– And it is mysterious how cinema works in that respect. It is the placement of a shot that makes it so important, and makes it highly significant. It’s like the end of “Stroszek”, for example, with the dancing chicken. But then, the technical crew or almost everyone on location hated the film so much that ultimately the cinematographer refused to shoot it (the shot) and said: “We are going for lunch now if you want to film that shit. “ And I said: “I’m gonna film that shit, sure.” And I tried to tell them. “Don’t you see there’s something very very big here?” And nobody saw it. It was really big. And it’s still one of the best things I ever filmed in my life.

– That’s one of the most beautiful endings of a film…

– Even the crew that I paid and who were loyal to me went on strike.

[…]

– And one thing about that scene, it is a rare occurrence of inter-cutting different things happening simultaneously, from Bruno on the mountain to the animals (chickens, ducks, rabbits) dancing and playing music and to the truck on fire making circles outside. Usually your scenes are rather large segments, set in one space, one situation, often shot in long takes….

– Yes but the animals dance for quite a while so you hang on to that. The problem was that the chickens wouldn’t dance for more than 15 seconds and then they would retreat. We had them in special training for dancing as long as they could. When you fed a quarter into the machine, the music would play and the chicken would dance. And as a reward it would get some corn. They were accustomed to dancing for 3 to 5 seconds. Now I held them in training for a couple of months to dance as long as they could. But they would only dance for 15 seconds. The problem is, I couldn’t get away with an ending that was a 15 second shot. I had quite a few of those shots and I had to add them together. There was always a jump cut. So there were technical reasons behind it as well. Very often it’s not an ideology or so that’s behind something.

Herzog, interviewed