For me, 'The Kite Runner' became about a guy who's emotionally shut down because he hasn't confronted his past.

I think people, unfortunately, do live in constant fear.

The interesting thing is that when you start out, people have no judgment and they see you young and fresh as a filmmaker - and because you have no experience yet, you're much more naive and think anything is possible.

Three days after my brother died, my father was in the hospital. He just did not want to live anymore. Before, he was fighting and loving life.

In times of joy and sorrow, love or hate, peace and unrest, music has always been an important outlet for expressing our emotions individually and as a nation.

My father did not have a lot of security in his life. He did odd jobs. He had a real struggle to make money. He lost a lot of time in his 20s, after the war, because he was sent to a forced-labour camp in Siberia.

Whoever wishes peace among peoples must fight statism.

I found that looking at the Israeli/Palestinian conflict from an outside vantage point was actually quite distancing. The history of the conflict, the personalities, the violence, the distrust, and the seeming lack of viable solutions made meaningful involvement feel impossible. What changed that, for me, was changing the vantage point.