Herzog on Herzog

Textstellen und Zitate

• Three things - a phone, typewriter and car - are all you need to produce films.
  I remember that when 20th Century Fox were first interested in co-producing Nosferatu they wanted me to travel to Hollywood. I did not go so I invited them to Munich instead. I met them at the airport and squeezed them all four executives into my Volkswagen bus with no heater on a freezing winter morning and drove into the Bavarian countryside. Later, they were astonished that I had budgeted only $2 for the screenplay as I needed only 200 sheets of blank paper and a pencil.
  (S. 12) · Christian_alternakid
• Maybe the most important advice I can give to those of you heading into the world of film is that as long as you are able-bodied, as long as you can make money for yourself, do not go looking for office jobs to pay the rent. I would also be very wary of excrutiatingly useless bottom-rung secretarial jobs in film-production companies.
  Go out where the real world is, go work as a bouncer in a sex-club, a warden in a lunatic asylum or in a slaughterhouse.
  Walk on foot, learn a craft or trade that has nothing to do with cinema.
  (S. 12) · Christian_alternakid
• At the age of 11 I had to leard "Hochdeutsch" which was a painful experience for me. Irish writers write in English, but they are Irish. I might write in German, but I am very much a Bavarian. Being Bavarian means as much as it means to be Scottish in the United Kingdom. Like Scots, Bavarians are very hard-drinking, hard-fighting, very warm hearted, very imaginative. The most imaginative Bavarian of all was King Ludwig II. He was totally mad and built all those castles that are so full of this quintesessential Bavarian dreaminess and exuberance. I always felt that he would have been the only one who could have done a film like "Fitzcarraldo", apart from me.
  You see this kind of baroque imagination in Fassbinder's films, the kind of unstoppable and ferocious creativity he had. Like his work, my films are not thin-blooded ideological constructs that we saw a lot in German cinema in the 1970s. Too many German films of that era were thin gargling water instead or real thick stout.
  (S. 23) · Christian_alternakid
• Compared to other filmmakers - particularly the French, who are able to sit around their cafés waxing eloquent about their work - I am like a Bavarian bullfrog just squatting there, brooding.
  I have never been capable of discussing art with people. I just cannot cope with irony.
  (S. 27) · Christian_alternakid
• I have never been one of those who cares about happiness. Happiness is a strange notion. I am just not made for it. It has never been a goal of mine; I do not think in those terms. It seems to be a goal for many people, but I have no goals in life. I suspect I am after something else.
  (S. 26) · Christian_alternakid
• Because Fassbinder was so unruly, a sweaty, grunting wild boar crashing through the underbrush, the media mistakenly labeled him a world revolutionary. (...) When it came to his films I had the feeling that 2 or 3 films in a row would not be so good - he released them so quickly, sometimes five films a year - and I would almost lose heart. And then all of a sudden he would come out with a great one. I had to keep on telling myself, "Never lose faith in the man". (S. 35) · Christian_alternakid
• Those who read own the world, and those who watch television lose it. (S. 37) · Christian_alternakid
• When I returned to Lanzarote to start shooting "Even Darfs Started Small" I was full of bitterness, affected by sickness and the film became a more radical film than I had originally planned. "Aguirre" looks like Kindergarten against this one. Somehow I had the feeling that if Goya and Hieronymus Bosch had the guts to do their gloomiest stuff, why shouldn't I? (S. 55) · Christian_alternakid
• I had the feeling I should be on equal terms with the actors so that same day I told them all, "If all of you get out of this film unscathed, if you are unhurt at the end, I am going to jump into a field of cacti". Some of them were seven feet high. So I put on some goggles to protect my eyes and jumped from a ramp. And I can tell you that getting out is a lot more difficult than jumping in.
  Any old idiot can do the leap in; it takes something else to extricate yourself from something like that. The spines were the size of my fingers. I do not think I have any left embedded in me. It seems the body absorbs them eventually. (S. 58) · Christian_alternakid
• The final scene caused problems because a rumour went around that to get the dromedary onto its knees for so long I cut its sinews.
  Very quickly I learned something that was to come in useful years later when I made "Fitzcarraldo": that you can fight a rumour only with an even wilder rumour. So immediately I issued a statement that actually I had nailed the dromedary to the ground.
  That silenced them. (S. 60) · Christian_alternakid
• Our grandchildren will blame us for not having tossed hand-grenades into TV stations because of the commercials. Television kills our imagination. (...) I have said this before and will repeat it again as long as I am able to talk: if we do not develop adequate images we will die out like dinosaurs. Look at the depiction of Jesus in our iconography, unchanged since the vanilla ice-cream kitsch of the Nazarene school of painting in the late 19th century. There images alone are sufficient proof that Christianity is moribund. (S. 66) · Christian_alternakid
• People often tell me that all my leading characters are so-called marginals and outsiders, but I always felt that a figure like Kaspar Hauser was not an outsider. He is at the centre; he manages to retain his unblemished dignity while everyone around him seems to be hideously conditioned. These people, transformed as they are into domestic pigs or members of the bourgeois society, are the bizarre ones, not Kaspar. (S. 68) · Christian_alternakid
• The moment I finished the screenplay I knew it was for Kinski and sent it to him immediately. Two nights later, at 3 a.m., I was awakened by the phone. At first I couldn't figure out what was going on. All I heard was inarticulate screams at the other end of the line. It was Kinski. After about half an hour I managed to filter out from his ranting that he was ecstatic about the screenplay and wanted to play Aguirre. (S. 88) · Christian_alternakid
• Ski-jumping is not just an athletic pursuit, it is something very spiritual too, a question of how to master the fear of death and isolation. It is a sport that is at least partially suicidal, and full of utter solitude.
  It is as if they are flying into the deepest, darkest abyss there is. These are men who step outside all that we are as human beings, and overcoming the mortal fear, the deep anxiety these men go through, this is what is so striking about ski-jumpers. And it is rarely muscular athletic men up there on the ramps; always it is young kids with deathly pale pimply complexions and an unsteady look in their eyes. They dream they can fly and want to step into this ecstasy which pushes against the laws of nature. (S. 96) · Christian_alternakid
• Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity. It is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in the world. (S. 99) · Christian_alternakid
• I dislike intensely even the concept of artists in this day and age. The whole concept of being an artist is somehow outdated today. There is only place left where you find artists: the circus. Film is not analysis, it is the agitation of the mind; cinema comes from the country fair and the circus, not from art and acedemicism. I truly feel that in the world of the painter or novelist or film director there are no artists. This is a concept that belongs to earlier centuries, where there was such a thing as virtue and pistol duels at dawn with men in love, and damsels fainting on couches. (S. 139) · Christian_alternakid
• Someone like Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film. (S. 138) · Christian_alternakid
• Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn't see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and chocking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. Of course there is a lot of misery, but it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees are in misery and the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing, they just screech in pain. Its a land that God, if he exists has – has created in anger. It’s the only land where – where creation is unfinished yet. Taking a close look at – at what’s around us there – there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle, we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel. We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order. Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment. (S. 163, über den Dschungel) · Christian_alternakid
• My 45 or so films have meant I could do the things I truly wanted todo throughout my life, which is priceless. It is more valuable than any cash you could ever have thrown at me.
  I made films, other people bought houses. Money lost, film gained. (S. 205) · Christian_alternakid
• I dislike Theatre profoundly. The few theatrical productions that I have watched were an affront to the human spirit. I find stage acting disgusting and not credible at all, somehow very dead to the world. The overdramatic forms, the screaming, the fake passion, it really pains me to watch. (S. 220) · Christian_alternakid
• I never go to exhibitions. I do not like the world of the "vernissage". The crowds you find there are the most repulsive of all. (S. 222) · Christian_alternakid
• The real Fitzcarraldo moved a far lighter boat from one river system to the next, but he disassembled the boat into little pieces and got some engineers to reassemble it later on. But for what we did there was no precedent in technical history, and no book of instructions we could refer to. And you know, probably no one will ever need to do again what we did. I am a Conquistador of the Useless. (S. 179) · Christian_alternakid
• There is some foul philosophy behind this quest of adventure. Today, the concept of adventure has this kind of rottenness to me. Oh, what a big shot you were in 1910 when you came back from Africa and told the ladies how many elephants you shot! Do the same thing at a party today and you will have the first available glass of champagne tossed in your face. Very soon from now, 'adventurers' should receive the same treatment. (S. 199) · Christian_alternakid
• What's more, when you think about people 400 years from now trying to understand civilization today, I think they will probably get more out of a Tarzan film than out of the State of the Union address by the President that same year. (..) I am under no illusions: my existence on this planet is a very fleeting one and so, perhaps, should be the lives of my films. (S. 235) · Christian_alternakid
• One day a theatre critic had been invited for dinner. He hinted that having watched a play in which Kinski had a small role, he would mention him as outstanding and extraordinary. At once, Kinski threw two hot potatoes and the cutlery in his face. He jumped up and screamed, 'I was not excellent! I was not extraordinary! I was monumental! I was epochal!' I think I was the only one around the table who was not afraid, merely astonished. I looked at him the way you would look if an extraterrestrial had just landed or a tornado had just struck. (S. 287) · Christian_alternakid
• "Kinksi sometimes believed I was completely mad. This is not true, of course. I am quite sane, clinically sane, so to speak." (S. 289) · Christian_alternakid