Background Image

...

We Do Not See The Danger Clearly Enough That We Develop Images Adequate To Our State Of Civilization. When You Watch Tv, You Know Instantly That There's Something Wrong With The Images. When You Open A Magazine And See The Ads, You Know There's Something Wrong With The Images. And It's Unhealthy And Not Good And Outright Dangerous, In My Opinion.

-Werner Herzog

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

We Do Not See

Werner Herzog

...

We Do Not See The Danger Clearly Enough That We Develop Images Adequate To Our State Of Civilization. When You Watch Tv, You Know Instantly That There's Something Wrong With The Images. When You Open A Magazine And See The Ads, You Know There's Something Wrong With The Images. And It's Unhealthy And Not Good And Outright Dangerous, In My Opinion.

Views: 65362

Topic

More From Werner Herzog

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.

Roger Ebert Was A Very Valiant Soldier Of Cinema Who Passed Away, And We Miss Him. It's Over With Serious Discourse About Cinema In The Print Media And On Television. It Has Been Replaced By Celebrity News. So We Are Speaking In His Spirit Always.

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.

You Will Learn More By Walking From Canada To Guatemala Than You Will Ever Learn In Film School.

I Think I'm A Prudent Filmmaker.

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 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

One Of The Most Original And Poetic Works Of Cinema Made Anywhere In The Seventies.

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.

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.

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.

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'm Not A Journalist; I'm A Poet. I Had A Discourse, An Encounter With These People But I Never Had A List Of Questions.

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.

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 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.

It's Very Strange, For Example, In North Korea Where The Volcano At The Chinese Border Is Some Sort Of The Mythical Birthplace Of The Korean People.

Fact Creates Norms, And Truth Illumination.

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

Look Into The Eyes Of A Chicken And You Will See Real Stupidity. It Is A Kind Of Bottomless Stupidity, A Fiendish Stupidity. They Are The Most Horrifying, Cannibalistic And Nightmarish Creatures In The World.

It's Funny How In The Long Time Of Me Working In Various Countries And Various Situations That There Is This Kind Of Idea Out In The Media That I Am A Daredevil And That I Risk The Lives Of Everyone Around Me, But Nobody Ever Gets Hurt On My Shoot. Some Crew Members Sometimes, But The Actors Are Ok.

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

The Power Of A Volcano When It Erupts Is So Evident, So Visible, So Palpable.

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.

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

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

I'm Not Into The Culture Of Complaint. I Roll Up My Sleeves And Somehow I Get It Together.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

At The Same Time, There's Something Magnificent About Volcanoes; They Created The Atmosphere That We Need For Breathing.

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[...]

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 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.

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.

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

Facts Do Not Constitute Truth.

If You Want To Propose Marriage To Your Girlfriend And You Live In England And She Is In Sicily, Do The Decent Thing And Walk Down There. Travelling By Car Or Aeroplane Wouldn't Be Right At Such A Moment.

I Could Not Become An American Citizen. I Would Not Like To Become A Citizen Of A Country That Has Capital Punishment.

After "jack Reacher" The Parts I Didn't Like, Most Of It Was Silly.

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

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.

What Would An Ocean Be Without A Monster Lurking In The Dark? It Would Be Like Sleep Without Dreams.

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.

May I Propose A Herzog Dictum? Those Who Read Own The World, And Those Who Watch Television Lose It.

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.

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.

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'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.

There Is Never An Excuse Not To Finish A Film.

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

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.

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

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 Think There Should Be Holy War Against Yoga Classes.

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.

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.

Nature Is Monumentally Indifferent.

Roger Ebert Was The Last Mammoth Alive Who Was Holding The Flag For Real Movies And Moviemakers.

Facts Do Not Convey Truth. That's A Mistake. Facts Create Norms, But Truth Creates Illumination.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Everything You See In North Korea, It's All Propaganda, But It's All Connected To The Volcano.

I Am A Product Of My Failures.

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

I'm A Very Professional Man. I'm Not Out For The Experience Of Adventure.

I Love Nature But Against My Better Judgment.

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.

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

It's Very Enigmatic Because Of Course, The Population [of North Korea] Has No Contact With The World Outside Or It's Very, Very Limited. They Don't Have Any Telephone Connections, No Radio, No Tv, No Movies, No Newspapers - Nothing From The Outside World. This Is Very Strange And There's The Very Strict, Unifying Government That Forces You To Be In Step. You See It In The Stadium Where The Spectators Create, By Flipping Cards, An Image Of The Dear Leader, Or Of The Volcano, And It's Made Of A 100,000 Human Pictures.

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.

I Think I Would Be A Good Villain In A James Bond Movie.

I Think Psychology And Self-reflection Is One Of The Major Catastrophes Of The Twentieth Century.

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

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 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 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.

When I Say Tourism Is Sin And Traveling On Foot Is Virtue, It's Condensed Into A Dictum. It's Much More Complex Than That, But Let's Face It, For Me, My Experience, The World Reveals Itself To Those That Travel On Foot. You Understand The World In A Much Deeper Level. And It Does Good To Anyone Who Makes Film.

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.

It's Not Because Nature Is Angry, It's Rather That We Are Stupid. We're Not Doing The Right Thing With Our Planet.

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

[ 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

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

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.

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

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.

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?

If An Actor Knows How To Milk A Cow, I Always Know It Will Not Be Difficult To Be In Business With Him.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

We Are Surrounded By Worn-out, Banal, Useless And Exhausted Images, Limping And Dragging Themselves Behind The Rest Of Our Cultural Evolution.

I Like To Direct Landscapes Just As I Like To Direct Actors And Animals.

Only The Poets Can Hold The Country Together, And I Wanted To Hold Germany Together.

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.

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.

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.

It's All Movies For Me. And Besides, When You Say Documentaries, In My Case, In Most Of These Cases, Means "feature Film" In Disguise.

The Trees Are In Misery, And The Birds Are In Misery. I Don’t Think They Sing. They Just Screech In Pain. …taking A Close Look At What’s Around Us, There Is Some Sort Of Harmony: It’s The Harmony Of Overwhelming And Collective Murder.

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 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.

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.

It Doesn't Matter Whether You Shoot On Celluloid Or On Digital, You Better Make A Good Film.

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

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

I Have Learned A Lot Through Defeats, And, Until Today, It's - I'm Still Haunted By Defeats, And They Do Happen. Sometimes, A Film Of Mine Is Rejected. And How Do You Deal With It? And You Have To Learn How To Deal With It And Survive Anyway.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

I Am Too Much Into What I'm Doing In My Work.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tourism Is A Mortal Sin.

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.

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 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.

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.

[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.

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.

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

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.

Maybe I Should Stay A Good Soldier Of Cinema.

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

When You Look At The Paintings At Chauvet Cave, They're Not Primitive Or Like Children's Little Scribbles, It Bursts On The Scene Fully Accomplished And When You Look Through The Faces Of Cultural History, Art History, It Has Never Gotten Any Better.

I Don't See Poetry As Something That Has To Do With Too Much Emotion Anyway. It Has To Do With Language.

I'm Very, Very Curious About How People Live Under The Volcano, How They Handle The Permanence Of Danger.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Public Life Is Constantly Aware Of The Volcano.

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

Lunatic Asylums

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.

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.

ِِِِِِِِِِ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.

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.

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

Complete Freedom

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

Get Used To The Bear Behind You.

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.

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

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.

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..."

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.

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

I'm Not Into Digital Marketing, Downloading, Or Streaming - I've Always Been A Man Of The Theaters.

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"].

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

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.

However, There Are A Couple Of Volcanoes Very Close Nearby, Like Vesuvius In Italy Right Next To Naples.

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 Have Always Postulated That We Have To Find A New Way To Deal With Reality. It's Not So Much Facts That Interest Me, But A Deeper Truth In Them - An Ecstasy Of Truth, An Ecstatic Truth That Illuminates Us. That's What I've Been After.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Film Is Not Analysis, It Is The Agitation Of Mind; Cinema Comes From The Country Fair And The Circus, Not From Art And Academicism.

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.

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

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.

I Don't Spend Sleepless Nights Over Getting Very Bad Reviews.

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 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.

I Prefer The Material Woman.

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

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.

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.

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

I Know Whenever It Comes To Be Really Dysfunctional And Vile And Base And Hostile On Screen, I'm Good At That.

The World Reveals Itself To Those Who Travel On Foot.

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.

Trending Author

Soren Kierkegaard

Thomas S. Monson

Category