Werner Herzog Quotes

I think the resolution involved in the high-def, Blu-ray image demands we pay attention to every detail to a level we've never seen before. The audiences have to believe everything they're seeing. As viewers, we're all so experienced and so much smarter than we realize. With Blu-ray, there will be less tricking of the eye.

Filmmaking isn’t if you can just strap on a camera onto an actor, and steadicam, and point it at their face, and follow them through the movie, that is not what moviemaking is, that is not what it’s about. It’s not just about getting a performance. It’s also about the psychology of the cinematic moment, and the psychology of the presentation of that, of that window.

I realized that my camera work could help me in a lot of ways to put the audience in the driver's seat, so to speak, to get them in there with the action, and to get them as close and be as intimate with what was going on on-screen as possible.

When you shoot on high-definition, everything is very sharp and clear, sometimes at the cost of losing dimension and depth of field.

I feel a lot of films that are shot digitally, even low-budget independent films, they look super slick now. Because the technology is so good that they look too good.

What makes 4K so interesting is it captures lifelike cinema-quality video.

By the time I got to 'Silence of the Lambs,' I was madly in love with close-ups because I'm madly in love with actors, and a basic premise of 'Silence of the Lambs' is the story about two people fighting their way into each other's heads.

What I love about DVD is that the quality is good.

Because the cameras now are all HD they see everything! They see all the imperfections, so your makeup has to be perfect.

A better quality of video is better for everyone.

The HD revolution is over, it happened. HD won. Everybody wants HD.

I'm really specific in the way that I shoot. I've always had a very good sense of what I need in the editing room. I used to shoot in a way that drew more attention to the camera and I've tried, in each film, to draw less and less attention to the camera. I think when you pay attention to the shots, you're aware of the fact that there's a director.

When I started doing television, I thought that I would change the way that I shot, the way that I blocked, and the technical side of it. You're not going to change your relationship with the actors or how you approach the characters. That wasn't any different.

Let's face it, the human eye is clumsy, sloppy, and unintelligible when compared to the camera's eye.

I think you can say a lot with the movement of your camera but you can also say a lot by keeping it still.

I see an incredible abuse of close-ups in many films these days. Why is that?

The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?

The function of camera movement is to assist the storytelling. That's all it is. It cannot be there just to demonstrate itself.

There's also a lot of punch you get from doing an extreme closeup and have it just be that image with nothing around it. There's a clarity and precision and impact there that you sometimes lose if you put everything else in that background.

I'm sure that the camera is part of European art.

[on his use of tracking shots throughout his 50-year career] There's always a certain amount of camera improvisation.

I'm the most experienced cinematographer in this medium, so there's no point in having that extra conversation in the middle of the loop. You're making the film in relation to what's happening now, and you can't really affect what's happening now. It's not like you're in control of anything in front of the camera. If you're calling yourself the director and you're not the cinematographer, I think you're kidding yourself.

I've never used High Definition video, never, ever, ever, ever, ever. And I never will. I can't stand that crap.

There is no right or wrong angle for something. The idea of putting the camera in an unfamiliar position is simply to do with film language. Sometimes it is spectacular, sometimes it is ugly, sometimes it is uninteresting.

This uses a lens system, which I have used for years in various different ways, but I've never used it in the context of an interview. This is the very first time that I've done that. It's a lens called The Revolution, so it allowed me to interview Elsa [Dorfman] and actually operate the camera. Well one of the cameras, because there were four cameras there.