Marjane Satrapi’s excellent Persepolis (check the website! It’s purty) opens this week, and Satrapi has been diligently running the press gauntlet. She’s always good for a quote: My personal favorite, from a slightly confrontational 2007 profile in the New York Times magazine: “I don’t very much like this term of graphic novel. I think they made up this term for the bourgeoisie not to be scared of comics.” I spoke to her in December, and even when she’s sick, jetlagged, and has just sat through a day’s worth of Q&A’s with every film critic in town, she’s still a damn entertaining interview. (And I’m not just saying so because at the end of the interview she patted my knee and called me “cute.”)

Here’s a decent profile from the Washington Post, which (if you can get past the embarrassing lead) explains the elaborate processes Satrapi went through in converting her graphic novel into a film. The movie combines the events of both books into one long, gorgeous flashback—it’s structured quite differently than the novels. When I spoke with her, she stressed that she sees comics and film as two entirely different storytelling languages. (Interestingly, this Times Online piece, about the recent spike in novelists trying their hands at writing comic books, has almost the opposite implication.)

From the Post:

The hardest thing about her new medium, Satrapi says, was learning to work with a small army of collaborators ( shoot shoot shoot). Eventually she grew to respect and admire her colleagues, but that didn’t stop her from drawing all 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 also insisted on acting out all the scenes for the animators — and had herself filmed doing it. That way, even if a new animator took over a scene, he or she could see what Satrapi intended.

My piece, meanwhile, will appear in tomorrow’s film section.