"A storyboard is an instrument for cowards."
"Filmmakers are not garbage collectors—we are thieves."
"Film schools are expensive—you can learn filmmaking on your own in two weeks."
These are just some of the great quotes from the trailer for Werner Herzog's six-hour online filmmaking class.
No one could be as irreverent about filmmaking as Herzog. His go-to reference text for filmmaking is an obscure book about observing Peregrine falcons on the marshes of the Essex coast written by J.A. Baker.
Herzog's films and documentaries, in particular, continue to defy what your told by film schools about less or no narration—in documentaries in particular—adhering to conventional story arcs with a clear beginning, middle and end, and borrowing narrative and visual devices from fictional filmmaking.
It reminds me of Errol Morris and his documentaries such as The Thin Blue Line, The Unknown Known and The Fog of War, which feature an inordinate amount of interviews to camera and fictional narrative devices such as re-enactment, which are also discouraged at film schools.
Given his diverse catalogue of films, Herzog, of course, can get away with breaking these conventions, but I guess you have to understand the conventions first and why they are there, before you can break them, or perhaps in the case of Herzog, he just went out there and said this is the way I'm going to make films and I don't care what anybody else thinks.