It's all movies for me. And besides, when you say documentaries, in my case, in most of these cases, means "feature film" in disguise.

With actors, normally I don't like to have any conversation about background and about motivations and all this.

May I propose a Herzog dictum? Those who read own the world, and those who watch television lose it.

For example, the face of Nicole Kidman in Queen of the Desert and she is the most beautiful goddess on screen that you can find anywhere around in the world. There's no imperfections, and yet I don't need to know every single pore in her face.

Perseverance has kept me going over the years. Things rarely happen overnight. Filmmakers should be prepared for many years of hard work. The sheer toil can be healthy and exhilarating.

My contacts with the film industry can be described in very simple terms: The industry does not really need me, and I do not really need the industry.

We haven't seen a real volcanic event at least in 74,000 years - [Mount Toba] in Indonesia, in Sumatra, where the crater itself is 100 kilometers across. It was so monumental, what happened, that for a very long time the entire atmosphere of our planet was darkened. It's not the lava and the heat per se; it's the obscuring of the entire atmosphere, and it made it very difficult for the human race to survive.