Werner Herzog
film director, film producer, screenwriter, film editor, film actor, author, cinematographer, voice actor, documentary filmmaker, opera director, film screenwriter, actor, director
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All Quotes by Werner Herzog
“That man is a head taller than me. That may change.”
“You are all wrong.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Well they are very frightening for me because their stupidity is so flat. You look into the eyes of a chicken and you lose yourself in a completely flat, frightening stupidity. They are like a great metaphor for me... I kind of love chicken, but they frighten me more than any other animal.”
“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.”
“I believe the common denominator of the Universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder.”
“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.”
“There are dignified stupidities, and there are heroic stupidities, and there is such a thing as stupid stupidities, and that would be a stupid stupidity not to have a camera on board.”
“If you switch on television it's just ridiculous and its destructive. It kills us. And talk shows will kill us. They kill our language. So we have to declare holy war against what we see every single day on television. Commercials and — I think there should be real war against commercials, real war against talk shows, real war against "Bonanza" and "Rawhide", or all these things.”
“If you want to do a film, steal a camera, steal raw stock, sneak into a lab and do it!”
“As you see [filmmaking] makes me into a clown. And that happens to everyone — just look at Orson Welles or look at even people like Truffaut. They have become clowns.”
“By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.”
“Do you not then hear this horrible scream all around you that people usually call silence.”
“Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.”
“Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.”
“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.”
“Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.”
“Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.”
“Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: "You can´t legislate stupidity."”
“We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.”
“Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species—including man—crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.”
“I shouldn't make movies anymore. I should go to a lunatic asylum.”
“If I abandon this project I would be a man without dreams and I don't want to live like that: I live my life or I end my life with this project.”
“I am fascinated by the idea that our civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness”
“It is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are, and we have to articulate ourselves. Otherwise we would be cows in the field.”
“I like to direct landscapes just as I like to direct actors and animals.”
“The kinds of landscape I try to find in my films...exist only in our dreams. 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.”
“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.”
“Film is not analysis, it is the agitation of mind; cinema comes from the country fair and the circus, not from art and academicism.”
“Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film.”
“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.”
“Your film is like your children. You might want a child with certain qualities, but you are never going to get the exact specification right. The film has a privilege to live its own life and develop its own character. To suppress this is dangerous. It is an approach that works the other way too: sometimes the footage has amazing qualities that you did not expect.”
“You can fight a rumour only with an even wilder rumour.”
“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.”
“I have never been one of those who cares about happiness. Happiness is a strange notion. I am just not made for it. It has never been a goal of mine; I do not think in those terms.”
“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.”
“May I propose a Herzog dictum? those who read own the world, and those who watch television lose it.”
“It is my firm belief, and I say this as a dictum, that all these tools now at our disposal, these things part of this explosive evolution of means of communication, mean we are now heading for an era of solitude. 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.”
“To me, adventure is a concept that applies only to those men and women of earlier historical times, like the mediaeval knights who travelled into the unknown. The concept has degenerated constantly since then... I absolutely loathe adventurers, and I particularly hate this old pseudo-adventurism where the mountain climb becomes about confronting the extremes of humanity.”
“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 colour photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe.”
“Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.”
“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.”
“Incredible. I didn't know how to calm him down, and then I had an inspiration. I went to my hut, where, for months I had hidden a piece of chocolate. We would almost have killed one another for something like that. I went back to him, going right into his face and ate the chocolate. All of a sudden he was quiet. This was utterly beyond him.”
“Often he was a joy, and you know, he was one of the few people I ever learned anything from.”
“I prefer to be alive, so I'm cautious about taking risks.”
“Every man should pull a boat over a mountain once in his life.”