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. Otherwise, the Manhattan phone
book would be
The Book of Books. Four million entries, all factually
correct, all subject to confirmation. But that doesn’t tell us anything
about one of the dozens of James Millers in there. His number and
address are indeed correct. But why does he cry into his pillow every
night? It takes poetry; it takes the poetic imagination to make visible a
deeper layer of truth. 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."
Werner Herzog, Every man for himself and God against all.
