Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir

by Werner Herzog

Intelligence is always a bundle of several qualities: logical thought, articulacy, originality, memory, musicality, sensitivity, speed of association, organizational capacity, and so on and so forth; but in my case, the bundle seemed to be differently composed.

I didn’t love pain; it was just something that was there in my frame of reference—the way I expected the world to be.

The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.

If you look over the history of filmmaking, you will see the ground is littered with wreckage.

In the labyrinth of memories, I often ask myself how much are they in flux, what mattered when, and how much has evaporated or changed tonality. How true are our memories? The question of truth has preoccupied me in all my films. Today it has even more urgency for all of us because we leave traces on the internet that take on a life of their own.

From early on in my work, I was confronted by facts. You have to take them seriously because they have a normative force, but making purely factual films has never interested me. Truth does not necessarily have to agree with facts.

I coined the phrase “ecstatic truth.” To explain that fully would take another book, so I’ll just sketch out a few lines of it here. It’s on this question that I have sought public conflict with the proponents of the so-called cinema verité who claim for themselves the truth of the whole genre of documentary films. As the auteur of a film, you are not allowed to exist, or not more than a fly on the wall anyway. That creed would make the CCTV cameras in banks the ultimate form of filmmaking. But I don’t want to be a fly; I’d rather be a hornet. Cinema verité was an idea from the 1960s; its representatives nowadays I call the “bookkeepers of the truth.” That got me furious attacks. My answer was “Happy New Year, losers.”

The French novelist André Gide once wrote: “I alter facts in such a way that they resemble truth more than reality.”

What the truth is is something none of us knows anyway, not even the philosophers or the mathematicians or the pope in Rome. I never see the truth as a fixed star on the horizon but always as an activity, a search, an approximation.

During the entire film, which feels like a requiem, there isn’t a single shot in which we can even recognize our planet. The film comes on as a kind of science fiction apocalypse. Hence the Pascal before the opening scenes—I wanted to raise the viewer to a high level and keep him there until the end. But the quote isn’t from Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher who left us wonderful aphorisms about the universe; it’s by me. I think Pascal couldn’t have put it any better. And another thing: in such instances, I always pointed out that I made something up.

I am always fascinated by the way people apprehend the “truth.”

In my films, music is never merely background; it’s what makes the images into even starker visions.

I’m a slow reader because I often depart from the text in front of me to picture scenes and situations and only then return to the words on the page.