It is something more fleeting than what you normally see. People might somehow take it into their own dreams, into their own life, in a way. I hear it more recently; people are telling me that when they leave the theater and see one of my films, they are not alone anymore. It's probably more that kind of feeling. If I managed to do a film like that, everything is fine.
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.
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.
I find it interesting that there are impostors out on the Internet pretending to be Werner Herzog.
There is never an excuse not to finish a film.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm a very professional man. I'm not out for the experience of adventure.
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.
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 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.
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.
We are surrounded by worn-out, banal, useless and exhausted images, limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution.
Otherwise you have to repeat a lot when you're filming. And I've seen the film and it's in a border town in Mexico close to the border with the United States, so of course you have a lot of traffic and noise and dogs barking right nearby, and for that you have to repeat a lot and Robert Rodriguez didn't do that. Smart, smart, smart, you better have smarts also.
North Korea has a very striking mythology there. It is influencing the whole nation.
I don't want to travel.
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 do whatever pushes me hardest. It's coming at me and I try to... it's like uninvited guest and I have to wrestle them out the door or through the window - get them out and get over with them quickly.
However, there are a couple of volcanoes very close nearby, like Vesuvius in Italy right next to Naples.
I am too much into what I'm doing in my work.
Maybe I should stay a good soldier of cinema.
