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

at the press conference for the film he impressed everyone with his complete sincerity and innocence. he said he had come to see the sea for the first time and marveled at how clean it was. someone told him that, in fact, it wasn't. 'when the world is emptied of human beings' he said, 'it will become so again

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.

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.

[ Digital revolution ] only has allowed me to work faster, editing digitally, which I'm doing right now, a film on volcanoes. I can edit almost as fast as I'm thinking, editing with celluloid means always searching for this little reel of film, and number it, and scribble on it with some sort of pens, and gluing it together, and working on a flatbed. It's much, much slower.

I'm a very professional man. I'm not out for the experience of adventure.

There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.