Five days before the end of the shoot, a newspaper article stated that I was directing a new film. The military immediately gave orders to interrupt the shoot. We were instructed to bring them our rushes. I immediately announced to the official in charge of cinema in Iran that this was out of the question, and that I would not allow a single soldier during the final days of the shoot. Luckily, there were only a few scenes left to shoot, inside a minibus, so we just left the military zone and continued filming sixty kilometers outside of Tehran–Iranian Jafar Panahi.

Cannes Film Fest 2006–I don?¢¬Ä¬ôt think there are any similar texts, perhaps ?¢¬Ä¬úSigns?¢¬Ä or ?¢¬Ä¬úJaws.?¢¬Ä When I first wrote the story people were confused about the scale of the monster–they thought of giant monsters like ?¢¬Ä¬úGodzilla.” The monster in ?¢¬Ä¬úThe Host?¢¬Ä is also a biological mutation, a bit like “Alien.”

The last thing I wanted to do was make a typically constrained, demure period movie. The Victorian Era is often mischaracterized as stuffy and repressive‚Äîwhen it was actually an incredibly exciting time in human development. You had the second Industrial Revolution, the birth of electricity, the birth of cinema, the start of widespread international travel and science being turned on its head by new theories. You also had the beginnings of mass advertising with billboards and posters. It was a period of great adventurousness with changes that are still being felt today–Nolan

Cannes Film Fest 2006–I always felt there was something very sympathetic about Louis XVI. He was never meant to be King and was only in that position because his older brother died. I think he was plagued with this sense of being very inadequate–near-sighted and said to be inept at a great many things. So I felt that Jason, who has this very vulnerable and sensitive side, would make Louis more touching and believable–Sofia Coppola

Cannes Film Fest 2006–“My biggest fear was making a ‚ÄòMasterpiece Theatre‚Äô kind of movie. I didn‚Äôt want to make a dry, historical period movie with the distant, cold tableau of shots. It was very important to me to tell the story in my own way. In the same way as I wanted “Lost in Translation” to feel like you had just spent a couple of hours in Tokyo, I wanted this film to let the audience feel what it might be like to be in Versailles during that time and to really get lost in that world.”