Werner Herzog Things

1. Der Spiegel Interview
   
2. The only way to truly come close to Herzog is to follow his self-mythologizing as a lonely combatant, fighting, to the point of total exhaustion, for his films and his convictions. In 1974, when film historian Lotte Eisner, one of Herzog's idols, was ill and near death in Paris, the director walked from Munich to the French capital in the middle of the winter."It was clear to me that if I did it, Eisner wouldn't die," he says. "It wasn't superstition, however, but something the Catholic Church calls assurance of salvation -- an expression one should treat with great caution. I wasn't surprised that Lotte Eisner had already been released from the hospital when I arrived in Paris."
3. People have understood more and more that I'm not the maverick -- the rest of the world is maverick. I'm not eccentric. I occupy the center and all the rest is bizarre and eccentric, but not me. I'm clinically sane. I think I have much more sanity than the entire film industry in the US, for example.
4. Through imagination, stylization and invention, we become much more truthful. Take, for example, my 1992 film "Lessons of Darkness," which featured the fires in Kuwait after the Iraqi army set the entire country on fire. It begins with a quote from the French philosopher Blaise Pascal: "The collapse of the stellar universe will occur, like creation, in grandiose splendor." What a wonderful sentence! Of course, it is not Pascal -- I invented it. Pascal couldn't have said it better himself, let's face it. To those with the mind of accountants, this looks like a fake. But ultimately it is not a fake because I elevate the audience onto a very high level before they have even seen the first image of the film, and you are stepping into this film with a different level of preparedness. In this respect, even though the quote is invented, it is not intended to deceive or mislead or defraud you. It's exactly the contrary: to fill you with a certain awe and to prepare your soul for something that has never been seen in the history of humankind. So it is not a lie, it is an intensified form of truth.
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