Werner Herzog Quotes - Page 6

There's this kind of strange mythology about me in the media because I've done unusual things.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

I travel without barely any luggage. Just a second set of underwear and binoculars and a map and a toothbrush.

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.

THE ACT OF KILLING invents a new form of cinematic surrealism.

I do not believe in the Cinema verite. Sometimes a really good lie is better than any truth.

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 ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.

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.

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.

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'm quite convinced that cooking is the only alternative to film making. Maybe there's also another alternative, that's walking on foot.

Tourism is a mortal sin.

I don't spend sleepless nights over getting very bad reviews.

Spirit of immersion and curiosity and awe and participation is something which Timothy Treadwell and I have in common.

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.

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[...]

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.

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.

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

Of course the entire planet Earth consists of magma under us, and only the very inner-core is different.