In the communist revolution in North Korea, when they threw out the Japanese occupiers, they claimed the power in the dynamic of this volcano for their revolution, saying that this is at the center of the dynamics of our revolution. Everything that you encounter - you don't have, for example, any advertisements, you don't have anything like that anywhere in the country - if you see anything it would be propaganda, and propaganda always inevitably comes back to the volcano. It's always including the volcano. You see the new leader and standing behind him you see the volcano.

If I had to climb into hell and wrestle the devil himself for one of my films, I would do it.

Do you not then hear this horrible scream all around you that people usually call silence.

If you’re purely after facts, please buy yourself the phone directory of Manhattan. It has four million times correct facts. But it doesn’t illuminate.

Because you're delegated to a cook book recipe and you slavishly and pedantically rely on it while you're shooting and you're not relying on your creative instincts and you're not relying on something which brings life into movies and excitement into it.

You have to be very prudent with what you are doing and what sort of tools you are utilizing. Drones have become a wonderful new tool in filmmaking.

The opinion of the public is sacred. The director is a cook who merely offers different dishes to them and has no right to insist they react in a particular way. A film is just a projection of light, completed only when it crosses the gaze of the audience[...]