Marjane Satrapi passed away this on June 4, 2026—a year after the death of her husband—at the age of 56. I interviewed Ms. Satrapi at the end of 2007, while she was promoting the animated feature Persepolis, based on her autobiographical graphic novel.
Born and raised in Iran but educated in Vienna, Marjane Satrapi grew up in the aftermath of the Islamic revolution, where she watched the idealism in the wake of freedom from the Shah’s rule give way to an increasingly oppressive and intolerant culture of religious extremism. She left for Paris in 1994 and has been an exile from her home ever since. “You become a stranger everywhere,” is how she described the feeling of exile, “but in a way you are also an insider everywhere.” Satrapi first told her story in the autobiographical graphic novels Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, sharing experiences and feelings at once culturally specific and universally human. Now she brings her story to the screen in the richly realized and evocatively told animated feature Persepolis, which she adapted and directed with Vincent Paronnaud. She talked about her novel, her film, and her life in a December visit to Seattle.
I read your graphic novels about a year ago and saw the film at Toronto. I thought it was remarkable how faithful the movie is to the character of the art and style of the original novels, and yet so fluid and creative in its use of the animation medium. What was the biggest challenge in moving from the static panel of the graphic novel to the medium of animation?
The first thing was to understand is that it is not the same narration, so we had to forget about the book and really start to make a new narration but with the same material. And that’s why, as you say, the book and the movie, they are very similar and at the same time they are very different and that is the whole paradox. In the relationship that reader, as with the comic books, and the viewer with the movie, to start with that, is not the same. Unlike literature, when you read a comic book, you are very active as a reader because between two frames you have to imagine the movement yourself. When you are watching a movie you are passive because you see the images. We’ll start with that. Then you have things like the sound, the music, etc., so if there is a feeling that I have to describe with one word or draw something in a comic, for example, I can count on the music to get this feeling. So it’s not the same medium. The whole danger of this project was to do exactly what everybody thought I would do, to take a camera and take it from the frame, one after the other, and think that we will get a movie. Since we knew this danger, we tried to avoid it as much as possible. And we thought about it as a movie, not even as an animated movie. We made it like a movie, the only thing is that it was drawn. People talk about animated movies as if it was a style. It’s not a style, it’s just a technique. It’s like comics. “Comics” is not a style, it’s not just superhero stories, it’s a medium. Animation is the same thing. So we approached it this way and just tried to make a movie.
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