SCENARIOS

I do not follow ideas I stumble into stories or into people and I know that this is so big I have to make a film Very often films come like uninvited guests like burglars in the middle of the night They are in your kitchen something is stirring you wake up at 3 a m and all of a sudden they come wildly swinging at you When I write a screenplay I write it as if I have the whole film in front of my eyes Then it is very easy for me and I can write very very fast It is almost like copying But of course sometimes I push myself I read myself into a frenzy of poetry reading Chinese poets of the eighth and ninth century reading old Icelandic poetry reading some of the finest German poets like Hölderlin All of this has absolutely nothing to do with the idea of my film but I work myself up into this kind of frenzy of high caliber language and concepts and beauty And then sometimes I push myself by playing music for example a piano concerto by Beethoven and I play it and write furiously But none of this is an answer to the question of how you focus on a single idea for a film And then during shooting you have to depart from it sometimes while keeping it alive in its essence Werner Herzog on filmmakingWerner Herzog doesn t write traditional screen