Offside, the Iranian movie about girls trying to see a soccer match, just came out on DVD. Do you love it?
Very much so. I designed the poster, actually. The movie shows you that though life is not easy for girls in Iran, they’re strong and they make it through. That’s an important message, because we can’t reduce Iranian people to their poverty and misery. The girls in Offside are actually pushy! It’s great!
Persepolis works in much the same way. Who couldn’t relate to adolescent rebellion?
Adolescence is wild because you’re full of hormones, you don’t know who you are. As adults, we should always remember adolescence — that intense desire for freedom. I never go toward the consensus and I have always stayed marginal. Because I have always thought, if the majority of people were right, we should be living in paradise. But we live in hell.
Hell is war?
Yes, and so is lying. If the US military were to say, “Okay, look, we’re coming into your region of the world because 85 percent of the oil is in this region and we’d love to have it, we’re stronger than you, so shut up and just accept that this is the way it is,” I could accept that in a way. But when they wrap it in this talk of human rights and democracy, that’s when it becomes too much. Don’t tell me it’s for my own good that you’re here to fuck me over. Don’t insult my intelligence.
How do you fight stupidity without weapons?
It’s easy — with education and culture, with openness, with a sense that everything is connected. That won’t solve all the problems. But it would help us to be less stupid. And it’s always better to be less stupid than more stupid.
Related:
Primary concerns, The Savages, How She Move, More 
- Primary concerns
The last thing people are looking for when they go to the movies is a reminder of the political crapola they are trying to escape.
- The Savages
I’m glad to see the return of director Tamara Jenkins, idle since her wonderful Slums of Beverly Hills (1998).
- How She Move
The dance sequences suffer for the lack of gloss, but it’s a fair trade because tiny bursts of drama erupt whenever the plot looks the other way.
- Casting ballots
Some believe democracy can save the world. Others wonder whether it can even work in America.
- Caramel
Why are beauty salons so popular all over the world as settings for microcosmic movies?
- New Jang Su Korean BBQ
In my unproduced screenplay, Who’s Afraid of Korean Food? the villain is a dish of kimchi.
- Cuba si, Cuban cinema no
This article originally appeared in the September 28, 1976 issue of the Boston Phoenix.
- Then She Found Me
Helen Hunt bites off more than she can chomp on, choosing also to star in this her first try as a film director, a clumsy, overplotted rendition of Elinor Lipman’s 1990 novel.
- Mutiny in Heaven
It is a truth now well established that the idea for a series of books about a schoolboy wizard did not , in fact, originate with its author, J.K. Rowling (as she has naively claimed), but was piped up red-hot and stinking from Below.
- Love in the Time of Cholera
Granted, this is hardly the first Hollywood film to feature Latinos practicing ESL in their own land, but with lines like “Her smell is in my noh-streels,” it’s among the dumbest.
- Family plots
Sidney Lumet may be 83, but his new film makes Quentin Tarantino and even the Coen Brothers look geriatric.
- Less
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Features
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