Werner Herzog "documentaries"

"The film is not there to tell you what to think. I did not structure it to push any ideas in your face. Maybe more than any other films I have made it is one that needs to be completed by the audience, which means all feelings, thoughts and interpretations are welcome. Today, thirty years later, the film is very much alive to audiences. It is like nothing they have ever seen before, and I think everyone comes away with their own understanding of the film."
- Werner Herzog

"People generally respond so positively to it because it is a film about solitude, about the terrifying difficulties of being understood by others. Essentially, everything we have to deal with every single day of our lives. In the film one finds the most radical and absolute human dignity, human suffering stripped bare. Land of Silence and Darkness is a film particularly close to my heart. If I had not have made it there would be a great gap in my existence."
– Werner Herzog

"I have never made a distinction between my feature films and my "documentaries." For me, they are all just films, and The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner is definitely one of my most important films. I have always felt very close to ski-jumpers."
– Werner Herzog

"For La Souffrière what we wanted to do was to get out of there with a film in our cameras. I am not in the business of suicide and there was nothing of bravado about the experience. We did not go there to get blown up. Blind and stupid risk-taking is not something I generally practice. I am simply not that kind of a filmmaker. But I do have to admit that with a film like La Souffrière we were playing the lottery."
– Werner Herzog

"My films are anthropological only in as much as they try to explore the human condition at this particular time on this planet. I do not make films using images only of clouds and trees, I work with human beings because the way they function in different cultural groups interests me. If that makes me an anthropologist then so be it. But I never think in terms of strict ethnography: going out to some distant island with the explicit purpose of studying the natives there. My goal is always to find out more about man himself, and film is my means. According to its nature, film does not have so much to do with reality as it does with our collective dreams. It chronicles our state of mind. The purpose is to record and guide, as chroniclers did in past centuries."
– Werner Herzog

"Lessons of Darkness was very well received in America. It was interesting to see the reaction to the film there because the whole country - and the whole world in fact - had repeatedly watched the same kind of images of the burning oil wells in Kuwait on CNN during and after the war. But these images saturated the public's consciousness only via news broadcasts and made very little impact because of their tabloid style. We have all watched so many horrific things on the news that we have become totally - and dangerously - inured to them. When it came to these spectacular fields of burning oil, everyone seemed to forget them the very next day. Yet to look at the surface of pitch-black oil is to see what looks like a vast serene lake reflecting the blue sky and the clouds. It is very strange, and I knew I was watching something momentous that had to be recorded for the memory of mankind."

"Dieter's story is an amazing one. Born in Germany, his earliest memories are of Allied bombers diving down from the clouds and bombing his small village in the Black Forest into dust. One bomber came so close to the house where Dieter lived, firing as it flew, that it whipped past the window where he was standing. For a split second Dieter's eyes locked with the pilot's. Rather than being afraid, Dieter was mesmerized: he had seen some strange and almighty being fly down from the clouds, and from that moment on Little Dieter Needed to Fly."
- Werner Herzog

"The film was one of those things dormant in me for many years. The film is the story of Juliane Köpcke, a seventeen-year-old German girl, the sole survivor of a plane crash in the Peruvian jungle on Christmas Eve in 1971. Juliane's mother was killed along with ninety-four others. What is so astonishing is that after ten days the intensive search was called off, and yet on the twelfth day Juliane emerged from the jungle. It is such a miraculous story, and what I like very much about Juliane is that she did everything right in order to survive her ordeal. The other reason for my fascination with the story is that in 1971 I was in Peru filming Aguirre and along with my wife, some actors and technicians, was booked on the very same flight. I had to bribe an airline employee to get the boarding passes, but at the last minute the flight was cancelled and the plane flew to a different destination. Only later did I discover that we were filming Aguirre just a few rivers away from Juliane as she was fighting for her life."
– Werner Herzog