By David D'Arcy

Who would have thought that the official knots of rhetoric about Iran, one of the three legs of the "Axis of Evil," and about France, the eternal scapegoat for American politicians, would be undone by a film adaptation of a comic book?

Persepolis [1], the new film by Marjane Satrapi [2] and Vincent Paronnaud [3], won't bring us world peace, but it brings us a piece of the world that ideologues have been trying to reshape in the service of American foreign policy for decades. To say that the animated film version of Satrapi's now famous autobiographical comic [4] has more true emotion than blood revenge live-action epics like The Kingdom [4] is, of course, faint praise. It may be more to say that this is an animated film that goes far beyond anything childish or grotesque - whether the grotesquery is the testosterone violence infusion of Beowulf [5] or the grotesquery of White House talking points, even if Iran's threat has now been brought down a notch or two from the peak it'd hit just a few months ago.

Persepolis takes on a simple story that gets complicated as one enters – nothing if not the classic approach of the Persian or Arabian tale. Young Marjane is a tomboy enamored of American culture in the Iran of the Shah, in which family and friends who show disloyalty or opposition are persecuted. Her grandmother is s constant source of comfort and advice. When the Islamic Republic replaces the Shah, things get even worse, and the young girl is sent to school in Austria, where she experiences extreme mal du pays with boys and loneliness and the perennial xenophobia that one tends to find in German-speaking countries. Back in Iran again, Marjane and her friends try to live normally in a state run by religious zealots, and innocent people are persecuted once again. It's another version of the coming-of-age story, but one in which police conduct house to house searches for partying youth and models in art school classes pose covered from head to toe.

If ever a subject needed levity, this was it.

Satrapi is one of the many comics authors around the world who has been inspired by Maus [6], Art Spiegelman [6]'s comic about coming to terms with the Holocaust and his father's years in Auschwitz. Iran isn't Auschwitz, despite the apocalyptic threats against Israel made by Iran's leader and despite demonology by the Bush administration. Yet Satrapi echoes Spiegelman in the way her characters' lives are ruled by an absolutist regime, and in the small ways that they try to find refuge in a society that they can't escape.

It's a hard story to compress down to 90 minutes, or to reconstitute out of whole cloth, as Satrapi and her collaborator Vincent Paronnaud say they have. You can see why Spiegelman has been reluctant so far to adapt Maus.

It's an odd coincidence that, at the end of the year, we're reconsidering Persepolis, a tale about Iran in French, with the Hollywood version of things French in the mildly funny and vastly over-praised Ratatouille [6]. If they are vying for awards in the field of animation, it's no contest.

It's less of a coincidence that Persepolis is sharing the honors of being one of the year's best films with the extraordinary Offside [6], Jafar Panahi [6]'s film about girl soccer fans in Tehran who dress as men and risk arrest to sneak into the stands to watch their national team play. Some of the girls even dress as soldiers. Each of the films stands nationalism on its head - Persepolis by personalizing a character's affection for family and home, Panahi's by examining persistent national pride and the way it gets expressed - obliquely, to put it mildly - among girls who have been legislated into second-class citizens. Put both on George W. Bush's Christmas list. To be fair, I think he'd like both of them if he had the discipline to sit through them. Neither is an "art film" or an agit-prop tract.

Another suggestion - see the French version of the film with voices done magnificently by Chiara Mastroianni [6], Catherine Deneuve [6], Danielle Darrieux [6], and the great Simon Abkarian [6]. I'm sure the American cast with Sean Penn [6] and Iggy Pop [6] in the version to be released widely means well, but Satrapi's story was written and published in French.

I spoke to Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud when they were at Persepolis's North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. Most of that conversation was in French, so I've included the original French words or phrases in parentheses when they were difficult to translate or when the original would be familiar to an English-speaking audience.

Why did you decide to tell your story in images, and not, as one might say, normally?

Marjane Satrapi: I couldn't do it any other way. I think in images. I love to draw. There was no other way. It's a bit as if you were asking a singer why he sings and doesn't dance. That's what I know. It's impossible for me to write without using images. I can't separate them.

How does that fit into the Islamic prohibition of the image?

Satrapi: In Iran, in Shiite Islam, you have a whole range iof imagery. It's not like Sunni Islam. where you don't have the same representation of things in images. In Iran, the imams were depicted, the prophet was depicted - it's not at all the same culture. I studied art, and we drew from models, we made drawings, we made sculpture. It had nothing too do with those other Islamic countries.

We know that the comics strips and books of Persepolis reached an audience in France and other countries. How did the film happen?

Vincent Paronnaud (co-director, co-screenwriter): At first, there were producers who proposed it to Marjane. So then, as we were coming from the independent milieu of comic books, we accepted, because we thought it would be a good toy to have fun with. That's it.

Was this your first experience with filmmaking?

Paronnaud: With feature length, yes. I had made some shorts, but this was the first time at this length. So we accepted, and then we wondered about how useful it might be to make a film. The book was a success, and we started thinking that it would be a bad idea to try to adapt it. We thought a lot about how to adapt it, how we would move ahead, and we put a huge amount of work into the script, and into research. The film and the book - it's the same story, but it's not at all the same project.

So was the real challenge compressing the book into the film?

Paronnaud: No, it's wrong to see it that way, because we added scenes that were not in the book. We had things to say, and we were just looking for the best appproach to saying it. It was a film of an hour and a half - we couldn't make a 25-hour film.

Did you ever think of approaching this as a series of nine or ten episodes, each of 55 minutes, for television?

Satrapi: We don't like series. I hate series. And I also don't like films that are number one, number two, and so on.

Vincent: We saw this as one entire single work, so it wasn't just a version of the book. As I explained, we took the book, and we put it to one side, and this was a diffrerent project.

How does your family feel about being depicted in the book or the film?

Satrapi: It's up to them to say that. I don't want to put myself in the place for speaking on behalf of other people.

Was anyone in your family or among your friends critical of the book for exposing any aspects of their private lives? What about Marcus, the Austrian boy who betrays you?

Satrapi: I don't say much about anyone's private life. As for the other people who are in the film, whether I'm being nasty about them, you never see their faces or know their names. I changed everything - not because I'm afraid of them, but because I have a point of view. Take my boyfriend in the film, Marcus. I do get a little nasty with him, and show him to be nasty. But from his point of view, he's a 19-year-old boy whom I ask to be everything for me, and he couldn't be that. If I were to ask for his point of view, he would say that I was being nasty. The only thing is that I have a means to express myself in the book and the film, and he has no means to express himself. Here I'm treating him badly, showing from my heart that he doesn't have a heart, which isn't exactly fair play.

Paronnaud: It's wrong to assume that we are looking for realism here. And that's the reason why we worked in animation. Before anything, it's a story. We're approaching it the way we would a work of fiction. The characters existed, but its not exactly the way they were. The streets are there, but they're not the same.

Satrapi: As soon as you have a script, there's a fictional side to it. You have to betray things. It's not a documentary on my life. It's story, and you should never forget that.

Before making the film, what did you like or admire in the field of animated cinema?

Satrapi: Our influences weren't in animated film. They were in German Expressionist [6] cinema, in Italian Neo-Realism [6], The Night of the Hunter [6], and films like them. We didn't have many references from animated films, because most of the time they were fables, things for children. We had more references to literature than we had to animation.

What kind of literature?

Paronnaud: They were multiple references. In certain passages of the film, there are clear references. Marjane and I read a lot, but this is like mayonnaise. We do things spontaneously, and looking back on it, we say that it reminds me of this or that.

Satrapi: We love Dostoyevsky [6] for his complexity of things where nothing is easy, or a storyteller like Primo Levi [7]. He was a reference for us because he never falls into miserabilism (miserabilisme).

Paronnaud: The authors whom we like are not preachers. We like authors who always leave some doubt. They ask questions but they never answer them. The good writers ask the readers or viewers to work a bit and their own brains.

How do you define miserabilism?

Satrapi: It's when you're trying to show that a situation is sad, and you show it again and again and again, with the result that you kill the sadness. It's when you have a character who is suffering, and you film it so relentlessly that you kill the suffering. It's as if you were trying to scare, to create a feeling of fear, and you show the monster who's coming, that at a certain point you're no longer afraid. It's more interesting to evoke something, and to leave room for the imagination.

Do you know Maus by Art Spiegelman?

Satrapi: Of course, Art Spiegelman is a very good friend.

Paronnaud: I love it.

Has Maus had any influence on the comics scene in France?

Satrapi: More than an influence.

Paronnaud: It's had a considerable influence, because comics, you can compare them to animation. Like animation, comics were infantilized for more than a century. After that there was the hippie movement, in which people like R. Crumb [7] made the medium more "adult," and the result of all that was that you had people telling stories in comics that hadn't been told before. And it influenced an entire generation of authors.

Satrapi: The reason I did Persepolis, is because I read Maus. I read Maus and I just went - [gaping, with mouth open] - you can really say something in a comic. After that I went to New York, and I saw Art, and we became friends. It's more than an influence. It's reverence. It's super, what he did. But there are so many American authors whom we've read - Kim Deitch [8], Chris Ware [9], Dan Clowes [9]...

Paronnaud: In France there is an autobiographical scene in comics, but the difference with the United States is that there is entertainment, something playful, which is very important. What we also like, and what we tried to put into our film, is that fact that we are having fun.

Satrapi: It's entertainment.

Paronnaud: We didn't want to be making something pretentious... black and white, this kind of subject, it's tempting to make something "auteurist" (un truc d'auteur).

Satrapi: Cinema d'auteur is a drag (chiant).

Paronnaud: We wanted to have fun.

Satrapi: But in a collaborative way - him in the cinema, and myself drawing it - we never wanted to forget that this playful entertaining side, the pizazz of the story. Without that, we would have killed the story.

Paronnaud: It's important to do things seriously, but never to take ourselves too seriously.

Satrapi: Humor is a function of intelligence. We use humor, because we know that life is short, and it's too serious to be dealt with too seriously. People who are too serious, it's just because they're jerks (cons). It's bullshit (connerie) to think that life is eternal, and to think that you have the time to bore us. People without humor are jerks.

It's just that. Comics were made on newsprint, and the people making them knew that this paper would be thrown away the next day, or that it would just fall apart and decompose. The built-in impermanence in comics ought to ensure whoever's writing them that he or she can't be too grand. It would be hard for them to imagine that their writings would stand the test of time, because the paper wouldn't.

Satrapi: I prefer writing on paper that decomposes easily. If I'm writing on paper that's too good, it scares me. I'm afraid to begin because this is the kind of paper for a masterpiece. I've always worked on bad paper - even for drawing, it's so much easier. When the paper's good, I say, "Shit, now I have to write a masterpiece." And
the minute that I have to make a masterpiece, it's shit. It's always like that.

Paronnaud: The history of comics is something special. At no time in the last century did people writing comics think that their work had any artistic value. Now we talk about Little Nemo [10] and things like that as works of art that have disappeared, and they've tried to find lost "comics." For a hundred years, they were made for children, and now there's an open epoch, in which people are saying, "Oh, comics, how great," and they've invented this term "graphic novel" that I hate.

Satrapi: They're comics. [Switching to English, and raising her voice] You can talk about a shit movie, for example. You have a movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger [10] and a movie by John Cassavetes [10]. Each thing is
called a movie. One is a bad movie, and one is a good movie. You have good and bad comics, but all of that is comics.

Paronnaud: It's just for the bourgeois, so that at Christmas they can buy a comic, as long as it's called a graphic novel.

Satrapi: This reminds me of a line from Chris Marker: "I hate graphic novels because a graphic novel, for me, is a bit like Lady Chatterley's Lover [11]. It's like this bourgeois lady, sitting annoyingly." C'est ca. I like comics. What is bad about comics? Comics are great.

What is the situation like for people making comics in Iran right now?

Satrapi: No, no, no. We don't have a culture of comics in Iran. You know, I am an Iranian, but I'm also French, and I've lived for too long outside my country, so I can't really speak about that.

Paronnaud: I'm French, so I can't answer the question.

Persepolis the book was published in France in 2000. When was the film released commercially?

Satrapi: The film came out June 27th.

How was it received?

Satrapi: By September, it had 1.1 million admissions, which is great for France.

Paronnaud: Comics, in black and white, with this kind of subject, it's not bad.

Satrapi: For anything that is not strictly commercial, a success at the box office would be 300,000 admissions.

Are you planning to make another film?

Satrapi: It's been proposed that we do another film together. But we're too busy promoting this one right now to decide what we will make a film about. We have to wait until the promotion for Persepolis is over to really think about it. You know, the promotion of a film really sucks the blood and energy out of you. When this bullshit is finished, we can really concentrate on something else.

The Triplets of Belleville [11] was another French animated feature. Who else is working in animation in France?

Satrapi: We don't know.

Paronnaud: We don't come from the milieu of animation. That's why the film was so difficult at the beginning, to manage the project, because it was not so precisely in the framework of animation. People had to stop for a second, before they could see what we wanted. But we can't talk about the milieu of animation because we don't come from it.

Satrapi: On the other hand, if our film could lead people to try new kinds of animated drawings, that would be good.

What role does the computer play in a work like Persepolis?

Satrapi: It's really at the end. The job of the computer is on what we call the compositing. All the elements that are drawn are put together - the figures, the production design, the dialogue, plus the movement of the camera. It's at the very end.

Paronnaud: All the other work would look like we were working in the 1950s. All by hand. And that was a problem, because everyone who was trained to do that kind of work was dead. So we had to find old people familiar with technologies that were being lost, who could train our team.

Are there any left in France?

Paronnaud: Now there are, thanks to us.

Satrapi: We found an old tracer [copier of drawings in the animation process] who was in Lyon. We brought him to Paris for three months. For three months, he trained a team and formed a group of tracers. There hadn't been one for 20 years. We recreated a craft that barely existed any more, because it was needed for what we wanted to do.

Do the two of you also work as editors?

Satrapi: We had a super editor, Stephane Roche [12], but the two of us were always behind him.

Paronnaud: From the beginning to the end, we were there to make life hell (fair chier) for everybody.

You hear all this American rhetoric about Iran now. What is it about Iran today that is most misunderstood?

Satrapi: The most important thing is not only about Iran, but about the whole region, and it is that the Bush administration talks about the rest of the world, and this part of the world, as if it were an abstract notion. They've reduced human beings to an abstract notion. They can go to war in Iraq, and they have the public opinion behind them. They talk all the time about terrorists, as if these people were coming from another planet, and they were not like us. From that point they can forget that the "other one" is a human being, just like them.

This is the beginning of the problem. Plus, by naming "the evil," as something absolutely dangerous, this is the beginning of fascism. If the evil are "them," then let's kill all of "them," and then people can live together. For me, the most important thing is that, if they see this movie, since we started it from a very individualistic point of view, it is story of one human being. Then they can relate to that, since the person whom they're so scared of is somebody just like them, who has parents, who has hopes, who has love, etc. From thinking in this film that you can see the other one as a human being, this is not the view of the US in the world today. They're trying to dehumanize everybody, and reduce them to some groups, to some ethnicity. If you understand that the person in front of you is a human being, maybe the public opinion will not be for the war anymore.

I am very humble about how art can change the world. If you have one duty, it is to ask a question that is complex. It's not up to us to give the answers. We're just trying to push people to think. But this question should be asked: "Who is this person whom I'm so scared of?"

I'm very optimistic about the American people. In the middle of the war, I was in America, and the American people always give you a chance to express yourself. And they want to know. They might listen to all the bullshit and believe things, but they are ready to listen if you have something to say, and I have great hopes for that. I love American people, to tell you the truth.

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