Werner Herzog quotes:

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  • Sometimes bad luck hits you like in an ancient Greek tragedy, and it's not your own making. When you have a plane crash, it's not your fault.

  • 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.

  • I function better in the jungle in Amazonia or Antarctica or Alaska or the Sahara desert. An artificial environment like a studio has never attracted me. I could work in a studio, but I would never really feel at home.

  • I have a great map of the Tibesti Mountains in the southern Sahara or Northern Chad. It's a dream of mine to go there, but it's such a volatile area, you have to be prudent.

  • I don't spend sleepless nights over getting very bad reviews.

  • Martin Luther was asked, what would you do if tomorrow the world would come to an end, and he said, 'I would plant an apple tree today.' This is a real good answer. I would start shooting a movie.

  • I think psychology and self-reflection is one of the major catastrophes of the twentieth century.

  • Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film.

  • Technology has a great advantage in that we are capable of creating dinosaurs and show them on the screen even though they are extinct 65 million years. All of a sudden, we have a fantastic tool that is as good as dreams are.

  • I think there are specific times where film noir is a natural concomitant of the mood. When there's insecurity, collapse of financial systems - that's where film noir always hits fertile ground.

  • Perhaps I seek certain utopian things, space for human honour and respect, landscapes not yet offended, planets that do not exist yet, dreamed landscapes.

  • I'm not into digital marketing, downloading, or streaming - I've always been a man of the theaters.

  • I'm politically interested, but I have no particular talent as a political beast, stepping out and running for office.

  • Ambition is to be the fastest runner on this planet, to be the first on the South Pole, which is a grotesque perversion of ambition. It's an ego trip, and I'm not on an ego trip. I don't have ambitions - I have a vision.

  • I think there should be holy war against yoga classes.

  • In the Chauvet Cave, there is a painting of a bison embracing the lower part of a naked female body. Why does Pablo Picasso, who had no knowledge of the Chauvet Cave, use exactly the same motif in his series of drawings of the Minotaur and the woman? Very, very strange.

  • I do other sorts of things. I act in other people's movies. I direct operas. I write books.

  • Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.

  • Facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.

  • Let's put it this way: art house theaters are vanishing. They have almost disappeared completely, and that means there's a shift in what audiences want to see. And they have to be aware of that and be realistic. It's as simple as that.

  • I am torn between the beauty of the natural world, which you see all around us, and the idea that some dumb tornado could blow a telephone pole onto my sweet Camaro.

  • I'm not an interviewer. I have conversations.

  • One more thing: Philippe, you are not a coward-so what I want to hear from you is the ecstatic truth about the twin towers."

  • I'm the last one who would do self-analysis.

  • The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.

  • I'm a very professional man. I'm not out for the experience of adventure.

  • I have nothing against 3D films but I do not need to see them.

  • I never have searched for a subject. They always just come along. They never come by way of decision-making. They just haunt me. I can't get rid of them. I did not invite them.

  • 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.

  • There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization."

  • I like and I love everything that has to do with cinema: writing, directing, editing, creating music, and even acting.

  • 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.

  • Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.

  • What have we done to our images? What have we done to our embarrassed landscapes? I have said this before and will repeat it again as long as I am able to talk: if we do not develop adequate images we will die out like dinosaurs.

  • Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.

  • There are specific times where film noir is a natural concomitant of the mood. When there's insecurity, collapse of financial systems - that's where film noir always hits fertile ground.

  • Read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read...if you don't read, you will never be a filmmaker.

  • I'm not into the culture of complaint. I roll up my sleeves and somehow I get it together.

  • I live my life outside of the glitz and glamour of the red carpet events, and so you'll never see me there. I'm never at parties.

  • The collapse of the stellar universe will occur - like creation - in grandiose splendor.

  • Centuries from now our great-great-great-grandchildren will look back at us with amazement at how we could allow such a precious achievement of human culture as the telling of a story to be shattered into smithereens by commercials, the same amazement we feel today when we look at our ancestors for whom slavery, capital punishment, burning of witches, and the inquisition were acceptable everyday events.

  • Very often, footage that you have shot develops its own dynamic, it's own life, that is totally unexpected, and moves away from you're original intentions. And you have to acknowledge, yes, there is a child growing and developing and moving in a direction that isn't expected-accept it as it is and let it develop its own life.

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

  • I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony; but chaos, hostility and murder.

  • People think we had a love-hate relationship. Well, I did not love him, nor did I hate him. We had mutual respect for each other, even as we both planned each other's murder.

  • Without dreams we would be cows in a field, and I don't want to live like that. I live my life or I end my life with this project.

  • I know for sure that there is only one step from insecticide to genocide.

  • James Joyce is a cul-de-sac. [Ulysses is] ... an example how literature branched out and went into, lost itself in nowhere, no man's land.

  • We are surrounded by worn-out, banal, useless and exhausted images, limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution.

  • 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.

  • Chauvet Cave is rather like the awakening of the modern human soul or I would say the awakening of modern human culture. Because Neanderthal men who still rode the landscape parallel to the people who did these paintings didn't have culture. There's no evidence of culture, no symbolic depiction, no evidence of music, no evidence of sculptures, no evidence of religious beliefs.

  • I've never left my culture. I've left my country, but I've not left my culture. In the same way, you shouldn't be worried why George Lucas is going to the outer galaxy to make a movie. He's still making a film within his culture; he's making an American film. I go to Thailand or the Peruvian jungle, the Amazon, and I still make Bavarian films.

  • I despise formal restaurants. I find all of that formality to be very base and vile. I would much rather eat potato chips on the sidewalk.

  • Along with this rapid growth of forms of communication at our disposal - be it fax, phone, email, Internet or whatever - human solitude will increase in direct proportion.

  • I know whenever it comes to be really dysfunctional and vile and base and hostile on screen, I'm good at that!

  • In the face of the obscene, explicit malice of the jungle, which lacks only dinosaurs as punctuation, I feel like a half-finished, poorly expressed sentence in a cheap novel.

  • Film should be looked at straight on; it is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.

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

  • Yes, the pyramids have been built, but if you give me 300,000 disciplined men and give me 30 years, I could build a bigger one.

  • I have not seen a film as powerful, surreal, and frightening in at least a decade unprecedented in the history of cinema.

  • Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.

  • I am not an artist and never have been. Rather I am like a craftsman and feel very close to the mediaeval artisans who produced their work anonymously and who, along with their apprentices, had a true feeling for the physical materials they were working with.

  • If you go to Florence, it has all surface beauty, but like Venice, it's simply a museum of Renaissance times. Los Angeles is raw, uncouth and bizarre, but it's a place of substance. It has more new horizons than any other place.

  • I travel without barely any luggage. Just a second set of underwear and binoculars and a map and a toothbrush.

  • I do whatever pushes me hardest. It's coming at me and I try to. It's like uninvited guest and I have to wrestle them out the door or through the window - get them out and get over with them quickly.

  • It happens sometimes that the material itself carries things you have not fully planned. The footage has its own right, its own life, its own vibrancy and energy in it.

  • I could not become an American citizen. I would not like to become a citizen of a country that has capital punishment.

  • Why go to Antarctica, why do a film like 'Grizzly Man'? It's the sheer joy of storytelling - it's the urge.

  • I'm simply not afraid. It's not in my dictionary of behaviour.

  • Every man should pull a boat over a mountain once in his life.

  • Life on our planet has been a constant series of cataclysmic events, and we are more suitable for extinction than a trilobite or a reptile. So we will vanish. There's no doubt in my heart.

  • I prefer to be alive, so I'm cautious about taking risks.

  • If you do not have an absolutely clear vision of something, where you can follow the light to the end of the tunnel, then it doesn't matter whether you're bold or cowardly, or whether you're stupid or intelligent. Doesn't get you anywhere.

  • You should bear in mind that almost all my documentaries are feature films in disguise.

  • I think the worst that can happen in filmmaking is if you're working with a storyboard. That kills all intuition, all fantasy, all creativity.

  • The universe is not harmonious: you know that by looking outside.

  • I work very fast and steadily, and I don't hardly ever notice that I'm working. It feels like just breathing or walking when I do films.

  • If an actor knows how to milk a cow, I always know it will not be difficult to be in business with him.

  • I think it is a quest of literature throughout the ages to describe the human condition.

  • "Jack Reacher" was easy because the function of the villain was just to spread fear and horror.

  • [ Digital revolution ] only has allowed me to work faster, editing digitally, which I'm doing right now, a film on volcanoes. I can edit almost as fast as I'm thinking, editing with celluloid means always searching for this little reel of film, and number it, and scribble on it with some sort of pens, and gluing it together, and working on a flatbed. It's much, much slower.

  • [Internet] is amazing as much as human beings can be amazing, and it's debased and depraved and vile as human beings can be.

  • [This kind of strange mythology about me.] I've pulled a huge steamboat over a mountain; I've done a feature film with all the actors acting under hypnosis - things that are very unusual.

  • [Tim White] always spoke about his work in terms of forensics, as if he was investigating a crime scene. While we were there, they found the fossilized excrement of a lion that had turned into stone, and we would immediately start to concoct stories. Was it a lion that killed the early human? Of course, the lion could've been there three weeks later, or maybe 20,000 years earlier.

  • A fairly young, intelligent-looking man with long hair asked me whether filming or being filmed could do harm, whether it could destroy a person. In my heart the answer was yes, but I said no.

  • After "Jack Reacher" the parts I didn't like, most of it was silly.

  • All of a sudden it's twelve-year-olds who are contacting me, fifteen-year-olds, and they have very, very fascinating questions. However, they speak in a language of their age group which I have to learn first.

  • Amos Vogel was a mentor, a guiding light for me. In his presence, you always rose. But his importance to me is of minor significance. What is significant is that with him an entire epoch ends. The Last Lion has left us.I am still not capable - or rather unwilling - to understand the fact that Amos passed away, because a man like him cannot be dead. His traces are everywhere.

  • As for the "anger" of the volcano, we leave it up to the local populations who create their demons, their gods and their divine punishment.

  • 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.

  • at the press conference for the film he impressed everyone with his complete sincerity and innocence. he said he had come to see the sea for the first time and marveled at how clean it was. someone told him that, in fact, it wasn't. 'when the world is emptied of human beings' he said, 'it will become so again

  • At the same time, there's something magnificent about volcanoes; they created the atmosphere that we need for breathing.

  • Because you're delegated to a cook book recipe and you slavishly and pedantically rely on it while you're shooting and you're not relying on your creative instincts and you're not relying on something which brings life into movies and excitement into it.

  • But the question that everyone wanted answered was whether I would have the nerve and the strength to start the whole process from scratch. I said yes; otherwise I would be someone who had no dream left, and without dreams I would not want to live.

  • By the way, today with digital cameras and editing on your laptop, and things like that, you can make a feature film, a narrative feature film easily for $10,000.

  • Clive [Oppenheimer] and I figured out that I'm the only one probably in the film industry who is clinically sane. I say that as a joke, but there's a grain of truth to it. I'm not a stupid daredevil who jumps into the crater of the volcano to get the closest close-up, I'm not one of those. And you have to be aware that you have a crew with you and you are responsible.

  • Coincidences always happen if you keep your mind open, while storyboards remain the instruments of cowards who do not trust in their own imagination and who are slaves of a matrix If you get used to planning your shots based solely on aesthetics, you are never that far from kitsch.

  • Do you not then hear this horrible scream all around you that people usually call silence.

  • English is a really wonderful language and I urge you all to investigate it

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Everything you see in North Korea, it's all propaganda, but it's all connected to the volcano.

  • Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.

  • Facts do not constitute truth,

  • Facts do not convey truth. That's a mistake. Facts create norms, but truth creates illumination.

  • Film is not analysis, it is the agitation of mind; cinema comes from the country fair and the circus, not from art and academicism.

  • For a film I shot on the most difficult mountain on God's wide earth in Patagonia for a sequence where there was high probability some digital effects were needed, somebody made storyboards and I quickly ignored them, after half an hour I ignored them and I never used any digital effect.

  • For a moment the feeling crept over me that my work, my vision, is going to destroy me, and for a fleeting moment I let myself take a long, hard look at myself, something I would not otherwise do--out of instinct, on principle, out of self-preservation--look at myself with objective curiosity to see whether my vision has not destroyed me already. I found it comforting to note that I was still breathing.

  • For example, how you would introduce a leading character into your film, and as an absolute ingenious example, [Elia] Kazan in his film Viva Zapata!, how he introduces his leading character Marlon Brando into the film. No film ever did it as wonderful as he did it.

  • For example, the face of Nicole Kidman in Queen of the Desert and she is the most beautiful goddess on screen that you can find anywhere around in the world. There's no imperfections, and yet I don't need to know every single pore in her face.

  • For me a true landscape is not just a representation of a desert or a forest. It shows an inner state of mind, literally inner landscapes, and it is the human soul that is visible through the landscapes presented in my films.

  • For me, the distinction between documentaries and feature films is not so clear - my "documentaries" were largely scripted, rehearsed, and repeated, and have a lot of fantasy and concoction in them.

  • 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.

  • Gaining trust is not difficult for me. I needed to gain the trust of the North Korean supervisors.

  • Get used to the bear behind you.

  • Hold firm to your vision but don't be a tyrant on set,

  • However, there are a couple of volcanoes very close nearby, like Vesuvius in Italy right next to Naples.

  • I always felt completely confident - it's like in a feature film, knowing your principle character is extremely well-cast. I had that same confidence in Clive [Oppenheimer].

  • I always had a feeling, for example, that there should be something from Verdi's "Requiem" in the film. You hear it when you see the lava flow in Iceland. That turned out to be a very easy choice.

  • I always loved celluloid cameras in the early days that were sturdy and reliable. Even under tropical conditions and downpour of rain, it would still work.

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