Talking back

A young girl is stopped by members of the Iranian morality squad in Persepolis. (Sony Pictures Classics/Mongrel Media)

If she hadn’t written a popular series of autobiographical comics and directed a film based on her life story, I’d think Marjane Satrapi was being evasive. Or maybe she’s just a brat. During our interview on a hotel patio at the Toronto International Film Festival, the artist-turned-director interrupts questions to cheek-kiss a passing friend, order a chocolate torte and coffee, and complain about the waitress (“What does she think, that I’m waving at her to say hello?”). She abruptly leaves twice to find a washroom (“Onion troubles,” she announces by way of explanation) and then turns the tape recorder on me. Whipping off her Olsen twins-sized sunglasses, she stares me down and says, “I’m tired of talking. What did you think of our movie?”

No one can argue that Satrapi hasn’t earned the right to be difficult. Born into a bourgeois leftie clan in Iran (her family is directly descended from the Persian royal family), she grew up in Tehran in the turbulent 1970s and ’80s, a period that spanned the rule of the Shah, the Islamic revolution and the Iran-Iraq war. Several of Satrapi’s family friends and relatives were imprisoned, tortured, even executed. Her parents, fearing for their daughter’s safety, sent her away to school in Vienna when she was 14. They were concerned that Marjane’s challenging attitude and loud mouth would get her into trouble with the fundamentalist authorities.

After a miserable adolescence in Austria and a failed marriage back in Iran, Satrapi moved to Paris in 1994, where she has lived ever since. In 2000, she published her graphic novel memoir Persepolis (the title refers to an ancient Iranian city). Taking inspiration from Art Spiegelman’s magnum opus Maus, Persepolis’s deceptively simple illustrations and rich dialogue zing with political barbs and pop culture references. The story follows Marjane as she comes of age, first in revolutionary Iran, and later in a sort-of exile in Vienna. In one scene, a young Marjane is cornered on the street by members of a morality squad who cite her “punk shoes” as an affront. When they notice the Michael Jackson button pinned to her jean jacket, she tells them that it’s actually Malcolm X, a famous American Muslim. 

Graphic novelist and filmmaker Marjane Satrapi. (Darryl James/Getty Images)

The book became a global hit, and found its way onto college curriculums. Then, shortly after its publication in the U.S. in 2003, Hollywood producers who were keen to adapt the bestseller to the big screen approached Satrapi. But she was reluctant to sign on; she worried about losing control of the story. Then a fledging French producer convinced her to make the animated feature in France, “where the director has the final cut,” says Satrapi. “It’s the law.”

“I didn’t want to make any compromises. I didn’t want to listen to some jerk telling me, ‘I don’t like this, I don’t like that.’ I would have said, ‘Then do it yourself.’”

She enlisted the help of fellow comic book artist and longtime friend Vincent Paronnaud, who is Satrapi’s temperamental and physical opposite: skinny to her voluptuous, shy to her extrovert, placid to her passionate. Not surprisingly, he too was reluctant to accept the job. “I accepted knowing it would be a tough project,” he says through a translator, while Satrapi disappears in search of sugar for her coffee.

“The book is so good already and it’s about Marjane’s life. Also, neither one of us had directed a feature film before, and I thought that I would have more of a technical role, since I had made a couple of short films. At the beginning, I was very scared to speak up, but Marjane gave me a lot of freedom. We made the decision to treat the story as a fiction, not as Marjane’s life. And that allowed it to become our story.”

Told in a flashback, the film remains quite faithful to the storyline of the graphic novel, though the addition of shades of grey give a more three-dimensional texture to the original, austere black and white drawings. Visually, it bears a much closer resemblance to early German silent films than anything from Disney or Pixar. Indeed, Satrapi has cited Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau as two of her influences.

Overseeing a crew of 90 was the biggest challenge for Satrapi and Paronnaud,  each of whom was used to working solo. “It was hell,” Satrapi says. “You’re never alone. All the time, people are asking you questions. We had to stay late at night, after everyone left, just to get our own work done.” But one of the perks was working with a cast that included iconic French actress Danielle Darrieux, voicing the grandmother, the legendary Catherine Deneuve as the mother, and Chiara Mastroianni, who is the daughter of Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni, as Marjane. (In the English-language version, which will be released later this year, Deneuve will again voice the mother and Gena Rowlands will play the grandmother.)

Marjane listens as her parents greet a friend just released from prison in Persepolis. (Sony Pictures Classics/Mongrel Media)

“It was very intimidating,” says Satrapi, who calmed her nerves with Cognac before meeting the cast for the first time. “You can’t just say to Catherine Deneuve, ‘Do this, do that.’ But she’s a big pro. She worked with us as if she was working with any other director. She took her work extremely seriously and she’s much less scary in real life.”

Persepolis was enthusiastically received at Cannes earlier this year, where it tied for best debut feature, and has been similarly praised at TIFF. Paronnaud credits the success of the film to political timeliness and the story’s universal themes. “People embrace the movie because it’s honest. We don’t pretend to give answers. We don’t preach or do propaganda. I believe that, particularly in this time, people need to be free to think for themselves. The subject is very current, of course, and people want to hear another point of view. People feel that in the world today there’s so much divisiveness, so much thinking in terms of good and bad, black and white. I think that people who still have a brain and a heart want to hear a story like this.”

For Satrapi, the opportunity to make a feature-length film has made all the headaches worth it: “There was no good reason to make a movie [version of the book]. It doesn’t give anything extra. But it’s rare in life that you get the chance to do something you want to do, with all the money and the resources you need. So, we said to ourselves, ‘Why not try it?’ The worse thing that could have happened was that we made a shit movie and spent two years learning something new.”

“Now that it’s done, though, I can give you 155 good reasons for having done it. And now, if we want to make something in Hollywood, they have to listen to us.”

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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