Top 314 Quotes & Sayings by Werner Herzog - Page 5

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

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.

The opinion of the public is sacred. The director is a cook who merely offers different dishes to them and has no right to insist they react in a particular way. A film is just a projection of light, completed only when it crosses the gaze of the audience[...]

I'm quite convinced that cooking is the only alternative to film making. Maybe there's also another alternative, that's walking on foot.

I run my own film school, the Rogue Film School, and I do it over three and a half days, eight hours non-stop everyday; alone, single-handedly. But the difference is in the Rogue Film School I do have real human beings in front of me from all over the world, and of course there's this course as well, they can ask, talk about their problems and obstacles, finances, anything, you just name it. Whereas in the Masterclass, you are speaking to cameras.

Some of the most important caves, like Lascaux in the Dordogne region in France, have had to be closed down. There had been too many people allowed in, and they left a mold on the walls that is spreading and which can't really be stopped.

In private I'm not. You will have to ask my wife. She maintains I'm a fluffy husband.

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

What I do not like, the kind of high-resolution cameras, 4K, 6K, for shooting dialogue, for having faces and close-ups of actors, and you see every single pore in the skin.

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.

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.

I think a state should not be in the capacity of killing anyone with the exception of warfare.

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.

Robert Rodriguez, makes a feature film in 35mm celluloid one and a half hours long, and nobody believed him, I think he wrote a book about it and gave all the details of how he spent the money, even making a 35mm celluloid feature film was possible, at least for Rodriguez.

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.

If the part is really good of course I would like to do it.

Here, all of a sudden, we have a revolution in - in communication, and it is - it is really, truly big. Internet is as big as the introduction of fire to the human race, or the introduction of electricity into our lives.

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.

Netflix trusted me in a way that was very, very pleasant.

If you truly love film, I think the healthiest thing to do is not read books on the subject. I prefer the glossy film magazines with their big color photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe.

It doesn't matter whether you shoot on celluloid or on digital, you better make a good film.

[ 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.

I don't dabble, I'm good at acting.

I must say, the people who started this whole Masterclass series have been very helpful and very intelligent to point out certain things and also give me some guidance, "isn't there something missing, shouldn't we address this or that?" so it's not completely alone out of the blue. It's very well thought through.

I am somebody who creates images, with my perspectives, fascinations and my instincts as a narrator. You have to activate the audience's imagination. If you are just giving them scientific results, they would forget the film in five minutes flat.

Otherwise you have to repeat a lot when you're filming. And I've seen the film and it's in a border town in Mexico close to the border with the United States, so of course you have a lot of traffic and noise and dogs barking right nearby, and for that you have to repeat a lot and Robert Rodriguez didn't do that. Smart, smart, smart, you better have smarts also.

When I film, there are no emotions. That would be the last thing.

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.

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.

When I see a face, I see a face in general and I see you are curious, I see the curiosity but I don't not look after a dermatological report of your cheeks, and that's what you see when you're too high-resolution. And now desperately in post-production, in color grading, they are trying to wipe out the precision of the dermatological report.

Similar thing until today, with digital cameras you look after something like that as robust as they can be.

It was a subject [ volcanoes] that was dormant in me for a long time and it popped up 40 years ago when I made a [short] film on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe about a volcano that was about to explode and a single farmer refused to leave ["La Soufrière"].

The danger is to stupidly believe that depicting facts gives us much insight. If facts were the only thing that counted, the telephone directory would be the book of books.

I had complete freedom. They [Netflix] knew roughly what I was doing.

The beauty of Netflix is on the 28th of October they push a button and the film will be in 190 countries at the same moment in 17 languages.

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.

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.

When you look at any of my films you will immediately be able to tell this is a [Werner] Herzog film. Even if you didn't have any credits, in two minutes flat you would know.

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

Otherwise [digital revolution] hasn't changed my way of filmmaking, I'm not nostalgic in postulating we should still make films on celluloid. I love celluloid but I don't need to continue on celluloid.

I wouldn't make a connection between the daily news and volcanoes.

You have to realize that, about 20,000 years ago, there was a cataclysmic event when an entire rock face collapsed and sealed off the cave. It's a completely preserved time capsule. You've got tracks of cave bears that look like they were left yesterday, and you've got the footprint of a boy who was probably eight years old next to the footprint of a wolf.

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

??????????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.

Maybe I should stay a good soldier of cinema.

I know what I'm talking about and I've never been over budget, in 70 films.

I am too much into what I'm doing in my work.

Only the poets can hold the country together, and I wanted to hold Germany together.

The elections have a different platform, the town hall is the platform for it. But the other question behind all this is should I run for president?

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.

That shot in "Into the Inferno" somehow popped up while my editor and I were viewing the footage. I immediately said, "That looks like the opening shot because the camera approaches the action very slowly and we have enough time to insert some of the main credits into it." So it was a practical choice. At the same time, you see these tiny figures standing at the rim of something, and all of a sudden, the camera rises further and you find yourself looking straight down into an inferno.

It's curiosity, and always a sense of poetry. You see it in particular in the chapter "Iceland" where I'm reciting ancient Icelandic poetry. It has this very beautiful gravitas in conjunction with the volcanoes.

If your project has real substance, ultimately the money will follow you like a common cur in the street with its tail between its legs.

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.

North Korea is not an exception. Even there, where you think it would be completely sober, they have the myth of their revolution being connected to the volcano.

Most of the volcanoes are pretty far away. You have to go to, God knows, Alaska. Or you have to go to the Southern Indies or you have to go to a specific island.

Netflix knew I was going to North Korea and Ethiopia and Iceland. They saw the film and liked it and that was that.

I don't see [the jungle] so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. It's just - Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn't see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. Of course, there's a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing. They just screech in pain.

I don't want to travel.

When we speak about trespassing, we speak about artistic trespassing. You have to be prudent and have common sense and a sense of responsibility when you're trespassing. I think you haven't seen a film on volcanoes like that before. It's not National Geographic. It is wildly imaginative and very poetic and has a sense of awe that you normally do not see in films.