«There are certainly laws and elements that make a film more accessible to mainstream audiences. If you've got Tom Cruise as a strongman, I'm sure it would have larger audiences, but it wouldn't have the same substance.»

«I'm making films for an audience out there and a very tiny fraction of them are would-be filmmakers. But let's speak of them-the would-be filmmakers, the tiny fraction. I've witnessed many times when I've showed films and was present at a screening that exactly those people feel very much encouraged by what I'm doing.»

«For such an advanced civilization as ours to be without images that are adequate to it is as serious a defect as being without memory.»

«ecstatic truth. I've always tried to strive for a much deeper truth in the images, in cinema, in storytelling, on a screen, so whether I've achieved it or not remains to be seen. . . . There are short fleeting moments when I know that I have achieved it. And to work for that and to strive for it and to try, gives at least some dignity and some meaning to my existence.»

«Many of my films have not been easy work,»

«I have my doubts about his attitude toward wild nature and that he did anything to help the bears, ... Wild nature is simply wild, and we have to respect that. He keeps repeating to the bears 'I love you,' and I think that is wrong. You should respect the distance.»

«Of course this is me revisiting my own past, going into the wilderness, telling a story, perhaps not the one I set out to tell, ... I had no opinion about Treadwell . . . I gave him space, let him tell me his story. And it was pretty easy to see that he was haunted by demons -- illuminated, courageous and cowardly, exhilarated and in love with the idea of himself as a star.»

«It's not that I do not care about it. I've seen it very often in my career. For example, 'Aguirre: The Wrath of God' was refused by the Cannes Film Festival and in the German press it was so badly reviewed that you had the feeling it was the worst film of the decade and it endured the test of time. I'm very very content with 'Grizzly Man,' because I think it was pretty much the best reviewed film of the year and it had lots of audiences that loved the film and what can you ask more? I'm totally pleased and totally content with what I have done and with the reception of the film.»

«You should look straight at a film; that's the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.»

«We are still doing somersaults for it. It's the usual pandemonium that makes moviemaking an odd profession, and I am the lion tamer.»