One solitary, overriding thought: get away from here. People frighten me. - Werner Herzog

Your film is like your children. You might want a child with certain qualities, but you are never going to get the exact specification right. The film has a privilege to live its own life and develop its own character. To suppress this is dangerous. It is an approach that works the other way too: sometimes the footage has amazing qualities that you did not expect.

I'm completely aware and utterly aware that Russia [the Soviet Union] lost 25 million people for winning the war, and I know that Russian troops were the ones who liberated concentration camps, Auschwitz and others, and I'm aware that there's an incredible sacrifice on the side of Russia, and I do believe that it's ignored because of course of political interests. It's very much the question what are the facts, maybe 600 or so thousand American soldiers lost their lives in the Second World War, 25–26 million Russian. Those are facts that cannot be ignored, and today it's not that really important what really happened, it's more the question who owns the narrative, and occupying the narrative has created some sort of lopsided ideologies in lopsided information, that we see every day.

It is my firm belief, and I say this as a dictum, that all these tools now at our disposal, these things part of this explosive evolution of means of communication, mean we are now heading for an era of solitude. Along with this rapid growth of forms of communication at our disposal— be it fax, phone, email, internet or whatever— human solitude will increase in direct proportion.