Absolutely.

In my films landscapes are never just picturesque or scenic backdrops

as they often are in Hollywood films. In Aguirre the jungle is never some lush,
beautiful environment it might be in a television commercial. Sometimes when you
see the jungle in the film it is a reality so strange you cannot trust it, and maybe
think it is a special effect. The jungle is really all about our dreams, our deepest
emotions, our nightmares. It is not just a location, it is a state of our mind. It has
almost human qualities. It is a vital part of the characters' inner landscapes. The
question I asked myself when first confronted by the jungle was 'How can I use this
terrain to portray landscapes of the mind?' I had never been to Peru before filming
but had imagined the land- scapes and the atmosphere with real precision. It was
curious because when I arrived there everything was exactly as I had imagined it. It
was as if the landscapes had no choice: they had to fit to my imagination and
submit themselves to my ideas of what they should look like.

I like to direct landscapes just as I like to direct actors and animals. People think I
am joking, but it is true. Often I try to introduce into a landscape a certain
atmosphere, using sound and vision to give it a definite character.

p81

Or look at the shot of the windmills in Signs of Life, where the sound was also
vitally important. I started by taking the recording of nearly a thousand people
clapping at the end of a concert and distorted it electronically unti) it sounded like
wood banging. Then I added another sound over it: what you hear in the
countryside when you put your ear on a telegraph pole and the wind passes
through the wires. You hear a humming that we children called 'angel song'. Then I
mixed the noise of the banging wood with this 'angel song' and used the sound as if
it were the windmills. This does not change the windmills or the landscape
physically, but it does change the way we look at them. That is what I tried to
render: a new and very direct perspective of things that touch us deeper than more
'realistic' sounds.

P82

The starting point for many of my films is a landscape, whether it be a real place or
an imaginary or hallucinatory one from a dream, and when I write a script I often
describe landscapes that I have never seen. I know that somewhere they do exist
and I have never failed to find them. Actually, maybe I should say that the
landscapes are not so much the impetus for a film, rather they become the film's
soul, and sometimes the characters and the story come afterwards, always very
naturally.

The landscapes in Aguirre are not there as decoration or to look especially exotic.
There is profound life there, a sensation of force, an intensity that you do not find
in movies of the entertainment industry where nature is always something
artificial.
P 83

These are the kinds of landscapes I try to find in my films, the landscapes that exist
only in our dreams. For me a true landscape is not just a representa- tion of a
desert or a forest. It shows an inner state of mind, liter- ally inner landscapes, and
it is the human soul that is visible through the landscapes presented in my films, be
it the jungle in Aguirre, the desert in Fata Morgana, or the burning oil fields of
Kuwait in Lessons of Darkness. This is my real connection to Caspar David
Friedrich, a man who never wanted to paint land- scapes per se, but wanted to
explore and show inner landscapes.

P 136

His land- scapes are not landscapes at all; they are states of mind, full of angst,
desolation, solitude, a state of dreamlike vision.

P 137

t is very beautiful how the whole continent of Australia some- how is spread over
with a kind of river network of dreams or 'songlines'. The aborigines would sing a
song when travelling and through the rhythm of the song would identify a
landscape. My friend Bruce Chatwin1 once travelled with them in a car and said
they would sing in fast-motion - as if you were running a tape forward at ten times
the normal speed - because the car was pass- ing so fast and the rhythm of the song
had to keep up with the landscape.

P 208

So for me, the boundary between fiction and 'documentary' simply does not exist;
they are all just films. Both take 'facts', characters, stories and play with them in the
same kind of way. I actually consider Fitzcarraldo my best 'documentary'. So I fight
against cinema verite because it reaches only the most banal level of understanding
of everything around us. I know that by making a clear distinction between 'fact'
and 'truth' in my films, I am able to penetrate into a deeper stratum of truth most
films do not even notice. The deep inner truth inherent in cinema can be
discovered only by not being bureaucratically, politically and mathematically
correct. In other words, I start to invent and play with the 'facts' as we know them.
Through invention, through imagination, through fabrication, I become more
truthful than the little bureau- crats.