Werner Herzog Film Quotes & Sayings

I would travel down to Hell and wrestle a film away from the devil if it was necessary. — Werner Herzog

There's a documentary film-maker called Werner Herzog, who's a German film-maker. I really dig his stuff, I'd love to chat with him. — Finn Jones

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. — Werner Herzog

If you want to do a film, steal a camera, steal raw stock, sneak into a lab and do it! — Werner Herzog

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. — Werner Herzog

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

Why go to Antarctica, why do a film like 'Grizzly Man'? It's the sheer joy of storytelling - it's the urge. — Werner Herzog

Michael Heseltine, a wild-haired visionary, Klaus Kinski to Margaret's Thatcher's Werner Herzog, pushed Docklands across the Thames to the East Greenwich Peninsula. The Millennium Dome concept was a remake of 'Fitzcarraldo', a film in which suborned natives (expendable extras) drag a paddle steamer over a hill in order to force a short cut to more exploitable territory. The point being to bring Enrico Caruso, one of the gods of opera, to an upstream trading post. An insane achievement mirrored in the rebranding of the Dome, after its long and expensive limbo, as the O2 Arena, a popular showcase for cryogenic rock acts:Norma Desmond divas and the resurrected Michael Jackson, whose virtual rebirth,post-mortem, gave the shabby tent the status of a riverside cathedral. — Iain Sinclair

I think there are specific times where film noir is a natural concomitant of the mood. When there's insecurity, collapse of financial systems - that's where film noir always hits fertile ground. — Werner Herzog

There is never an excuse not to finish a film. — Werner Herzog

Your film is like your children. You might want a child with certain qualities, but you are never going to get the exact specification right. The film has a privilege to live its own life and develop its own character. To suppress this is dangerous. It is an approach that works the other way too: sometimes the footage has amazing qualities that you did not expect — Werner Herzog

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. — Werner Herzog

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[ ... ] — Werner Herzog

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. — Werner Herzog

When I say tourism is sin and traveling on foot is virtue, it's condensed into a dictum. It's much more complex than that, but let's face it, for me, my experience, the world reveals itself to those that travel on foot. You understand the world in a much deeper level. And it does good to anyone who makes film. — Werner Herzog

You will learn more by walking from Canada to Guatemala than you will ever learn in film school. — Werner Herzog

Directors who have inspired me include Billy Wilder, Federico Fellini, lngmar Bergman, John Ford, Orson Welles, Werner Herzog, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola and Ernst Lubitsch. In art school, I studied painters like Edward Hopper, who used urban motifs, Franz Kafka is my favorite novelist. My approach to film stems from my art background, as I go beyond the story to the sub-conscious mood created by sound and images. — David Lynch

I cannot work fast enough. I cannot cope fast enough, really. And just releasing a film is hard. — Werner Herzog

There are certainly laws and elements that make a film more accessible to mainstream audiences. If you've got Tom Cruise as a strongman, I'm sure it would have larger audiences, but it wouldn't have the same substance. — Werner Herzog

At the press conference for the film he impressed everyone with his complete sincerity and innocence. he said he had come to see the sea for the first time and marveled at how clean it was. someone told him that, in fact, it wasn't. 'when the world is emptied of human beings' he said, 'it will become so again — Werner Herzog

Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates. — Werner Herzog

Meanwhile it's got stormy, the tattered fog even thicker, chasing across my path. Three people are sitting in a glassy tourist cafe between clouds and clouds, protected by glass from all sides. Since I don't see any waiters, it crosses my mind that corpses have been sitting there for weeks, statuesque. All this time the cafe has been unattended, for sure. Just how long have they been sitting here, petrified like this? — Werner Herzog

I have not seen a film as powerful, surreal, and frightening in at least a decade unprecedented in the history of cinema. — Werner Herzog

I've never left my culture. I've left my country, but I've not left my culture. In the same way, you shouldn't be worried why George Lucas is going to the outer galaxy to make a movie. He's still making a film within his culture; he's making an American film. I go to Thailand or the Peruvian jungle, the Amazon, and I still make Bavarian films. — Werner Herzog

The Rogue Film School is not for the faint-hearted. It is for those who have travelled on foot, who have worked as bouncers in sex clubs or as wardens in a lunatic asylum, for those who are willing to learn about lock picking or forging shooting permits in countries not favoring their projects. In short: for those who have a sense of poetry. For those who are pilgrims. For those who can tell a story to four year old children and hold their attention. For those who have a fire burning within. For those who have a dream. — Werner Herzog

Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film. — Werner Herzog

My contacts with the film industry can be described in very simple terms: The industry does not really need me, and I do not really need the industry. — Werner Herzog

Money doesn't make films. You just do it and take the initiative. — Werner Herzog

If I had to climb into hell and wrestle the devil himself for one of my films, I would do it. — Werner Herzog

Film is not analysis, it is the agitation of mind; cinema comes from the country fair and the circus, not from art and academicism. — Werner Herzog

Am I in the wrong place here, or in the wrong life? Did I not recognize, as I sat in a train that raced past a station and did not stop, that I was on the wrong train, and did I not learn from the conductor that the train would not stop at the next station, either, a hundred kilometers away, and did he not also admit to me, whispering with his hand shielding his mouth, that the train would not stop again at all? — Werner Herzog

If you truly love film, I think the healthiest thing to do is not read books on the subject. I prefer the glossy film magazines with their big color photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe. — Werner Herzog