Facts do not convey truth. That’s a mistake. Facts create norms, but truth creates illumination.
I would travel down to Hell and wrestle a film away from the devil if it was necessary.
I think the worst that can happen in filmmaking is if you’re working with a storyboard. That kills all intuition, all fantasy, all creativity.
Women have a very good sense for seeing instantly what constitutes a good man. Not physically. The physical strength is only a small side of it.
Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity. It is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in the world.
Martin Luther was asked, what would you do if tomorrow the world would come to an end, and he said, ‘I would plant an apple tree today.’ This is a real good answer. I would start shooting a movie.
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.
The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.
I have not seen a film as powerful, surreal, and frightening in at least a decade unprecedented in the history of cinema.
English is a really wonderful language and I urge you all to investigate it.
There’s more substance in my prose and my poetry than in all my films together. Writing is a more direct way of expressing yourself because, in cinema, you always have finances, organization, actors, technical apparatus and all that stuff coming in between.
Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species – including man – crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.
Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.
You should bear in mind that almost all my documentaries are feature films in disguise.
Never wallow in your troubles; despair must be kept private and brief.
Facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.
I see planets that don’t exist and landscapes that have only been dreamed.
In my films, I hope there are a few moments where you feel almost illuminated, like in a state of ecstasy, stepping out of yourself, beyond yourself and perceiving something which is only, in the case of cinema, possible in collective dreams.
If you don’t have a deal in two days, you won’t have a deal in two years.
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.