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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.

-Werner Herzog

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It Is Something More

Werner Herzog

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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.

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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.

Finding Yourself

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.

The Act Of Killing Invents A New Form Of Cinematic Surrealism.

I Cannot Work Fast Enough. I Cannot Cope Fast Enough, Really. And Just Releasing A Film Is Hard.

In Private I'm Not. You Will Have To Ask My Wife. She Maintains I'm A Fluffy Husband.

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.

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.

Every Man Should Pull A Boat Over A Mountain Once In His Life.

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.

If You Do Not Understand How Finances Are Functioning, You Are In A Very Precarious Situation, At Least Concerning Long-term Survival.

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.

I Like And I Love Everything That Has To Do With Cinema, Writing, Directing, Editing, Creating Music, And Even Acting.

Of Course The Entire Planet Earth Consists Of Magma Under Us, And Only The Very Inner-core Is Different.

I Try To Be After Something That Is Deeply Reverberating Inside Of Our Souls, Some Deep Echo From - Even From Prehistory. What Makes Us Humans? How Do We Communicate? Where Are We Going At This Moment? Something For An Audience Where They Can Step Outside Of Themselves, Where They Can Be Almost Like In Ecstasy Of Truth, Some Sort Of Deep Illumination. And That's What I'm Trying In Documentaries And In Feature Films.

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.

I'm A Very Circumspect And Prudent Person, And I Eliminate Danger As Far As It Can Be Done.

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.

[internet] Is Amazing As Much As Human Beings Can Be Amazing, And It's Debased And Depraved And Vile As Human Beings Can Be.

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.

I Believe The Common Denominator Of The Universe Is Not Harmony, But Chaos, Hostility And Murder.

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.

It's Not Far-fetched That Almost Everywhere In The World Where You Have Volcanoes You Have Mythologies Or New Gods Being Created.

I Would Travel Down To Hell And Wrestle A Film Away From The Devil If It Was Necessary.

My Contacts With The Film Industry Can Be Described In Very Simple Terms: The Industry Does Not Really Need Me, And I Do Not Really Need The Industry.

I Think I'm A Prudent Filmmaker.

In My Films, I Hope There Are A Few Moments Where You Feel Almost Illuminated, Like In A State Of Ecstasy, Stepping Out Of Yourself, Beyond Yourself And Perceiving Something Which Is Only, In The Case Of Cinema, Possible In Collective Dreams.

I'm Reminded Of An Interview Larry King Had On His Talk Show With One Of Michael Jackson's Sisters. He's Talking About How Many Millions She Made On Her Latest Record, And All Of A Sudden, She Looks At Him Tearfully And Says, "larry, You Know, I'm Not Interested In Money Or Sales Or Songs. I'm A Spiritual Person." And I Thought, "oh My God..."

Netflix Trusted Me In A Way That Was Very, Very Pleasant.

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 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.

You Have To Be Very Prudent With What You Are Doing And What Sort Of Tools You Are Utilizing. Drones Have Become A Wonderful New Tool In Filmmaking.

I Travel Without Barely Any Luggage. Just A Second Set Of Underwear And Binoculars And A Map And A Toothbrush.

Facts Do Not Constitute Truth.

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.

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.

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.

I Do Other Sorts Of Things. I Act In Other People's Movies. I Direct Operas. I Write Books.

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.

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.

We Have To Articulate Ourselves. Otherwise We Would Be Cows In The Field.

Of Course There's A Value In A Storyboard If You Do A Big - Let's Say An Action Movie And Actors Have To Move And Act In Front Of A Green Screen Because Entire Backgrounds Exploding And Cars Flying Through There Have To Be Created Separately, And In This Case You Better Make Sure The Actors Are Precisely Placed And The Background Action Is Moving In A Certain Moment, For This Type Of Film You Would Need A Storyboard.

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.

"jack Reacher" Was Easy Because The Function Of The Villain Was Just To Spread Fear And Horror.

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.

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.

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'm Not A One-trick Horse.

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.

I Went To Volcanoes Where I Knew That There Was A Lot Of Mythology Around Them; There Was Something Like The Creation Of Gods And Monsters And Demons.

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.

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.

In A Way, I Managed To Get The Deepest Things, The Best Things Out Of People. That's Why I'm A Filmmaker. If You Don't Have It In You, You'd Better Do Something Else.

Civilization Is Like A Thin Layer Of Ice Upon A Deep Ocean Of Chaos And Darkness.

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.

You Can't Have A Helicopter Fly Over Boiling Lava. It Would've Exploded From The Heat, And Is Just Way Too Dangerous. The Pilot Of A Helicopter Would've Flatly Refused Anyway.

I Had Complete Freedom. They [netflix] Knew Roughly What I Was Doing.

Complete Freedom

ِِِِِِِِِِ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.

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.

Similar Thing Until Today, With Digital Cameras You Look After Something Like That As Robust As They Can Be.

The Punishment Itself Is Something I Respectfully Disagree With, But For Thousands And Thousands Of Years It Was Practiced Everywhere.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There's A Completely New Culture Out There. I'm Not A Participant Of Texting And Driving - Or Texting At All - But I See There's Something Going On In Civilization Which Is Coming With Great Vehemence At Us.

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.

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.

Of Course, As A German, I Wouldn't Like To Tell The American People How To Handle Their Criminal Justice.

The Wonderful Thing Is That Clive [oppenheimer ] Insisted On Training His Camera - His Private Camera - On Me At One Point. We Were Discussing Things Such As How To Avoid Certain Dangers, While Reflecting On A Volcano That Had Threatened To Explode 40 Years Ago.

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.

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.

You Better Make Yourself Acquainted To What The Requirements Are, What The Value Of Money Is All About And How You Create A Long-term Survival, And In Many Cases It Has To Do With How You Handle Finances.

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.

Ten Years Ago In Antarctica Shooting "encounters At The End Of The World," I Met A Very Fine Volcanologist From Cambridge University [clive Oppenheimer] And We Kept Talking About Doing A Film And All Of A Sudden It Became Serious When He Hinted At The Possibility To Film In North Korea.

Cambridge University

[ 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.

Digital Revolution

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.

Of Course, You Do Not Do Any Research: You Have To Go There And Do Your Film. It's Not That I Would Travel There Before Without A Camera And Spend Half A Year On One Of Those Volcanoes And Then Come Back With A Camera. You Have To Have Some Sort Of A Clear Mindset.

If You Don’t Have A Deal In Two Days, You Won’t Have A Deal In Two Years.

Once In A While I Come Across A Director Who Hasgrown Up Thousands Of Miles From Me, And The Work Touches Me.through These Issues/50/images I Am Connected And Something Is Illuminated.and I Know Then That I Am Not Alone.

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.

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.

Public Life Is Constantly Aware Of The Volcano.

I Was Able To Persuade Them To Let Me Shoot In Areas That Were Beyond The Volcano Itself. Beyond The Joint Scientific Program Between Cambridge University And North Korean Scientists. I Was Able To Film In A Kindergarten, Subway, Other Things You Would Not Normally Be Allowed To Do.

Cambridge University

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.

Spirit Of Immersion And Curiosity And Awe And Participation Is Something Which Timothy Treadwell And I Have In Common.

Fact Creates Norms, And Truth Illumination.

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.

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.

While You Are Walking You Would Learn Much More About Filmmaking Than If You Were In A Classroom. During Your Voyage You Will Learn More About What Your Future Holds Than In Five Years At Film School. Your Experiences Would Be The Very Opposite Of Academic Knowledge, For Academia Is The Death Of Cinema. It Is The Very Opposite Of Passion.

Of Course Subjects Are Changing, And Since I Started So Early In Filmmaking, I Did My First Film At Age 19, Of Course You Grow Up With Your Films And You Are Not Trotting The Same Path All The Time.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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 Think A State Should Not Be In The Capacity Of Killing Anyone With The Exception Of Warfare.

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.

I Do Not Believe In The Cinema Verite. Sometimes A Really Good Lie Is Better Than Any Truth.

Women Have A Very Good Sense For Seeing Instantly What Constitutes A Good Man. Not Physically. The Physical Strength Is Only A Small Side Of It.

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"].

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.

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.

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.

Digital Revolution

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.

The Collapse Of The Stellar Universe Will Occur - Like Creation - In Grandiose Splendor.

I Shouldn't Make Movies Anymore. I Should Go To A Lunatic Asylum.

Lunatic Asylums

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.

I Wouldn't Like To Travel At All. I've Been Too Much Around.

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.

I Do Not Want To Have A Cell Phone. I Do Not Want It For Cultural Reasons. I Do Not Want To Be Available All The Time. I Want To Have Time To Think And To Touch Somebody, And Have A Meal Across My Kitchen Table Without A Cell Phone, Being Constantly On Tweets.

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.

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.

The Paintings Are Not Just On Flat Walls - You Have These Enormous Niches, Bulges And Protrusions, As Well As Stalactites And Stalagmites. The Effect Of The Three-dimensionality Is Phenomenal. It's A Real Drama Which The Artists Of The Time Understood, And They Used It For The Drama Of Their Paintings.

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 See Planets That Don't Exist And Landscapes That Have Only Been Dreamed.

I Think It Is A Quest Of Literature Throughout The Ages To Describe The Human Condition.

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.

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.

We Are Not Accountants, We Are Not Accountants Who Do Number After Number After Number Of Storyboard Images, A Robot Could Do It Ultimately, But What I'm Doing A Robot Cannot Do.

I Have Not Seen A Film As Powerful, Surreal, And Frightening In At Least A Decade Unprecedented In The History Of Cinema.

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.

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.

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.

I Doubt That Vr Will Really Replace The Quality Of Books. If You Want To Go Into Let's Say The Prado In Madrid And You Want To Go Into Hieronymus Bosch Or Whatever, You'd Rather Go Into Books And You Take Your Time And It's Sitting There All Day Long And You Go Back And Revisit It And It Becomes Part Of Your Physical Life.

Tourism Is A Mortal Sin.

I Prefer The Material Woman.

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.

There Is Never An Excuse Not To Finish A Film.

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.

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.

Gaining Trust Is Not Difficult For Me. I Needed To Gain The Trust Of The North Korean Supervisors.

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.

If You Don't Read, You Will Never Be A Filmmaker.

We Were Very, Very Lucky [with Tim White Filmed Making Historic Discoveries In The East African Rift ] . In 100 Years, Only Three Skeletal Remains [of Early Man] Were Ever Found At This Site. This Was The Third One, And We Were Right There When It Happened. In Fact, When I First Heard They Had Found Something, I Said, "please Stop It! Don't Do Anything Right Now. Let's Do It Tomorrow Until We Have Unpacked Our Cameras And Assembled Our Stuff.

[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.

When I Film, There Are No Emotions. That Would Be The Last Thing.

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

There Are Certain Ways, Narrative Forms, That Do Not Function As A Continuation, For Example, Of 3d Movies. You See, What Is Obvious To Me Is Virtual Reality Or Immersive 360 Degrees Virtual Reality Is Not Somehow A Part Of 3d Movies, And It Is Not A New Form Of Video Games, It's Neither, It Is Something Completely New, Something Different, And Nobody Has Come Up Yet With Real Convincing Content.

I'm Talking A Lot On Financing In The Masterclass And I Know What It Means To Because I Had To Finance My First Films, All Of Them, And I Earned My Money As A Welder In A Steel Factory Doing Night Shifts While I Was Still In High School During The Day.

[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.

There Are Photos Of Kim Jong-un Right Up Atop The Volcano. I Actually Wrote A Letter To Him Asking If I Could Speak On Camera. I Never Got An Answer. But What Was Interesting Was The People Who Were Responsible For Us, Our "guards," It Took Them Two Days To Figure Out How I Should Address Him. "president? No, You Can't Because There's A President For Eternity." And It Was A Time When His Status Was Still In Flux. Only A Few Months Later There Was This Party Congress Which Assigned An Official Title To Him, But That Was After We Did Our Film.

Of Course I Do Things In My Voice In My Commentary, Which I Wrote.

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.

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.

Film Is Not The Art Of Scholars, But Of Illiterates.

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 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.

If You Want To Do A Film, Steal A Camera, Steal Raw Stock, Sneak Into A Lab And Do It!

We Live In An Era When Established Values Are No Longer Valid, When Prodigious Discoveries Are Being Made Every Year, When Catastrophes Of Unbelievable Proportions Occur Weekly. In Ancient Greek The Word “chaos” Means “gaping Void” Or “yawning Emptiness.” The Most Effective Response To The Chaos In Our Lives Is The Creation Of New Forms Of Literature, Music, Poetry, Art And Cinema.

I Find It Interesting That There Are Impostors Out On The Internet Pretending To Be Werner Herzog.

Money Doesn't Make Films. You Just Do It And Take The Initiative.

My Crew [on "fitzcarraldo" Filming] Actually Said, "we Have Filmed It From Outside On The Rocks Of The Shore. We Should Be On Board [the Ship]," And I Said It's Dangerous, I Only Do It If You Cinematographer Thomas Mauch And You Actor [klaus] Kinski Decide On Your Own.

I Prefer To Be Alive, So I'm Cautious About Taking Risks.

Maybe I Should Stay A Good Soldier Of Cinema.

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.

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.

You Can Fight A Rumour Only With An Even Wilder Rumour.

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 Know What I'm Talking About And I've Never Been Over Budget, In 70 Films.

I'm Trying To Find These Rare Moments Where You Feel Completely Illuminated. Facts Never Illuminate You. The Phone Directory Of Manhattan Doesn't Illuminate You, Although It Has Factually Correct Entries, Millions Of Them. But These Rare Moments Of Illumination That You Find When You Read A Great Poem, You Instantly Know. You Instantly Feel This Spark Of Illumination. You Are Almost Stepping Outside Of Yourself And You See Something Sublime.

The Universe Is Not Harmonious: You Know That By Looking Outside.

Someone Like Jean-luc Godard Is For Me Intellectual Counterfeit Money When Compared To A Good Kung Fu Film.

You Are Confronted With Abysses Of Time That Are, In A Way, Unfathomable. You See A Painting In Charcoal Of Raindeer And It Was Left Unfinished And Somebody Else Finished It. But Through Radio Carbon Dating We Know That The Next One Completed The Painting 5,000 Years Later. You're Just Blown Away By The Notion Of Passage Of Time. We Have No Relationship To That Kind Of Depth Of Time.

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.

If The Part Is Really Good Of Course I Would Like To Do It.

Read, Read, Read, Read, Read, Read, Read, Read, Read, Read, Read, Read, Read...if You Don't Read, You Will Never Be A Filmmaker.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

North Korea Has A Very Striking Mythology There. It Is Influencing The Whole Nation.

Our Presence On This Planet Does Not Seem To Be Sustainable. Our Technical Civilization Makes Up Particularly Vulnerable. There Is Talk All Over The Scientific Community About Climate Change. Many Of Them [scientists] Agree, The End Of Human Life On Earth Is Assured.

I Wouldn't Make A Connection Between The Daily News And Volcanoes.

I Know For Sure That There Is Only One Step From Insecticide To Genocide.

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.

Nature Is Monumentally Indifferent.

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.

I Am A Product Of My Failures.

I Do Have A Clear Vision, And I Do See Things That Are Existing In My Quote-unquote Spirit, But That Doesn't Necessary Make Me A Very Spiritual Person.

You Should Bear In Mind That Almost All My Documentaries Are Feature Films In Disguise.

I Make Films Because I Have Not Learned Anything Else And I Know I Can Do It To A Certain Degree. 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.

Netflix Knew I Was Going To North Korea And Ethiopia And Iceland. They Saw The Film And Liked It And That Was That.

I Never Planned My Career In Steps. It's All Coming At Me Like Burglars In The Night.

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 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.

If I Had To Climb Into Hell And Wrestle The Devil Himself For One Of My Films, I Would Do It.

I Have Been In Lots Of Very Intense Life Situations. I Have Been Shot At, And I Have Been Hungry, And I Have Been In Solitude, And I Have Also Briefly Been Behind Bars. So In A Way, I Know The Heart Of Men.

In The Communist Revolution In North Korea, When They Threw Out The Japanese Occupiers, They Claimed The Power In The Dynamic Of This Volcano For Their Revolution, Saying That This Is At The Center Of The Dynamics Of Our Revolution. Everything That You Encounter - You Don't Have, For Example, Any Advertisements, You Don't Have Anything Like That Anywhere In The Country - If You See Anything It Would Be Propaganda, And Propaganda Always Inevitably Comes Back To The Volcano. It's Always Including The Volcano. You See The New Leader And Standing Behind Him You See The Volcano.

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 Your Project Has Real Substance, Ultimately The Money Will Follow You Like A Common Cur In The Street With Its Tail Between Its Legs.

I Don't Want To Travel.

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.

We Live In A Society That Has No Adequate Images Anymore, And If We Do Not Find Adequate Images And An Adequate Language For Our Civilization With Which To Express Them, We Will Die Out Like The Dinosaurs.

I Discover No Kinship, No Understanding, No Mercy. I See Only The Overwhelming Indifference Of Nature.

I Think There Should Be Holy War Against Yoga Classes.

The Universe Couldn't Care Less About Us. I Say This Very Clearly In The Film [ "into The Inferno"]: Our Planet Is "indifferent To Scurrying Roaches, Retarded Reptiles And Vapid Humans Alike."

English Is A Really Wonderful Language And I Urge You All To Investigate It

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.

Facts Sometimes Have A Strange And Bizarre Power That Makes Their Inherent Truth Seem Unbelievable.

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