Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog is a German filmmaker and actor who has been assessed by the admins of this site as ISTP.

Quotes

 * "I do understand humor, but I take things literal. Whatever other references that might be there doesn't ever occur to me. So for me a chair is a chair. And I do not reference to other possibilities -- what the chair could refer to."


 * [what students learn in his film school]: "I teach them how to pick locks and how to forge a shooting permit."


 * "The poet must not avert his eyes...we should not be sitting in the library and studying an academic subject. I think the poet has to live a real, solid, pure, raw life out there."


 * [on why he makes films]: "I never learned anything in my life with the exception of a little bit of cinema. It has come almost naturally to me."
 * [On how he was as a child]: "I was very much a loner. I learned how to concentrate by necessity because in Munich the whole family lived together in just one room. There were four of us in this tiny place, each doing their own thing. I would lie on my back on the floor with a book and read for hours no matter how much talking and activity was going on. Often I would read all day long, and when I finished, I would look up to discover that everyone else had left hours ago."


 * "Taking a close look around us, there is some sort of a harmony. The harmony of overwhelming and collective murder."'
 * "The best advice I can offer to those heading into the world of film is not to wait for the system to finance your projects and for others to decide your fate. If you can’t afford to make a million-dollar film, raise $10,000 and produce it yourself. That’s all you need to make a feature film these days. Beware of useless, bottom-rung secretarial jobs in film-production companies. Instead, so long as you are able-bodied, head out to where the real world is. Roll up your sleeves and work as a bouncer in a sex club or a warden in a lunatic asylum or a machine operator in a slaughterhouse. Drive a taxi for six months and you’ll have enough money to make a film. Walk on foot, learn languages and a craft or trade that has nothing to do with cinema. Filmmaking — like great literature — must have experience of life at its foundation. Read Conrad or Hemingway and you can tell how much real life is in those books. A lot of what you see in my films isn’t invention; it’s very much life itself, my own life. If you have an image in your head, hold on to it because — as remote as it might seem — at some point you might be able to use it in a film. I have always sought to transform my own experiences and fantasies into cinema."