Werner Herzog: What I've Learned

Filmmaker, 64, Los Angeles
Werner Herzog
Sam Jones

I do not make documentaries or features. My films are something else.

Facts do not interest me much. Facts are for accountants. Truth creates illumination.

I know the heart of men. It may sound pretentious, but it's true.

Not a good question. You are trying to deduce if I am obsessed like the subjects of my films. Let's not get into that. I am a professional person. Others would not do what I do, but I am trying to be a good soldier of cinema.

I was shooting a film with an entire cast of midgets, and one caught fire and was run over by a car. He was completely unhurt, and I was so astonished, I told the cast that if they all escaped filming unscathed, I would jump into a cactus for their amusement. And they did, so I jumped into a cactus.

There is no small talk in the Sahara.

You look at the footage of Timothy Treadwell, you look into the abyss of human nature.

It's very mysterious. Amie Huguenard, Treadwell's girlfriend, wanted to leave him for good. But at the end, she does not run away, she tries to defend him. You hear quite clearly that she attacks the bear with a frying pan, beating it over the head.

I do not know why people who are in love do what they do.

We are overconcerned with the well-being of whales, panda bears, and tree frogs. But cultures are dying with incredible speed. There are six thousand languages still alive, many of them spoken by very few speakers. By the end of the century, there may be only 10 percent left. I met an aborigine in Australia who was eighty years old and the only speaker of his language. He was considered mute because he had nobody left to talk to. He is certainly dead now.

Why America? I got married.

Los Angeles is the city with the most substance in the United States -- cultural substance. There is a competition between New York and Los Angeles, but New York only consumes culture and borrows it from Europe. Things get done in Los Angeles.

I will not become a citizen of a country that has capital punishment. It is a question of principle.

I made a film where I hypnotized the entire cast. People who are psychotic should not be hypnotized.

It is silly to believe human life is sustainable on this planet. We've got maybe twenty thousand years, maybe fifty thousand years, maybe five hundred thousand years.

Respect the natives.

The studio wanted it to be a plastic miniature boat pulled over a garden hill, but I said we will pull a real ship over a real mountain, and it will be a grandiose event in a magnificent opera. I wanted the audience to be able to trust their eyes.

More than in any other historical epoch, our sense of reality is severely challenged. It is the Internet, Photoshop, digital effects in cinema, video games -- tools that have arrived with instant impact. It is like warfare. For centuries, warfare was the same: the medieval knight with a sword in combat. Suddenly he was confronted with firearms and overnight was never the same. It is now a moment of the same magnitude for us.

School has not given me anything. I have always been suspicious of teachers. I do not know why.

I do not get lost. Sense of direction is a missing skill among modern men.

Tourism is a sin. Traveling on foot is a virtue. The moment people understand that you have come on foot and are trying to engage and understand them, there is an immediate change in attitude. On foot, no one chases you away or does not allow you to use their resources. They tell you stories they have not told anyone else.

If I opened a film school, I would make everyone earn their tuition themselves by working. Not in an office -- out where there is real life. Earn it as a bouncer in a sex club or as a warden in a lunatic asylum. And travel on foot for three months. And do physical, combative sports, like boxing. That makes you more of a filmmaker than three years of film school. Pura vida, as the Mexicans say.

I was shot a year ago. It did not impress me because I had been shot at before. Once, with an elite unit of insurgents crossing over from Honduras into Nicaragua, we came under fire in the middle of the river, which was unpleasant because we were so visible and the jungle hid the shooters.

Sunglasses. Good boots. Binoculars. And a mosquito net.

It is significant that neither the Sherpas nor any of the other mountain people ever thought about climbing the Himalayas until bored English aristocrats in the nineteenth century came in. You do not have to be on the summit of Mount Everest to appreciate it. To speak of "conquering" a mountain is not right.

I won't answer that. The meaning of life does not belong in a magazine. A magazine should know its limitations.

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