Werner Herzog (German: [ˈvɛɐ̯nɐ ˈhɛɐ̯tsoːk]; born 5 September 1942) is a German screenwriter, film director, author, actor, and opera director.
My non-fiction films are pretty much fiction, or at least close. . . It's all "movies" for me. I never have searched for a subject. They always just come along. They never come by way of decision-making. They just haunt me. I can't get rid of them. I did not invite them.
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.
In private I'm not. You will have to ask my wife. She maintains I'm a fluffy husband.
Nature is monumentally indifferent.
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.
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.
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.
Tourism is a mortal sin.
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.
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.
[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.
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'm not a citizen of America, I cannot vote. But it is fascinating because there's a new kind of protagonist out there that we didn't expect. By the way, I'm not in any panic at all.
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 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 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 prefer to be alive, so I'm cautious about taking risks.
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.
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.