"One day I saw this camera room, and nobody was in there, and I took one and tested it, walked ou,t and they never noticed that a camera was missing."

Said Werner Herzog to Anderson Cooper, who injected flatly: "That's a stolen camera."

Herzog: "It was more expropriation than theft. You have to have a certain amount of, I say, good criminal energy to make a film. Sometimes, yes, you have to go outside of what the norm is."

And I like this, about Klaus Kinski: "I had a a mad man as a leading character. He had a temper as demented as it gets. You had to contain him, and I made his madness — his explosive destructiveness —productive for the screen.... Every gray hair on my head I call Kinsky."

"I couldn't take it anymore: 'Your father! Great! Genius! I always liked him!'"

"The idolization has got worse and worse since he died."

Cut me a big slice of that ham acting.

Bigger can be better. (Via Throwing Things.) Think Jack Nicholson in "The Shining" and Klaus Kinski in "Aguirre the Wrath of God" and George C. Scott in "Dr. Strangelove." Those are all named in the linked article, and I love them all. What can I add? Jeff Goldblum in "The Fly"! But I hate a lot of ham acting too. I'm still mad at myself for sitting through Nicolas Cage in "Leaving Las Vegas." Just remembering that performance makes me feel a little ill.