It's very enigmatic because of course, the population [of North Korea] has no contact with the world outside or it's very, very limited. They don't have any telephone connections, no radio, no TV, no movies, no newspapers - nothing from the outside world. This is very strange and there's the very strict, unifying government that forces you to be in step. You see it in the stadium where the spectators create, by flipping cards, an image of the dear leader, or of the volcano, and it's made of a 100,000 human pictures.

I'm very, very curious about how people live under the volcano, how they handle the permanence of danger.

Similar thing until today, with digital cameras you look after something like that as robust as they can be.

Netflix knew I was going to North Korea and Ethiopia and Iceland. They saw the film and liked it and that was that.

Tourism is a mortal sin.

You must live life in its very elementary forms. The Mexicans have a very nice word for it: pura vida. It doesn't mean just purity of life, but the raw, stark-naked quality of life. And that's what makes young people more into a filmmaker than academia.

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