Maybe I should stay a good soldier of cinema.

At the end [when I speak about] magma under us everywhere, how it's monumentally indifferent to scurrying roaches, recoiled reptiles, and vapid humans alike. You see, you would never hear anything like that in a National Geographic or a PBS movie. This is clearly a transgression when it comes to being politically correct with your commentary.

This is the birth of the modern human soul. The artists are like us, not like the Neanderthals, who had no culture - and who incidentally were still roaming the landscape at the time the paintings were made. It is striking that there is a distant cultural echo that seems to reach all the way down to us, over dozens of millennia.

You can't have a helicopter fly over boiling lava. It would've exploded from the heat, and is just way too dangerous. The pilot of a helicopter would've flatly refused anyway.

When you look at my film you see footage that is unbelievably awesome and beautiful and dangerous looking. It's something that is very, very cinematic.

If you want to propose marriage to your girlfriend and you live in England and she is in Sicily, do the decent thing and walk down there. Travelling by car or aeroplane wouldn't be right at such a moment.

The daredevil aspect to what I did there is moving a monstrously big ship over a mountain in the jungle of Peru with 800 or 900 or so native people from the area. So that idea was wild but the way it was executed was prudent. Nobody was ever hurt and when it became clear that we had to be more secure with the posts that would hold the ship, I spent 12 days having a post built that would have withstood the force of 10 times the weight of my ship.