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.
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.
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.
May I propose a Herzog dictum? those who read own the world, and those who watch television lose it.
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 love nature, but against my better judgment.
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.
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.
Get used to the bear behind you.
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 know whenever it comes to be really dysfunctional and vile and base and hostile on screen, I’m good at that.
You can fight a rumour only with an even wilder rumour.
We have to articulate ourselves. Otherwise we would be cows in the field.
I think a state should not be in the capacity of killing anyone with the exception of warfare.
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.
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.
The punishment itself is something I respectfully disagree with, but for thousands and thousands of years it was practiced everywhere.
If your project has real substance, ultimately the money will follow you like a common cur in the street with its tail between its legs.
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.
Tourism is a mortal sin.