It seems odd, but people who see my films normally take them in in a deeper way than you would actually watch a film, let's say The Terminator or whatever.

I would travel down to Hell and wrestle a film away from the devil if it was necessary.

At the same time, there's something magnificent about volcanoes; they created the atmosphere that we need for breathing.

In the face of the obscene, explicit malice of the jungle, which lacks only dinosaurs as punctuation, I feel like a half-finished, poorly expressed sentence in a cheap novel.

Gaining trust is not difficult for me. I needed to gain the trust of the North Korean supervisors.

The deal was we had to have people accompanying us and they would ask us not to film something [in North Korea]. For example, we wanted to film at a certain place and there happened to be a building under construction and it didn't look as fancy as the other buildings, so they wanted us to shoot where everything looked finished and made a good impression of the cityscape.

We are just a blip. I found it very interesting when Clive [Oppenheimer] interviewed the Ethiopian scientists and asked them, "Do we have another 100,000 years?" In their calculation, mankind will be entering a very critical phrase a thousand years from now.