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.

Everyone who makes films has to be an athlete to a certain degree because cinema does not come from abstract academic thinking; it comes from your knees and thighs.

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.

The punishment itself is something I respectfully disagree with, but for thousands and thousands of years it was practiced everywhere.

I cannot work fast enough. I cannot cope fast enough, really. And just releasing a film is hard.

We have volcanoes also in our immediate neighborhood. I wish we didn't have to travel that far. Probably the kind of magnitude and awesome raw power of them is very fascinating, and of course it's very cinematic.

THE ACT OF KILLING invents a new form of cinematic surrealism.