The director of Persepolis talks about her biopic of Marie Curie: Marjane Satrapi interviewed

The problem with making an accurate film about science is that science is rarely exciting to watch, explains director Marjane Satrapi. Movie convention tends to insist on the climax of the eureka moment and the fiction of the solitary male genius, who doggedly closes in on his discovery in the same way that a detective might doggedly close in on a killer. ‘It doesn’t happen this way,’ says Satrapi. ‘It’s a result of lots and lots of work, which most of the time is repetitive and most of the time you know you don’t know where you’re going, and it’s lots of collaboration.’

Satrapi studied mathematics in her birthplace of Iran, and has a scientist’s intolerance for dramatic licence. ‘You cannot make a film about science and then lie about science. It will be a fraud.’ Which explains how she came to be attached to Radioactive, a wholly unconventional biopic of Marie Curie — who, it turns out, was a wholly unconventional woman in many ways.