Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog Stipetić, known as Werner Herzog, is a German screenwriter, film director, author, actor and opera director...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth5 September 1942
CityMunich, Germany
CountryGermany
access depth digital domain instant man precision record shoot wait
I'm old-fashioned; I'm a man of celluloid. I think it still has a depth and a precision that you do not have in the digital domain, and the digital domain has some disadvantages. When you shoot something and record it with a digital camera, you have an instant access to it - you don't have to wait for the dailies.
motivation actors conversation
With actors, normally I don't like to have any conversation about background and about motivations and all this.
heart men solitude
I have been in lots of very intense life situations. I have been shot at, and I have been hungry, and I have been in solitude, and I have also briefly been behind bars. So in a way, I know the heart of men.
decision fiction way
My non-fiction films are pretty much fiction, or at least close... It's all "movies" for me. I never have searched for a subject. They always just come along. They never come by way of decision-making. They just haunt me. I can't get rid of them. I did not invite them.
artist echoes soul
This is the birth of the modern human soul. The artists are like us, not like the Neanderthals, who had no culture - and who incidentally were still roaming the landscape at the time the paintings were made. It is striking that there is a distant cultural echo that seems to reach all the way down to us, over dozens of millennia.
book believe giving
The danger is to stupidly believe that depicting facts gives us much insight. If facts were the only thing that counted, the telephone directory would be the book of books.
devastation fascination crime
There is a fascination about crime, which is understandable, but hardly anyone talks about the families of victims of violent crime and the devastation that is beyond the victim alone.
insane germany would-be
In Germany, you would be hanged if you cracked a joke about Hitler and you would be killed by the state if you were insane in a project of euthanasia.
men good-man sides
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.
home alaska desert
I function better in the jungle in Amazonia or Antarctica or Alaska or the Sahara desert. An artificial environment like a studio has never attracted me. I could work in a studio, but I would never really feel at home.
dream cinema film
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.
law guilt care
I don't care whether the person is guilty or not guilty. It's not my business to establish guilt or innocence. It's a court of law that does that and a jury does that, but not me.
writing organization together
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.
religious men people
Chauvet Cave is rather like the awakening of the modern human soul or I would say the awakening of modern human culture. Because Neanderthal men who still rode the landscape parallel to the people who did these paintings didn't have culture. There's no evidence of culture, no symbolic depiction, no evidence of music, no evidence of sculptures, no evidence of religious beliefs.