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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.

Werner Herzog

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Werner Herzog
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: September 5
Author
Cinematographer
Film Actor
Film Director
Film Editor
Film Producer
Screenwriter
Voice Actor
München
Werner Herzog Stipetić
Werner Stipetić
Happen
Planning
Matrix
Open
Instruments
Kitsch
Keep
Shots
Cowards
Happens
Slave
Aesthetics
Used
Remain
Solely
Mind
Based
Coincidence
Always
Trust
Slaves
Never
Imagination
Coward
Coincidences

More quotes by Werner Herzog

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Get used to the bear behind you.
Werner Herzog
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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.
Werner Herzog
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What I do not like, the kind of high-resolution cameras, 4K, 6K, for shooting dialogue, for having faces and close-ups of actors, and you see every single pore in the skin.
Werner Herzog
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We are surrounded by worn-out, banal, useless and exhausted images, limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution.
Werner Herzog
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At the end [when I speak about] magma under us everywhere, how it's monumentally indifferent to scurrying roaches, recoiled reptiles, and vapid humans alike. You see, you would never hear anything like that in a National Geographic or a PBS movie. This is clearly a transgression when it comes to being politically correct with your commentary.
Werner Herzog
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For a film I shot on the most difficult mountain on God's wide earth in Patagonia for a sequence where there was high probability some digital effects were needed, somebody made storyboards and I quickly ignored them, after half an hour I ignored them and I never used any digital effect.
Werner Herzog
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We are just a blip. I found it very interesting when Clive [Oppenheimer] interviewed the Ethiopian scientists and asked them, Do we have another 100,000 years? In their calculation, mankind will be entering a very critical phrase a thousand years from now.
Werner Herzog
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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.
Werner Herzog
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I work very fast and steadily, and I don't hardly ever notice that I'm working. It feels like just breathing or walking when I do films.
Werner Herzog
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Well, it had to be about the stories and the people who live under the volcano, what kind of new gods do they create? What sort of demons? And of course North Korea falls clearly into this category since the socialist revolution at the end of the Second World War. Somehow they adopted the myth of the power and dynamics of their volcano.
Werner Herzog
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It has always been my aim to find that sort of passion and figure out how to transform it into cinema.Timothy Treadwell's footage was almost like a diary, and he had always dreamt of becoming the movie star in his own gigantic production.
Werner Herzog
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For example, how you would introduce a leading character into your film, and as an absolute ingenious example, [Elia] Kazan in his film Viva Zapata!, how he introduces his leading character Marlon Brando into the film. No film ever did it as wonderful as he did it.
Werner Herzog
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Otherwise [digital revolution] hasn't changed my way of filmmaking, I'm not nostalgic in postulating we should still make films on celluloid. I love celluloid but I don't need to continue on celluloid.
Werner Herzog
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I am too much into what I'm doing in my work.
Werner Herzog
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Very often, footage that you have shot develops its own dynamic, it's own life, that is totally unexpected, and moves away from you're original intentions. And you have to acknowledge, yes, there is a child growing and developing and moving in a direction that isn't expected-accept it as it is and let it develop its own life.
Werner Herzog
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For me a true landscape is not just a representation of a desert or a forest. It shows an inner state of mind, literally inner landscapes, and it is the human soul that is visible through the landscapes presented in my films.
Werner Herzog
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It's very strange, for example, in North Korea where the volcano at the Chinese border is some sort of the mythical birthplace of the Korean people.
Werner Herzog
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The punishment itself is something I respectfully disagree with, but for thousands and thousands of years it was practiced everywhere.
Werner Herzog
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Never wallow in your troubles despair must be kept private and brief.
Werner Herzog
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I don't spend sleepless nights over getting very bad reviews.
Werner Herzog