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Ten years ago in Antarctica shooting Encounters at the End of the World, I met a very fine volcanologist from Cambridge University [Clive Oppenheimer] and we kept talking about doing a film and all of a sudden it became serious when he hinted at the possibility to film in North Korea.

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
Talking
Kept
Hinted
Film
Ten
Antarctica
Ends
University
Cambridge
Years
Mets
Korea
World
Became
Encounters
Possibility
Sudden
Fine
North
Oppenheimer
Serious
Shooting
Clive

More quotes by Werner Herzog

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Fragility of modern world leaves me with the idea we'd better anticipate what's going on. We take our right steps today and now. And we'd better avoid, that we are overdependent on, let's say, the internet.
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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.
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I prefer the material woman.
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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.
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Only the poets can hold the country together, and I wanted to hold Germany together.
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You should look straight at a film that's the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.
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Roger Ebert was a very valiant soldier of cinema who passed away, and we miss him. It's over with serious discourse about cinema in the print media and on television. It has been replaced by celebrity news. So we are speaking in his spirit always.
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In the Chauvet Cave, there is a painting of a bison embracing the lower part of a naked female body. Why does Pablo Picasso, who had no knowledge of the Chauvet Cave, use exactly the same motif in his series of drawings of the Minotaur and the woman? Very, very strange.
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Our presence on this planet does not seem to be sustainable. Our technical civilization makes up particularly vulnerable. There is talk all over the scientific community about climate change. Many of them [scientists] agree, the end of human life on earth is assured.
Werner Herzog
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Money doesn't make films. You just do it and take the initiative.
Werner Herzog
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I do not believe in the Cinema verite. Sometimes a really good lie is better than any truth.
Werner Herzog
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After Jack Reacher the parts I didn't like, most of it was silly.
Werner Herzog
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You are in a place that has not been seen for tens of thousands of years, because it was so sealed off. There is such silence that when you hold your breath you can hear your own heartbeat. Everything is so fresh that you have the sensation that the painters have merely retreated deeper into the dark and that they are looking at you.
Werner Herzog
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I went to volcanoes where I knew that there was a lot of mythology around them there was something like the creation of gods and monsters and demons.
Werner Herzog
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You have to be completely open to what people would tell you. You do not shape them you do not force the materials into your ideas. You have to have all windows and doors open.
Werner Herzog
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The volcano itself wasn't that interesting, but the man who refused to be evacuated - the only one of 75,000 people - was what set the tone for the film [Encounters at the End of the World] that we made together [with Clive Oppenheimer] ten years later.
Werner Herzog
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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
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It happens sometimes that the material itself carries things you have not fully planned. The footage has its own right, its own life, its own vibrancy and energy in it.
Werner Herzog
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If you do not understand how finances are functioning, you are in a very precarious situation, at least concerning long-term survival.
Werner Herzog
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It was a subject [ volcanoes] that was dormant in me for a long time and it popped up 40 years ago when I made a [short] film on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe about a volcano that was about to explode and a single farmer refused to leave [La Soufrière].
Werner Herzog