I think psychology and self-reflection is one of the major catastrophes of the twentieth century.
I despise formal restaurants. I find all of that formality to be very base and vile. I would much rather eat potato chips on the sidewalk.
I don’t spend sleepless nights over getting very bad reviews.
I have a great map of the Tibesti Mountains in the southern Sahara or Northern Chad. It’s a dream of mine to go there, but it’s such a volatile area, you have to be prudent.
In the Chauvet Cave, there is a painting of a bison embracing the lower part of a naked female body. Why does Pablo Picasso, who had no knowledge of the Chauvet Cave, use exactly the same motif in his series of drawings of the Minotaur and the woman? Very, very strange.
I like and I love everything that has to do with cinema: writing, directing, editing, creating music, and even acting.
If you’re purely after facts, please buy yourself the phone directory of Manhattan. It has four million times correct facts. But it doesn’t illuminate.
I’m not into digital marketing, downloading, or streaming – I’ve always been a man of the theaters.
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.