There is a fascination about crime, which is understandable, but hardly anyone talks about the families of victims of violent crime and the devastation that is beyond the victim alone.

Of course, as a German, I wouldn't like to tell the American people how to handle their criminal justice.

Facts do not convey truth. That's a mistake. Facts create norms, but truth creates illumination.

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

I was able to persuade them to let me shoot in areas that were beyond the volcano itself. Beyond the joint scientific program between Cambridge University and North Korean scientists. I was able to film in a kindergarten, subway, other things you would not normally be allowed to do.

In my films, I hope there are a few moments where you feel almost illuminated, like in a state of ecstasy, stepping out of yourself, beyond yourself and perceiving something which is only, in the case of cinema, possible in collective dreams.

You are confronted with abysses of time that are, in a way, unfathomable. You see a painting in charcoal of raindeer and it was left unfinished and somebody else finished it. But through radio carbon dating we know that the next one completed the painting 5,000 years later. You're just blown away by the notion of passage of time. We have no relationship to that kind of depth of time.