by Werner Herzog"We ought to be grateful that the universe out there knows no smile"
"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."
"To me, adventure is a concept that applies only to those men and women of earlier historical times, like the mediaeval knights who traveled 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."
"The birds are in misery, I don't think they sing. They just screech in pain."
"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."
"It is my firm belief, and I say this as a dictum, that all these tools now at our disposal, these things part of 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."
"May I propose a Herzog dictum? those who read own the world, and those who watch television lose it."
"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 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."
"You can fight a rumour only with an even wilder rumour."
"We comprehend... that nuclear power is a real danger for mankind, that over-crowding of the planet is the greatest danger of all. We have understood that the destruction of the environment is another enormous danger. But I truly believe that the lack of adequate imagery is a danger of the same magnitude. It is as serious a defect as being without memory. 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."
"The volume and depth and intensity of the world is something only those on foot will ever experience,"
"I personally would rather do the existentially essential things in life on foot. If you live in
"I love nature but against my better judgement."
"We had dramatic arguments, we were wrestling with each other, and we had, above all that, a blind, profound trust in each other. It was a fate beyond ourselves as persons, which brought us together, forced us together. We knew that and we accepted it. - ( - on Klaus Kinski)
"Stupidity is the devil. Look in the eye of a chicken and you'll know. It's the most horrifying, cannibalistic, and nightmarish creature in this world."
"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."
"If I had to climb into Hell and wrestle the Devil himself for one of my films, I would do it."
"I shouldn't make movies, I should go to the lunatic asylum."
"It is a place where nature is unfinished yet...a place where God, if he exists, has created in anger...Even the stars up in the sky look a mess." ( - Expressing anger at the Amazon rainforest for the difficulties involved in filming Fitzcarraldo.
"I see planets that don't exist and landscapes that have only been dreamed."
"I have the impression that the images that surround us today are worn out, they are abused and useless and exhausted. They are limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution. When I look at the postcards in tourist shops and the images and advertisements that surround us in magazines, or I turn on the television, or if I walk into a travel agency and see those huge posters with that same tedious and rickety image of the
"I invite any sort of myths because I like the stooges and doppelgangers and doubles out there. I feel protected behind all these things. Let them blossom! I do not plant them, I do not throw out the seeds. I advise you to read Herzog on Herzog because there you see a few clarifications."
"I do not want to go into general rules of what a filmmaker should do and how he should approach his work... I am not Moses on the mountain who proclaims the rules of procedure and what is sin and what is virtue."
"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."
"Often he was a joy, and you know, he was one of the few people I ever learned anything from." ( - On Klaus Kinski)
"Actually, for some time now I have given some thought to opening a film school. But if I did start one up you would only be allowed to fill out an application form after you have walked alone on foot, let's say from
"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."
"Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness."
"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. ( - On Klaus Kinski)
"You're all wrong." - ( - when faced with the jeering and hollering of the 1500 booing patrons who despised his 'Lessons of Darkness' at the Berlin Film Festival.)
"Everyday life is only an illusion behind which lies the reality of dreams. . . It is not only my dreams. My belief is that all these dreams are yours as well. And the only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or film making is all about. It's as simple as that."
"Perhaps I seek certain utopian things, space for human honour and respect, landscapes not yet offended, planets that do not exist yet, dreamed landscapes, very few people seek these images today."
He wasn’t a madman as some liked to dismiss him. Because he wanted to live, in his life, recklessly and egomaniacally, the most extreme, the most radically human, his nerves were disclosed and vulnerable in his fight against mediocrity, nastiness, the vermin. Only his excess of sensitiveness let him develop scandals, let him thrash about like a wild animal which finds itself hopelessly surrounded. - (on Klaus Kinski)
"Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates."
"I needed Kinski for a few more shots, so I turned them down. I have always regretted that I lost that opportunity." ( - On declining an offer by local Indians to kill Kinski for him, during the making of Fitzcarraldo.)
"He was a pestilence every day... but who cares? I mean, what remains is the film. ... There has never been a man in cinema who had such a presence, such a ferocious intensity on the screen." ( - On Klaus Kinski)
"When you travel on foot with this intensity," said Herzog, "it is not a matter of covering actual ground, rather it is a question of moving through your own inner landscapes. When I am walking I fall deep into dreams, I float through fantasies and find myself inside unbelieveable stories. I literally walk through whole novels and films and football matches. I do not even look at where I am stepping, but I never lose my direction. When I come out of a big story I find myself twenty-five or thirty kilometres further on. How I got there I do not know."
"You will learn more by walking from
"My films come out of some sort of pain. I must make films to rid myself of them, like ridding myself of a nightmare."
"A director is only a liontamer of the wild accidents and coincidences that come along."
...the risks have also been assessed. I am really one of those professional people, who calculate everything very exactly and assess things. Naturally, however, the risks I took were often very high in many respects. That may be my nature though. I really can’t properly say what is behind it, but it is certainly also connected with the nature of film and this work.
"Don't do office work. Go where the real world is. Work as a bouncer in a sex club, in a slaughterhose, as a taxi driver, where there is real life."
"I'm not out to win prizes - that's for dogs and horses."
"Kinski walked off, packed all his things and was absolutely serious about quitting and leaving at once he'd already broken his contract 40 or 50 times. I went up to him and said, 'You can't do this.' I told him I had a rifle and that he'd only make it as far as the first bend before he had eight bullets in his head the ninth one would be for me." ( - On Klaus Kinski.)
"It was worthwhile for what you see on the screen. Who cares if every grey hair on my head I call 'Kinski'?" ( - On Klaus Kinski)
"Filmakers of Cinéma Vérité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts."
"We are surrounded by worn-out images, and we deserve new ones."
"In this century we maybe had two or three of Kinski’s type. There is nobody else, he is a wonder of the world, and this wonder of the world can now be viewed for one more time. Sometime it maybe topples over, sometime it maybe doesn’t work anymore, I do not exactly know, maybe I’ m wrong. There is a duty, an extraordinary duty which is inflicted on me, because nobody else does it. I have to be able to accept it because I want to be a good soldier of the cinema.
"I make films to rid myself of pain, like ridding yourself of a nightmare."
I cannot work fast enough. I cannot cope fast enough, really. And just releasing a film is hard.
It’s very often that at the beginning of a shooting an insane shouting sets in, which also stems from his unsecurity. But Kinski is so extraordinary that he has to have his space. If he doesn’t have that he’ll never make a good movie. Of course this means an unbelievable exertion, also on my side, and self-denial, too, and nerves, and perseverance, and I don’t know what all. It’s not pleasant at all!
He tries to drag a ship, a boat into the sea, which of course is much too heavy. Towards the end of the scene I feel, now there ‘ll be something more, and I let the camera run. He knows that I let it go on running, he’s having a blind trust there, an absolutely blind trust. It then goes on that he collapses, with exhaustion, drowns, and is being washed away by the sea. This goes on minutes long, minutes long also in the film. Its a scene which developed as nobody knew it before, neither him nor myself, but we knew of each other that we’d now do that together. There he had this total security. Probably, everybody else would have switched off the camera the moment where he sank to his knees and couldn’t go on. Then it would have been over. For me, such moments are unique. For it, everything is worthwhile. - (on the final scene of 'Cobra Verde')
I know whenever it comes to be really dysfunctional and vile and base and hostile on screen, I'm good at that!
I'm old-fashioned; I'm a man of celluloid. I think it still has a depth and a precision that you do not have in the digital domain, and the digital domain has some disadvantages. When you shoot something and record it with a digital camera, you have an instant access to it - you don't have to wait for the dailies.
"Let's put it this way: 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.
"It isn't money that makes films, it's faith."
Strangely enough, I've always believed that my stories were mainstream stories; the films are narrated in a way that you never have a boring moment.
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.
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.
"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."
"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 privelege 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."
"I don't spend sleepless nights over getting very bad reviews."
"Film is not analysis, it is the agitation of mind; cinema comes from the country fair and the circus, not from art and academicism."
"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."
"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."
"I like to direct landscapes just as I like to direct actors and animals."
"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.
"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." - Said while making Fitzcarraldo.
I'm making films for an audience out there and a very tiny fraction of them are would-be filmmakers. But let's speak of them-the would-be filmmakers, the tiny fraction. I've witnessed many times when I've showed films and was present at a screening that exactly those people feel very much encouraged by what I'm doing."
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