Top 314 Quotes & Sayings by Werner Herzog - Page 3

It seems odd, but people who see my films normally take them in in a deeper way than you would actually watch a film, let's say The Terminator or whatever.

Well, it had to be about the stories and the people who live under the volcano, what kind of new gods do they create? What sort of demons? And of course North Korea falls clearly into this category since the socialist revolution at the end of the Second World War. Somehow they adopted the myth of the power and dynamics of their volcano.

Perseverance has kept me going over the years. Things rarely happen overnight. Filmmakers should be prepared for many years of hard work. The sheer toil can be healthy and exhilarating.

I am someone who takes everything very literally. I simply do not understand irony, a defect I have had ever since I was able to think independently.

It has always been my aim to find that sort of passion and figure out how to transform it into cinema.Timothy Treadwell's footage was almost like a diary, and he had always dreamt of becoming the movie star in his own gigantic production.

You also can understand how to play tennis from Serena Williams, and she is awesome. I haven't seen her Masterclass but just watching her on the court - I saw some of Wimbledon on TV and there's such an awesome force in her and focus and determination and technique, you just look at her and it's awesome. If I would like to learn tennis I would immediately turn to her.

You have to be completely open to what people would tell you. You do not shape them; you do not force the materials into your ideas. You have to have all windows and doors open.

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.

There's more substance in my prose and my poetry than in all my films together. Writing is a more direct way of expressing yourself because, in cinema, you always have finances, organization, actors, technical apparatus and all that stuff coming in between.

The internet doesn't have any qualities, technical qualities. It's just fast, reaching out everywhere and so, it can process that and that volume of data flows and so, but it doesn't have any qualities like "good" or "bad" or "ethical" or "non-ethical". It's humans, it's us, not the internet.

The daredevil aspect to what I did there is moving a monstrously big ship over a mountain in the jungle of Peru with 800 or 900 or so native people from the area. So that idea was wild but the way it was executed was prudent. Nobody was ever hurt and when it became clear that we had to be more secure with the posts that would hold the ship, I spent 12 days having a post built that would have withstood the force of 10 times the weight of my ship.

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.

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.

When the camera is looking back at our planet Earth, it's the tiniest of specks somewhere out there in the universe. So we do have a new sense of proportion. Of course the volcanoes and the magma under us just remind us of that.

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.

If you’re purely after facts, please buy yourself the phone directory of Manhattan. It has four million times correct facts. But it doesn’t illuminate.

I think I would be a good villain in a James Bond movie.

The deal was we had to have people accompanying us and they would ask us not to film something [in North Korea]. For example, we wanted to film at a certain place and there happened to be a building under construction and it didn't look as fancy as the other buildings, so they wanted us to shoot where everything looked finished and made a good impression of the cityscape.

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

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

There is a fascination about crime, which is understandable, but hardly anyone talks about the families of victims of violent crime and the devastation that is beyond the victim alone.

You are in a place that has not been seen for tens of thousands of years, because it was so sealed off. There is such silence that when you hold your breath you can hear your own heartbeat. Everything is so fresh that you have the sensation that the painters have merely retreated deeper into the dark and that they are looking at you.

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.

Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.

Meanwhile it's got stormy, the tattered fog even thicker, chasing across my path. Three people are sitting in a glassy tourist cafe between clouds and clouds, protected by glass from all sides. Since I don't see any waiters, it crosses my mind that corpses have been sitting there for weeks, statuesque. All this time the cafe has been unattended, for sure. Just how long have they been sitting here, petrified like this?

Of course the entire planet Earth consists of magma under us, and only the very inner-core is different.

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.

We haven't seen a real volcanic event at least in 74,000 years - [Mount Toba] in Indonesia, in Sumatra, where the crater itself is 100 kilometers across. It was so monumental, what happened, that for a very long time the entire atmosphere of our planet was darkened. It's not the lava and the heat per se; it's the obscuring of the entire atmosphere, and it made it very difficult for the human race to survive.

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.

There's this kind of strange mythology about me in the media because I've done unusual things.

In Germany, you would be hanged if you cracked a joke about Hitler and you would be killed by the state if you were insane in a project of euthanasia.

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.

It is not only my dreams, my belief is that all these dreams are yours as well. The only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about... and it is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are. We have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field.

I think I'm a prudent filmmaker.

I am so used to plunging into the unknown that any other surroundings and form of existence strike me as exotic and unsuitable for human beings.

If you do not understand how finances are functioning, you are in a very precarious situation, at least concerning long-term survival.

I have worked for YouTube like texting and driving because I was curious to test what's out there and how does it function, can I release something like about texting and driving to very young audiences, at the age where they do their drivers test? And the response was phenomenal, millions of people saw it.

There's happens to be a volcano in the vicinity and there's some talk about a volcano as well, so that's the title Salt and Fire

It's not far-fetched that almost everywhere in the world where you have volcanoes you have mythologies or new gods being created.

Fragility of modern world leaves me with the idea we'd better anticipate what's going on. We take our right steps today and now. And we'd better avoid, that we are overdependent on, let's say, the internet.

I wouldn't like to travel at all. I've been too much around.

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'm one of the few reading and thinking people who loves Las Vegas for the vulgarity and omnipresence of the dream. The collective dream. There's something enormous about it. Let me say one thing: Las Vegas and cinema have similar roots. The country fair. The magician at the country fair. The vulgarity of the country fair.

I don't care whether the person is guilty or not guilty. It's not my business to establish guilt or innocence. It's a court of law that does that and a jury does that, but not me.

I'm not a one-trick horse.

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.

When you look at my film you see footage that is unbelievably awesome and beautiful and dangerous looking. It's something that is very, very cinematic.

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

Orson Welles, one of the best of the best. One of the strongest. As strong as an animal. He somehow was pushed out of the business because he would spend the entire budget of the film before he had even done half the pre-production.

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 think I would be a good villain in a James Bond movie. They were fairly weak, the last half-dozen of villains in James Bond movies were not that convincing.

I have made 70 or so films. In all my films not a single actor, a single extra, was hurt. Not one. So statistics are on my side when I say I'm clinically sane.

I couldn't roam wildly and speak secretly with villagers [in North Korea]. No way you could do that. And honestly, I didn't even try. I was realistic of what I could do and yet persuaded them into accepting numerous things that I shouldn't have filmed.

I do not recall to [Kim Jong-un], but it was complex. "Dear young leader of the people and chairman of the joint military commission" or something like that.

It is something more fleeting than what you normally see. People might somehow take it into their own dreams, into their own life, in a way. I hear it more recently; people are telling me that when they leave the theater and see one of my films, they are not alone anymore. It's probably more that kind of feeling. If I managed to do a film like that, everything is fine.

Strangely enough, there's this mythology sprouting out that I cannot stop.

This climate surrounding me has reached Clive Oppenheimer. In practical terms he sees that I'm not interested in any sort of daredevil stunts, I'm just interested in the work. And he's convinced that I'm clinically sane.

Of course I do things in my voice in my commentary, which I wrote.

Public life is constantly aware of the volcano.

I looked, for example, to certain types of literature to which I would like to refer, like The Peregrine by J. A. Baker, and I mention a book, "read this, read it, read it if you are serious of being in any type of art or into filmmaking," or films that I should quote as examples.