own society. And in the images of my birthplace Abadan, I found that unique coexistence of Iran's oldest and most traditional elements and the Western world. Now, Abadan was the embodiment of this cultural marriage between East and West. This was a city which was neither Iranian, nor Western. One side was a traditional style Iranian Market, the ba'zar, and on the other side, there were the oil tankers, and tens of ocean liners in various colors. You could see an Arab woman completely under veil and protective mask, and at the same time, you could see a Western woman in the latest Paris fashion with her child and a can of Coca Cola in his hand passing by a foreign sailor. I noticed that this combination had always been present in my life and this sensibility had been rooted in my own background. Thus I decided to give a new form to what I had grown up, mold it into the form I had developed in my mind. Again I began to study, read and see movies, this time to the point of death."

- Literary Influences:
" My studies outside the realm of cinema were focused on literature, especially fiction, and especially novels of Faulkner and Hemingway. I learned a lot from these two. Of course, their style is very different from each other, and Hemingway is closer to the kind of work in which I am most interested. I discussed them with experts. Another writer who influenced me was Maupassant, and yet another was Chekhov, of course. I must have read some of his short stories more than fifty times."

- Success With Western Audiences:
" Thank God I am a person who can say that he comes from the heart of our society, and like many others, I have had quite an ordinary life. But I have reached the conclusion that one doesn't have to live an ordinary, conservative life forever. We don't have to occupy ourselves with mundane things all the time and avoid ambition. One has the right to proceed. When you consider Van Gogh for example, you see that he was an ordinary man who reached to that high stage. In Iran we have great poets, such as Hafiz and Molavi, who are exceptional and unique, but in cinema, I could not find anyone to refer to. That was why I sought refuge in foreign films. Now, if my films were similar to Western films, that means I had lost my bid. But if my culture is explained and depicted in my films in a language that foreign viewers understand, then I have gained. And I think the latter may have been the case.
I think that Waiting was to be shown in Iran at this time, it could find its own audience, especially now that the people have seen films like The Runner and The Search, I think Waiting would be more meaningful to the audience.
I had my doubts, I have to admit, about the potential of The Runner with the Iranian audience. I don't know if they like The Runner as entertainment when they see it, but one thing I am sure of is that this film has turned at least five people in to filmmakers of the future."

- Marsiyeh:
" After Waiting, I made another film with a more or less narrative style called Elegy, and I continued to experiment with a visual expression. However, because we had a story there, I was again drawn to story-telling techniques and naturalism. But even at that time, and later, whenever I looked at that film, I saw that I was only successful when my interest in impressionism takes over."

- Made in Iran:
" Something similar to Elegy happened in my next film Made in Iran. That was it. No more doubts and hesitations. Cut! I had picked a definitive direction for my future."

- The Search, a Movie Without a Script:
" The first sign of the end of wavering and overcoming the doubts was, in my opinion, The Search. I liked Alain Resnais' Night And Fog (1955), which by the way is one of the most brilliant documentaries about war and its impact on society that I have seen. What I liked most about this film was its impressionistic aspects. And again, in The Search, I consider myself more successful when we leave the dialogue and enter the nightmarish last twenty minutes of the film."

- Low Budget Independence:
" In this type of work, I cannot and should not go after a commercial producer who is always worried about his money and the number of shooting days we can afford. I made The Search with very little money from Iranian TV on 16mm black and white film. It was a film, which was to be shown one night on television. I leveled my expectations in terms of production, so that I would not have to lose any of my independence."

- Sketching For Script:
" One of the good things they do in the visual arts is sketching. I thought with myself it would be good to sit down and write a sketch about Amiro, the character of The Runner. For example, Amiro is an orphaned young adult who is homeless and gets into many different jobs to make money, and meets a challenge that changes his life and gives him a new consciousness. When the sketch is good, the painting becomes good, otherwise it is a waste of paint. The Search was in fact a sketch about the refugees of the revolution. It was made without a finished script. Each day I set out shooting, I selected from the subjects that were around us and happened every day and thus were outside my control and will as a filmmaker. From all that happened around us every day I had to select the events and personalities that I found closest to my original idea. This is the hardest part of this kind of filmmaking."

- Arranging Accidents:
" I visited a point on the Tehran-Qum highway more than forty times in preparation for a two-minute sequence of The Search. I stood by the highway looking, pacing and thinking to the point of not sleeping at all at nights. I had a notepad with me all the time, even in the middle of the night I used to get up and jot down a few lines. These were ideas based on what I had seen."

- Working Under The Gun – The Search 2:
" At the Iran-Iraq war fronts where I shot The Search 2, I was always doing my work, setting up shots, giving directions, despite everything that was going on; even under the barrage of Iraqi guns, I always knew what my next shot was going to be. I usually become so tuned to the location that I usually get what I want out of it. This is the principle in Bresson's photography that I was talking about. When you look at his pictures of short moments and accidents, it seems that everything was set up beforehand for his camera. I practiced this principle during the filming of The Search 2 and I was amazed at the way it worked out."

- Censorship:
" I have no idea why The Search 2 was banned by Iranian TV and was never shown."

- A Day's Work:
" I deal with everything around me during filming. When I come out to begin the day's work, the weather, the air, the car dashing past me on the road and all the particles in the air influence the first shot we take that day."

- Controlling The Observed:
" I agree that documentary filmmaking is one of the pillars of what I do. I realized this from early on, and I started seeing the films of Flaherty and many others, especially Vertov. In Vertov's The Man With A Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929), it appears that Vertov had arranged everything, it seems so calculated and preconceived. But the truth of the matter is that he has gone around with the camera shooting everything, but he has shot everything only the way he wanted. In this way, the film is really controlled, although he had not set up, arranged and rehearsed the shots in advance. In The Search there are many shots which happened spontaneously. Many a time I suddenly saw something and hurried the crew to shoot it. However there are many shots that I have deliberately arranged. When I put these two kinds of shots together in front of you and you cannot tell the difference, that means it has worked."

- A Room With A Chicken:
" For example, while we were shooting The Runner, I could not find a room to shoot the boy's home. I looked everywhere for a room I could rearrange. Eventually I saw an abandoned ship and I said that is it. I remembered that once as a child, I had lived in such a place for a while. I felt that the ship's architecture and the shapes of its cabin were in harmony with the feeling with which I wanted to set up Amiro's room. And then I set it up. If you see a needle there on the floor, I had set it up. Everything. When I wanted to start shooting the scene, I realized that it lacked something. So I sent someone after a small chicken. When they brought the chicken and put it in the room, I felt it was fixed. I wanted the room to have a life in it. Amiro couldn't have a mother, and nobody visited him. I wanted him to carry the load all by himself. Thus, the chicken provided a life there without the need for another character. The chicken was a living creature which was dependent on Amiro, who had nobody to depend on but himself."

- Music No More:
" From Waiting on, I did away with music in the films' soundtracks. I think the music makes the image melodramatic. I want to avoid that. This kind of emphasis belongs to the narrative cinema. What I learned from Impressionist painting was that I can either do my job with the scene's elements or I can't. If I can't, then I would be using music to impose on my audience a feeling which I couldn't express with my film, Although I do listen to music a lot and I have had a lot of my visual ideas while listening to music. For example, my latest film, Water, Wind, Sand was made while I was listening to a lot of Beethoven."

- Consciousness Curve:
" In Elegy a man who had been in jail for a while is released. He walks out with curiosity. Wherever he looks, he finds the society further in decay and more materialistic than before. But he is not supposed to learn anything. He is just an observer and he realizes that nothing positive has happened in the society while he was gone.
In The Runner the case is just the opposite. There Amiro's observation of his environment, his various jobs and his hesitations show him that if he does not want to have that destiny, he had better get moving, begin to act and transform his conditions. When he sees the crippled boy, he realizes that without legs he can't move. Thus he changes his job to avoid his foot being bitten away by the sharks. Each new situation is a step towards consciousness, even some kind of spiritual consciousness."

- Hope In The Runner:
" Unlike my earlier films, there is hope in The Runner. I think I have changed, my attitude towards life has changed over time."

- More Hope:
" And there is also hope, even more hope, a hopeful desire and a dream of prosperity in Water, Wind, Sand, which is about total devastation, poverty and disaster. I had seen the Hirmand River, which had recently dried up, causing a lot of people to move away and turning that whole area into an instant desert."

- Three Months In The Sandstorm:
" Water, Wind, Sand was shot in ninety days in the most difficult circumstances. The temperatures were nearly 100° Fahrenheit every day and the continuous winds ranged from forty to one hundred and twenty miles per hour. Working with only a crew of five people with limited supplies of food and water and sleeping in shelters without any ceilings, we eventually became part of the nature in that area."

- Reasons for Three Years Ban:
" I have no idea why Water, Wind, Sand was banned by the government for three years. But I was happy and grateful when they eventually decided to release the film, both in Iran and abroad."