Best 247 quotes of Werner Herzog on MyQuotes

Werner Herzog

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    Werner Herzog

    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.

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    Werner Herzog

    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.

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    Werner Herzog

    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.

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    Werner Herzog

    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.

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    Werner Herzog

    ِِِِِِِِِِ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.

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    Werner Herzog

    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.

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    Werner Herzog

    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.

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    Werner Herzog

    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

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    Werner Herzog

    At the same time, there's something magnificent about volcanoes; they created the atmosphere that we need for breathing.

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    Werner Herzog

    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.

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    Werner Herzog

    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.

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    Werner Herzog

    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.

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    Werner Herzog

    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.

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    Werner Herzog

    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.

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    Werner Herzog

    Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.

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    Werner Herzog

    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.

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    Werner Herzog

    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.

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    Werner Herzog

    [ 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.

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    Werner Herzog

    English is a really wonderful language and I urge you all to investigate it

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    Werner Herzog

    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.

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    Werner Herzog

    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.

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    Werner Herzog

    Everything you see in North Korea, it's all propaganda, but it's all connected to the volcano.

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    Werner Herzog

    Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.

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    Werner Herzog

    Facts do not convey truth. That's a mistake. Facts create norms, but truth creates illumination.

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    Werner Herzog

    Facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.

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    Werner Herzog

    Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.

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    Werner Herzog

    Film is not analysis, it is the agitation of mind; cinema comes from the country fair and the circus, not from art and academicism.

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    Werner Herzog

    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.

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    Werner Herzog

    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.

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    Werner Herzog

    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.

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    Werner Herzog

    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.

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    Werner Herzog

    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.

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    Werner Herzog

    For me, the distinction between documentaries and feature films is not so clear - my "documentaries" were largely scripted, rehearsed, and repeated, and have a lot of fantasy and concoction in them.

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    Werner Herzog

    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.

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    Werner Herzog

    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.

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    Werner Herzog

    Gaining trust is not difficult for me. I needed to gain the trust of the North Korean supervisors.

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    Werner Herzog

    Get used to the bear behind you.

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    Werner Herzog

    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.

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    Werner Herzog

    Hold firm to your vision but don't be a tyrant on set.

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    Werner Herzog

    However, there are a couple of volcanoes very close nearby, like Vesuvius in Italy right next to Naples.

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    Werner Herzog

    I always felt completely confident - it's like in a feature film, knowing your principle character is extremely well-cast. I had that same confidence in Clive [Oppenheimer].

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    Werner Herzog

    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.

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    Werner Herzog

    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.

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    Werner Herzog

    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.

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    Werner Herzog

    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.

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    Werner Herzog

    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.

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    Werner Herzog

    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.

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    Werner Herzog

    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.

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    Werner Herzog

    I believe the common denominator of the Universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder.

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    Werner Herzog

    I could not become an American citizen. I would not like to become a citizen of a country that has capital punishment.