I'm not a journalist; I'm a poet. I had a discourse, an encounter with these people but I never had a list of questions.

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.

Nature is monumentally indifferent.

Most of the volcanoes are pretty far away. You have to go to, God knows, Alaska. Or you have to go to the Southern Indies or you have to go to a specific island.

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.

That shot in "Into the Inferno" somehow popped up while my editor and I were viewing the footage. I immediately said, "That looks like the opening shot because the camera approaches the action very slowly and we have enough time to insert some of the main credits into it." So it was a practical choice. At the same time, you see these tiny figures standing at the rim of something, and all of a sudden, the camera rises further and you find yourself looking straight down into an inferno.

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