Ershadi and Abdalla on the challenges of picking up the Afghani culture:

Homayoun Ershadi: You see, I’m Iranian, so we are very close to their culture, actually. We have the same culture, you know. It used to be one country once and still, all of the literature in school is in Farsi and it’s from Iran and Afghanistan. I went to Kabul two times and Khalid spent one month there. My language is Iranian, which is very close to Dari and I learned very easily, but Khalid didn’t even know one word in Dari and he learned [it] in one month. I’ll let him explain.

Khalid Abdalla: Obviously Amir is Afghan-American and I’m neither. I’m British and Egyptian and the film took me on quite a journey. I ended up going to Afghanistan, as it turned out, with six days notice, and spent a month there. During which time I was in complete immersion and banished English and had four or five hours of Dari lessons, which is the Afghani Farsi, a day. Also, while I was there, I voraciously traveled everywhere I could and ate everything I could. I also learned to fly kites there with the boys and I also went to a couple of weddings, and somehow at the end of that month I came out speaking the language, which I hadn’t expected. It’s not very often at the end of film you can say, "Hey, I learned a new language."

Khalid Abdalla on the stereotypes projected upon Afghanistan:

"I didn’t really arrive with so many stereotypes myself. I mean, Egypt is a very different country to Afghanistan and Afghanistan isn’t even an Arab country. But obviously for a lot of people in the West, generally the two are paired together and I’m always acutely aware, myself, that sometimes in one way or another Afghanistan has been representing me, even when people think of the word Arab they still think of the word Taliban, even though the Taliban aren’t Arab. So, in myself, I had that dislocation of the stereotype that’s been fed to me and what I believe the country is really like. Having said that, even when I arrived in Afghanistan I didn’t know what the situation would be security wise. And because of the way Afghanistan is filtered, you tend to have an association with traditional forms of Afghan dress and the potential of trouble. It was a great learning experience for me. I remember going to some parties and I’d be sitting there, and there’s was some beer and I wasn’t drinking, but there were all of these people dressed exactly how a terrorist would be represented in a bad movie, drinking beers. That was something, visually, that I’d never seen before."