Werner Herzog Quotes

I feel like, whatever movie I was making, there would always be moments of human intimacy and insight into a little bit of what makes us tick as people.

I'm not an activist at all. I'm a filmmaker, and I wanted the people involved to tell their own story.

I want people to feel that they've gotten to know the people in the film a little bit, gotten to see Pine Ridge in ways they haven't seen before. I think that's a good start.

As a filmmaker, you are constantly having the discussion with your team about whether something is "relatable".

I feel my characters are valid, my characters are people, my characters have hope. Hope is the thing that'll take us through.

As an actress, I'm drawn to emotion and expressing the human condition in all its forms, and I'm fortunate to have thoughts and feelings at my fingertips.

I really love the independent movies and I just think that sometimes when they throw a lot of money into it and a lot of special effects and a lot of stunts that you lose the connection, the human connection and I personally love movies that are about the human connection.

A good journalist, as you know, is a great listener. And so's a good writer. And I got to listen to people for almost 20 years. That serves me well, I hope, when I try to understand how a character might be feeling, or how they might react.

I am an emotional and fragile person. I observe life, I am perceptive and can read a person's body language. I have a strong journalistic streak in me, and had I not been a filmmaker, I would have become a film journalist. I have combined my perceptive and journalistic traits to create my own brand of cinema.

I've discovered I can't make a film about people I dislike.

You can mix in certain sensitivities as a filmmaker.

As a filmmaker, you're looking to reveal something. When other people relate to it, it makes an otherwise lonely world a little less lonely.

Whenever I write, I try and approach my stories from some kind of universal theme or idea or emotion.

Whenever I do someone's portrait, I'm trying to locate the photo in the lens while reaching into that person psychologically. There's the magic! I don't always achieve it. It's a hit or a miss!

I always at least try to come from some sort of human place no matter how ridiculous the character is. That's really awesome. That is more the work that I'm leaning towards doing.

Filmmaking is essentially about entertainment, but it's amazing to realize that it has this other muscle that could actually help. Do you know what I mean? People permit entertainment to wash over them, but every once and a while, entertainment - and this is entertaining - also galvanizes something else and that would be a really good thing to have happen in this case.

I'm trying to capture something more fragile than a regular story. I love what people bring me.

We all have a lot of people inside us, yet we get to live only one life. Fiction lets us slip into someone else’s skin, so to speak. That’s why we read novels, and also why we write them - to experience more life, through imagination.

All my life I've been interested in other people's stories. I wanted to know them, understand them, feel them.

I make films because I have not learned anything else and I know I can do it to a certain degree. And it is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are. We have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field.

It's a hard thing to explain to other people because it sounds very superficial and nepotistic, but doing the interview is actually a very deep, dream-fulfilling aspect of relationship.

A poet can't afford to be aloof. The tools of his trade are the people he bumps up against.

I've documented a lot of things myself as a filmmaker. If you want a rockumentary, that's in there.

Are people drawn to each other because of the stories they carry inside?

I'm not fixed in any genre. I love all kinds of films. The essential thing is; you have to have good material. If you have the filmmaker, and the material, and the script is good, you can start from there.