Everything you see in North Korea, it's all propaganda, but it's all connected to the volcano.

Your film is like your children. You might want a child with certain qualities, but you are never going to get the exact specification right. The film has a privilege to live its own life and develop its own character. To suppress this is dangerous. It is an approach that works the other way too: sometimes the footage has amazing qualities that you did not expect.

The volcano itself wasn't that interesting, but the man who refused to be evacuated - the only one of 75,000 people - was what set the tone for the film ["Encounters at the End of the World"] that we made together [with Clive Oppenheimer] ten years later.

By the way, today with digital cameras and editing on your laptop, and things like that, you can make a feature film, a narrative feature film easily for $10,000.

You have to realize that, about 20,000 years ago, there was a cataclysmic event when an entire rock face collapsed and sealed off the cave. It's a completely preserved time capsule. You've got tracks of cave bears that look like they were left yesterday, and you've got the footprint of a boy who was probably eight years old next to the footprint of a wolf.

It happens sometimes that the material itself carries things you have not fully planned. The footage has its own right, its own life, its own vibrancy and energy in it.

As for the "anger" of the volcano, we leave it up to the local populations who create their demons, their gods and their divine punishment.