Marjane Satrapi on the Graphic Novel, Family History, and Adventures in Cinema

Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan/PEN American Center

As a twenty-something art student living in Paris, Marjane Satrapi considered a number of odd jobs before deciding to write graphic novels. For a brief time, she imagined herself as a private detective, then as a headhunter (the gun-toting kind), and finally as a furs saleswoman on the Champs-Élysées.

As a twenty-something art student living in Paris, Marjane Satrapi considered a number of odd jobs before deciding to write graphic novels. For a brief time, she imagined herself as a private detective, then as a headhunter (the gun-toting kind), and finally as a furs saleswoman on the Champs-Élysées.

Fortunately for comic fans and literature lovers, all were passing fancies, and soon the Iranian-born artist began work on her first graphic novel, Persepolis, a memoir set in the turbulent years of the Islamic Republic’s cultural revolution. While Satrapi, now 42, has remained a cartoonist for those years, she has since experimented with other mediums of expression, such as animated film and live-action cinema. As part of the PEN World Voices Festival series, “Literature and the Moving Image,” Satrapi discussed how she started with comics and advanced to film with Françoise Mouly, The New Yorker’s art director, in the Museum of Modern Art’s subterranean theatre.

Satrapi, an Iranian living in Paris, and Mouly, a Frenchwoman living in New York, conversed comfortably on-stage, as if the audience had been invited into their living room to witness the reunion of old friends. Mouly began by reminiscing about their first meeting (they were in downtown Los Angeles, wandering the empty streets in search of a café where they could enjoy coffee and cigarettes) then moved to the preliminary question: “How did you get into graphic novels?”

For Satrapi, it all started with the work of one man, one genius: Art Spiegelman. Growing up in Tehran, Satrapi had thought that comics were exclusively for children, but when she was given Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel, Maus, for her 24th birthday, her attitude immediately changed. “It was the biggest revelation in my life,” said Satrapi, “It was stuck in my head because I’m someone who thinks with images, image is part of my narration as it is in graphic novels. In graphic novels, before you write, you draw.”

With her years of art school education, Satrapi began writing Persepolis, an autobiographical depiction of her childhood in Iran in the early eighties. By writing the book, she affirmed her identity in the face of a repressive government while shaping the Western view of Iran. “Suddenly we became terrorists. Our problems were only the veil, and the beard, and the nuclear weapon,” said Satrapi. “Nobody remembered that this country had the biggest poet of the world, and the philosophers, and 4,000 years of history. All of that [the book] was just to say, ‘Hey, we’re human beings.’” As Satrapi told Mouly, she did not expect Persepolis to become popular, or even be published. “When it was published, I thought 300 people might buy my book and say, “We did something for this poor girl,” Satrapi reflected with wry humor.

Despite these expectations, the graphic novel became an instant success. When Satrapi was approached with the prospect of adapting it into a film, she resisted, making huge demands in the hopes that the project would be forgotten. But the film company agreed that it could be entirely hand-drawn animation in black-and-white. When the film was released in 2007 it garnered the Cannes Jury Prize and César Award for Best Debut.

Rather than adapt another of her graphic novels into animated film, Satrapi chose to make a studio film instead. Chicken with Plums, which recently premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, tells the story of Satrapi’s great-uncle, Nasser-Ali Khan, a celebrated violinist living in Tehran in the 1950s. After his wife destroys his prized violin, he searches for a replacement, but soon concludes that no violin will give him the pleasure of playing again. He steadfastly decides to die, and after eight days of laying in bed, remembering his youth and the loss of a true love, a beautiful woman (to symbol effect) named Iran, he is buried.

For Satrapi, the nature of the stories required different mediums. “Persepolis,” as a highly political film, needed to be animated in Satrapi’s opinion. “People have lots of problems identifying with somebody who does not look like them exactly, but the abstraction of the drawing makes it possible that anybody can relate to a drawing, people can even relate to a mouse.”

As a love story, “Chicken with Plums” could be set in any city and did not need to track with historical moments. Satrapi’s stunning production creates a stylized world set in the glamorous 1950s, shown in vivid Technicolor and replete with seductive and mysterious characters.

“Making a movie is like taking hard drugs. You take the drugs, you get really high, you get really happy, and then it’s finished and then you get down and you are like, I will never, ever, do that again,” joked Satrapi.

But this doesn’t mean the daring auteur won’t continue producing films. In January, she wrapped up production of a separate film project in more may be forthcoming. And while Satrapi is working on the last volume of the trilogy that includes “Persepolis” and “Chicken with Plums,” she is also dabbling in yet another medium as she prepares an exhibition of paintings. With these exploring tendencies, it may not be long before Satrapi begins sleuthing or selling furs.

Trailer: “Chicken with Plums” is currently being screened at film festivals around the country.