[MUSIC PLAYING]
For me, it's all just movies.
And my documentaries are partly staged, or inventive,
or poetical, and not so much fact-based,
although the hard core of facts I always incorporate.
So I think this distinction is a little bit too
mechanical and too brainless.
Many of my documentaries, in fact,
are feature films in disguise.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
You shouldn't be too pedantic.
I keep [? quoting, ?] for example, the Pieta-- the statue
of Michelangelo in St. Peter's Church Cathedral.
It's one of the most beautiful sculptures that was ever made.
And when you look at the dead Jesus
in the arms of Saint Mary, Jesus is 33 years old--
is a 33-years-old man.
And when you look at the Virgin, at his mother,
she is depicted as a 17-year-old virgin.
So where are the facts?
He just takes a liberty to shape it and form it himself.
And Shakespeare, by the way, said once in one of his dramas,
the most truthful poetry is the most feigning.
So, if you read [? Terdelene-- ?]
a great German poet, early 1800s,
he actually became insane at the end of his life--
he writes about a storm in the mountains.
And of course, it is not a weather report of 1802.
It's a great poem.
And what happens very often, what I hear very often is said,
filmmakers believe that facts-- in
particular, documentary filmmakers--
that facts constitute truth.
They don't.
They do not per se.
Facts have enormous power.
They have the power to create norms.
If, let's say, a million or five million asylum seekers
are streaming into Western Europe,
it will create new norms of behavior.
So that's a power of facts.
But this doesn't, the fact per se doesn't illuminate you.
It doesn't give you what I call an ecstasy-- something
ecstatic, something that illuminates you.
Otherwise it keeps quoting that quite often the phone
directory of Manhattan would be the book of books.
4 million, 5 million entries, all factually correct.
But it doesn't illuminate us.
It doesn't tell us anything about every single person
that's listed there.
So I've always tried to postulate something
that is much deeper-- and you can find it
in cinema-- some moments where you depart from, let's say,
historical facts, and you start to invent on your own.
I have done it quite often, and I've gotten a lot of flak
for that.
But I maintain that this is something
really important for filmmaking, and it should develop.
We should divorce documentaries from journalism--
from mere investigative journalism.
We are not flies on the wall.
That's what you hear quite often, you should be like a fly
off the wall.
No, that's only the losers who do that.
It's a camera that you find in the bank,
and it watches the bank for 15 years,
and not a single bank robber will ever show up.
So those are the losers.
You have to step out.
You have to create.
And only by imagining, and by creating, and by fantasizing,
and bringing in deep dreams, all of a sudden
puts you into a position where you
start to see something deeper.
You notice something.
You notice something that stays within you forever.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I have done things that have to do with this kind of ecstasy
of truth.
And I have started fairly early in the film
Land of Silence and Darkness.
It's a film about a woman who is deaf and blind at the same
time, so she cannot see any hand signals because she is blind,
and she cannot hear you.
And at the end of the film, the whole film
works towards this moment, sensitizing you as an audience.
At the end, all of a sudden, this middle-aged man,
kind of fearful, breaks away from two women
who are having a conversation.
And he moves along in an orchard.
And he touches a branch of an apple tree.
And he starts very softly and very tenderly
to follow the branch, and touch the leaves,
and touches the trunk of the tree.
And its heartbreakingly beautiful.
And then all of a sudden, I interrupt
the film with a caption.
"If a world war would break out now, I wouldn't even notice."
It just stops your breath.
I invented this quote.
I put it in there.
And I think it was right, because it really lifts you up
into an area where the film hasn't been before.
And I just do these things.
Or, for example, I started a film about the fires of Kuwait.
It's called Lessons of Darkness.
For one hour, there's not a single image
where you can recognize our planet anymore.
It's so strange, and everything is so devastated and burnt
in fires and smoke, like a science fiction film.
Number one, I declared the film is some sort of a science
fiction film, which it is not.
Nothing political in it.
And the film begins with a written caption.
And it says, "The collapse of the stellar universe
will occur-- like Creation-- in grandiose splendor."
and under it, Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher, who
said wonderful things about the universe.
People ask me, where did you find this quote?
And I keep to-- at the beginning,
I said, it must be in some of his letters or so.
Not so.
It was my invention.
I invented it, and I put "Blaise Pascal,"
because I wanted to have the audience lifted up
to a very, very high level.
And that's how you enter the film, and I never let you down.
Not an inch, I do not let you down.
So it's a complete invention, but it's
for the sake of something very deep,
something very compelling.
Something that illuminates you.
And by the way, I do believe that Blaise Pascal couldn't
have said it better, anyway.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Very good example for something completely made up,
invented, is a scene from The White Diamond.
It was filmed at the Kaieteur waterfalls--
they're gigantic waterfalls, three times
the height of Niagara Falls.
It's a very beautiful location.
Really, really very special.
And now, this is all dialogue I invented for him.
This is all scripted.
And he says, it's foggy at the moment.
And when it rains he comes here.
And he sees one drop of water, which actually was put there
by myself.
And now he looks through this drop of water.
And the image is inverted in it.
You see the waterfall here, normal.
It is thundering down.
This is Kaieteur, very beautiful.
Now the drop of water.
You see the water is going upwards.
But it wasn't even water, it was a drop of glycerin
that we put there, because glycerin has better
optical qualities than water.
And now I ask him a stupid new-age question.
"Mark Anthony, to you see an entire universe
in a single drop of water?"
Can't get more stupid, but I scripted it for me.
And he says, "I cannot hear what you say for the thunder that
you are."
Mark Anthony, do you see a whole new universe in this one
single drop of water?
I cannot hear what you say for the thunder of what you are.
End of scene.
And you see the warship rising from there.
But it's utterly concocted and scripted,
and it's a very beautiful moment in the film.
In a documentary, Echoes from a Somber Empire,
about a British journalist who reported from Africa and mostly
of the Central African Republic under Bokassa.
With Michael Goldsmith I went to the zoo, Bokassa's zoo.
There was only a crocodile left, which
was used to feed prisoners-- actually,
prisoners were fed to the crocodile.
There was a half-dead hyena, and there was a chimp.
And I had discovered the chimp.
And drunken soldiers had taught it how to smoke.
And this is how the film ends now.
He hands a cigarette to the chimp.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And then I play music-- Schumann's Nocturnal.
I mean, it's just-- and now, a made-up dialogue.
Werner, I can't see this anymore.
Can you turn this off now?
Michael, I think this is one of the shots I should hold.
The scripted line.
And you promise this will be the end shot,
It'll be the last shot in the film?
Yes, I promise.
And I'm answering, no, Mikey, I think
this is one of the shots I should hold.
I knew I should hold it.
And he said, only if you promise me
that this will be the last shot in the film.
And the last shot in the film is this lost chimp
in a cage, where only two more surviving animals in this zoo
were around, and drunk soldiers, and the disaster
of the whole country, and lawlessness,
and absence of justice, and absence of many, many things
that we are accustomed-- and it ends like this.
And it was so clear when I discovered
this chimp-- this chimp has to be the end of the film,
and I must invent a dialogue.
And I did.
And this is a moment where you are illuminated
as an audience, where you look very
deep into a strange world of something completely surreal.
And otherwise, if you stood to fact, fact, fact,
you would never get a moment like this.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
There's another good example where I invent a situation.
I did a film on faith and superstition in Russia.
It's called Bells from the Deep.
Pilgrims on thin ice seeking a vision
of the sunken city of Kitezh.
And the ice was really very thin.
And the pilgrims-- I say pilgrims quote
unquote-- crawling on their bellies and praying.
And they try to look through the ice
in order to catch a vision of the sunken city of Kitezh.
They also try to listen to the sound of the bells
from the deep.
And here, a lady whom I liked a lot is talking,
and at some point I ask her, and she speaks about the legend.
And actually it's a very deep thing for Russians--
when you try to depict the Russian soul,
it's somehow embodied to a very good degree in the legend,
in the religious legends of the sunken city of Kitezh.
But of course there were no pilgrims around.
And I went to the next country and there
were two guys who you see here in the background.
And they had already drunk a little bit.
And one of them is on his belly.
They crawl.
And I ask him, can you do this?
And can you listen and can you try to see something?
And there's this other one, you see he's motionless.
He had actually fallen asleep.
He's not deep in meditation and prayer.
And yet, this entire sequence, I showed it to audiences
in Russia.
Although the Russians know that this was an organized
kind of scene, they love it more than any other part
of the movie.
When they finished praying I stopped on the same spot
to say a prayer of my own, and then ran to catch up with them.
I kept close behind them and listened to their chanting.
You see, I had to take a lot of flak.
And my answer is yes, I take you into a certain ecstasy
of images, and I show you something
you would not notice otherwise.
There's something deeper than facts.
And I think those who start to put me down now,
for doing something like this, I have
an answer-- you are all losers.
Happy new year.