Everything that I've done was prudent and never has anyone gotten hurt in my films - not a single actor, not a single extra, ever.

I am somebody who creates images, with my perspectives, fascinations and my instincts as a narrator. You have to activate the audience's imagination. If you are just giving them scientific results, they would forget the film in five minutes flat.

Of course subjects are changing, and since I started so early in filmmaking, I did my first film at age 19, of course you grow up with your films and you are not trotting the same path all the time.

I'm not a one-trick horse.

You will learn more by walking from Canada to Guatemala than you will ever learn in film school.

Some of the most important caves, like Lascaux in the Dordogne region in France, have had to be closed down. There had been too many people allowed in, and they left a mold on the walls that is spreading and which can't really be stopped.

The wonderful thing is that Clive [Oppenheimer ] insisted on training his camera - his private camera - on me at one point. We were discussing things such as how to avoid certain dangers, while reflecting on a volcano that had threatened to explode 40 years ago.