Because you're delegated to a cook book recipe and you slavishly and pedantically rely on it while you're shooting and you're not relying on your creative instincts and you're not relying on something which brings life into movies and excitement into it.
Werner HerzogIt was a subject [ volcanoes] that was dormant in me for a long time and it popped up 40 years ago when I made a [short] film on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe about a volcano that was about to explode and a single farmer refused to leave ["La Soufrière"].
Werner HerzogWe are surrounded by worn-out, banal, useless and exhausted images, limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution.
Werner HerzogAt the end [when I speak about] magma under us everywhere, how it's monumentally indifferent to scurrying roaches, recoiled reptiles, and vapid humans alike. You see, you would never hear anything like that in a National Geographic or a PBS movie. This is clearly a transgression when it comes to being politically correct with your commentary.
Werner HerzogThe daredevil aspect to what I did there is moving a monstrously big ship over a mountain in the jungle of Peru with 800 or 900 or so native people from the area. So that idea was wild but the way it was executed was prudent. Nobody was ever hurt and when it became clear that we had to be more secure with the posts that would hold the ship, I spent 12 days having a post built that would have withstood the force of 10 times the weight of my ship.
Werner Herzog