A moment with: Marjane Satrapi, writer, artist and film director of 'Persepolis'

(Editor's Note: This story has been change since it was first published. Author Marjane's Satrapi's appearance at the Moore Theater was set for April 14; the date and place were incorrect in an earlier version of the story.)

Born and raised in Iran, 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 oppressive culture of religious extremism. She left for Paris in 1994, when she was 26, and has been an exile ever since. "You become a stranger everywhere," she said, "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." Now she brings her story to the screen in the richly realized animated feature "Persepolis."

	Satrapi

She talked about her memoir, her film and her life on a recent visit to Seattle.

On why she chose the graphic novel/comic book medium for her story.

I have a brain that functions with text and images so this is it. It's funny ... nobody would ask a writer, "Why did you write a book and why didn't you dance?"

On adapting her graphic memoir into an animated feature:

People talk about animated movies as if it was 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. So we approached it this way.

On animation over live action:

As soon as you make a movie in a geographical place with some type of human being, then it becomes the story of a Middle Easterner: "They're not us, they're foreign." There's something about the abstraction of the drawing that everybody can relate to, because drawing is the first language of the human being, before writing or language.

On animating in black and white:

It was not even a question for us, it was obvious. For me, it was not possible to do it otherwise. Plus, for this flashback structure, it helped a lot. She remembers her past and then it turns into black and white. It's like the contrary of "The Wizard of Oz."

On her identity as an Iranian-born Parisian:

When people ask about it, I say I'm sitting between two chairs. It's not very comfortable, it's true, but when I want to lie down I can because I have two chairs. Everybody else has one chair, they are comfortably seated, but they cannot lie down.

On her fondness for ABBA and American heavy metal music as a child in Iran:

Well, you know, I had bad taste like all adolescents. I was full of hormones, and I had very bad taste. But that was for a very short period. Since I was 15 or 16, I've listened to fairly good music.

On what Western rock music meant to her in '80s Iran:

The same thing that it means to you. The only thing is that when you were an adolescent, you could just go into a shop and buy it. In Iran we had to go to the black market. But it's exactly the same thing, that you rebel, that you want to destroy your parents in order to grow up. That means you are full of hormones.

-- Sean Axmaker