It doesn't matter whether you shoot on celluloid or on digital, you better make a good film.

Amos Vogel was a mentor, a guiding light for me. In his presence, you always rose. But his importance to me is of minor significance. What is significant is that with him an entire epoch ends. The Last Lion has left us.I am still not capable - or rather unwilling - to understand the fact that Amos passed away, because a man like him cannot be dead. His traces are everywhere.

The danger is to stupidly believe that depicting facts gives us much insight. If facts were the only thing that counted, the telephone directory would be the book of books.

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.

I try to be after something that is deeply reverberating inside of our souls, some deep echo from - even from prehistory. What makes us humans? How do we communicate? Where are we going at this moment? Something for an audience where they can step outside of themselves, where they can be almost like in ecstasy of truth, some sort of deep illumination. And that's what I'm trying in documentaries and in feature films.

English is a really wonderful language and I urge you all to investigate it

You have to be completely open to what people would tell you. You do not shape them; you do not force the materials into your ideas. You have to have all windows and doors open.