Dark reality in comic strips

Marjane Satrapi, 38, the Iranian-born author of Persepolis — the internationally bestselling graphic memoir that she has turned into an animation film — bounces in her chair like a 6-year-old as she talks about Westerners who assume that her Iranian relatives still ride camels.

Why did she take on the filmmaking project, I ask her.
“Good question! I always thought it was the [expletive] idea in the world to make a movie out of this book.''

The first of four French instalments of Persepolis — Satrapi has lived in Paris for many years now — was published in 2000. The New York Review of Books called them “implacably witty and fearless''.

In simply drawn black-and-white panels, Persepolis tells the story of a girl growing up in revolutionary Iran.

Before her eyes, the country transforms itself from a brutal secular dictatorship propped up by Western interests to an equally brutal anti-Western theocracy.

Her parents fear for their outspoken daughter under the regime of the ayatollahs, and at 14, Marjane is sent to Austria, where she confronts the twin demons of adolescence and exile alone.

Satrapi didn't think Hollywood could get her story right, especially the complicated mix of love for her country and antagonism towards the present Iranian government.

She turned down various proposals to adapt it. Then a couple of French producers (later backed by Hollywood powerhouse Kathleen Kennedy) made her the proverbial un-refusable offer.

Satrapi marvels: “Somebody comes to you and tells you: ‘I will give you all the money you want, you don't need to make any compromise and you can make the movie exactly how you want.' I mean, how many times does that happen?''

Deserving award

All the money she wanted turned out to be around $8 million. Persepolis shared the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival last year.

The hardest thing about her new medium, Satrapi says, was learning to work with a small army of collaborators.

Eventually, she grew to respect and admire her colleagues but that didn't stop her from drawing all the 600-plus characters herself, in front view and profile, before turning the animators loose.

Fearing that the emotional truth of her creation would be overwhelmed by Disneyesque technical virtuosity, she insisted on acting out all the scenes for the animators — and had herself filmed doing it.

That way, even new animators taking over a scene could see what Satrapi intended.

As she says this, we find ourselves hoping she will demonstrate. But no such luck.

She does burst into song, however, as she describes the “aerobic kind of dance'' she performs at a key point in the narrative.

After becoming miserable in Austria, she has returned to Iran but finds that she now fits in neither place and tries to kill herself with pills.

Waking up not dead, she accepts that she is fated to live and rocks out.

“I had to make a very silly dance,'' she explains, “the silliest possible ... because it is an irony.''

It reached such heights of silliness that she became shy about performing in front of the animators and filming it with just one other person in the room.

For Satrapi, such moments of reticence are rare.

The New Yorker art editor Francoise Mouly, a friend Satrapi's, tells of accompanying her to West Point where she was invited to speak a few years ago.

Satrapi was greeted warmly by cadets who had read Persepolis and loved it.

Mouly and Satrapi met through Mouly's husband, Art Spiegelman, whose graphic classic, Maus, exploded the prevailing notion that comics were not for grown-ups.

Satrapi first encountered Maus in Paris, where she was sharing a studio with a number of comic artists whom she regaled with stories from her Iranian childhood.

“The whole day I was eating their brains,'' she says. “To make me shut up, they told me: ‘Why don't you make your story into a comic?''' Spiegelman's masterpiece showed her it could be done.

Persepolis has a casual style. But never mind that: “What she had was a great story to tell and the verve to tell it.''

Is Satrapi happy with her new creation?

“I never get bored by seeing this movie,'' she says. But the best part of having reimagined her story as an animated film is that she can sit in a darkened theatre and listen to the audience react.

“When I hear people laughing,'' Satrapi says, “that is the biggest reward for me.''