Baltasar Kormakur

“I consider myself more a European director who is from Iceland than an Icelandic director.”

“I developed 'Trapped' because I was fascinated with the idea of a terrible crime in a small town cut off from the rest of the world.”

“People talk about Hollywood as a myth, but in reality, when you make Icelandic movies and you want to get them distributed in the U.S., you're not really working with Hollywood. The movies I've been making, the first one I made, I made it with Working Title, but it was financed through Universal, so it became a Hollywood production.”

“Sometimes those big bloated superhero movies take themselves too seriously compared to the material they were based on. Am I going to listen to psychoanalysis from someone with a mask?”

“Throughout the history of Iceland, men have been lost at sea; every family in Iceland is connected to that kind of story.”

“When I made '101 Reykjavik,' people talked about 'Almodovar on ice.' When I made 'The Sea,' people referenced Bergman.”

“I am a big fan of movies that don't take themselves too seriously. You know you won't change the world, but have fun. Movies like 'Butch Cassidy' I enjoyed tremendously, but it didn't alter my opinion of the world.”

“I'm the first Icelandic director who started working on U.S. movies. There are others behind me now, but it's like when Bjork opened the door for Icelandic musicians to work abroad. We're such a closed-off country, but Bjork broke the spell. And I'm glad it was a woman who did it. She showed us we could break this barrier.”

“When 'Iron Man' came out, I said, 'Oh - they are trying to have some fun.' It was a relief because every superhero movie had become so damn serious. Some people love that, but for me, it's a weird thing to watch. A man with a cape can have fun, but I won't listen to a lecture from him.”

“I want to work with directors who can tell intimate stories in a way that feels universal and with a big enough scope and depth to travel outside of Iceland.”

“The thing about Iceland is that we are trapped there anyway, all of us. We have been trapped there for thousands of years.”

“We will work on ways to digitally enhance Everest, matching it with Dolomites and Everest, but I'll do everything physically first. If there's no other way, then I'll go to CGI.”

“With a huge storm, you need a lot of volume, but it can't become one loud noise. Dolby Atmos helped a lot because it gave us the separation of those elements.”

“'The Oath' seems like the perfect project for me, coming off the back of a big-scale adventure film like 'Everest.' I want to delve into an intimate, dark and psychological world where the characters are claustrophobic.”

“When I write and develop things myself, I might work for a while on a script from a book, and then I go back and read the book and go back into it to see if I lost something: is there something there?”

“In the case of 'The Deep,' because of the people involved, the talent and the real lives of people who died, I wanted to make the most honest film I could. And sometimes that's the best way to go: Just make the best version of the film you can.”

“Real acting is about giving people an insight into a person, letting the audience in.”

“It's important for cinema to keep on evolving: for people, and not only teenagers, to be able to go to a movie that has huge epic scope but has an intellectual and real story to tell.”

“The winters are too long, and there's only one airline, so it's difficult to escape when you feel frustrated or claustrophobic. The audience for our films isn't very large, so it's difficult to support an industry. But, Iceland is beautiful. Sometimes it's hard to imagine living anywhere else.”

“I started as an actor, then became a theater director. I loved acting but didn't feel as confident as I needed to be, so I started directing theater; then I played in some movies, and then I felt the need to do my own stuff.”