3: Werner Herzog: Difference between revisions
No edit summary  |
|||
(45 intermediate revisions by 11 users not shown) | |||
Line 1: | Line 1: | ||
{{EpisodeInfoBox | |||
|title=Werner Herzog | |||
|image=[[File:The-portal-podcast-cover-art.jpg]] | |||
|guest=[[Werner Herzog]] | |||
|length=01:10:38 | |||
|releasedate=25 July 2019 | |||
|youtubedate=31 July 2019 | |||
|customlabel1=Apple Podcasts | |||
|customdata1=[https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/3-werner-herzog/id1469999563?i=1000445326690 Listen] | |||
|customlabel2= | |||
|customdata2= | |||
|customlabel3= | |||
|customdata3= | |||
|customlabel4= | |||
|customdata4= | |||
<!-- |download=[https://rss.art19.com/episodes/fc8934df-0bbe-48c0-aed1-25a0c3674712.mp3 Download] --> | |||
|youtube=[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eua5iPUKw6Y Watch] | |||
|link4title=Portal Blog | |||
|link4=[https://theportal.group/werner-herzog-on-the-portal-episode-003-the-outlaw-as-revelator/ Read] | |||
|prev=ep2 | |||
|next=ep4 | |||
}} | |||
In this episode of [[The Portal Podcast]], Eric interviews legendary filmmaker and director [[Werner Herzog]] about his life in outlaw filmmaking in front of a live audience. | |||
[[ | <!--{{#widget:OmnyFMEpisode|show=the-portal|slug=3-werner-herzog|width=65%}}--> | ||
 | |||
{{#widget:YouTube|id=Eua5iPUKw6Y}} | |||
[[File:ThePortal-Ep3 WernerHerzog-EricWeinstein.png|600px|thumb|Eric Weinstein (right) talking with Werner Herzog (left) on episode 3 of The Portal podcast which was conducted in front of a live audience.]] | |||
== Transcript == | == Transcript == | ||
<small>[https://theportal.wiki/images/e/e4/3_Werner_Herzog.vtt Raw transcript file]</small> | |||
'''[00:00:03] Eric:''' <span title="00:00:03"> Hello. </span><span title="00:00:03">You've found The Portal. </span><span title="00:00:04">I'm your host Eric Weinstein, and this will be our second </span><span title="00:00:07">interview episode to be released. </span><span title="00:00:09">I think we have something really remarkable for you today because we </span><span title="00:00:11">have a human being who's led a life that even though he makes movies </span><span title="00:00:15">that are fictional, I would say that his actual nonfiction life is more </span><span title="00:00:19">interesting than any movie he's ever made. </span><span title="00:00:21">This is a person who has been shot on camera. </span><span title="00:00:24">A person who has stolen, who has forged and who's taught other </span><span title="00:00:28">filmmakers to steal and to forge. </span><span title="00:00:32">The person I'm talking about is Werner Herzog. </span><span title="00:00:34">Now, I first became aware of Werner Herzog when I was 16 and </span><span title="00:00:38">just entering the University of Pennsylvania, and a friend of mine </span><span title="00:00:41">said, you've got to see this movie. </span><span title="00:00:43">Fitzcarraldo I said, what is Fitzcarraldo? </span><span title="00:00:46">He says, if nothing else, it's a story about a man so possessed by an </span><span title="00:00:52">idée fixe that he drags a boat over a mountain in the jungle, in order </span><span title="00:00:58">to somehow build an opera house. </span><span title="00:01:00">And the whole thing sounded incredibly mad. </span><span title="00:01:03">And in fact, what was so interesting about this film was that the director </span><span title="00:01:07">actually had to do in real life what the crazy fictional character </span><span title="00:01:11">did inside of the storyline. </span><span title="00:01:15">This led me to a fascination with a today's interview subject Werner Herzog. </span><span title="00:01:20">This is a man who has lived so richly and so profoundly that I actually </span><span title="00:01:25">started to get a different idea about what he was doing as a film maker. </span><span title="00:01:29">The idea that I could not shake was, is that Werner Herzog needed to live </span><span title="00:01:33">so deeply and so profoundly that he had to make movies simply to justify </span><span title="00:01:39">what it meant to be Werner Herzog. </span><span title="00:01:42">Now, I've often asked myself this question, what is it the </span><span title="00:01:44">great generals do between wars? </span><span title="00:01:47">It's hard to imagine, let's say a Patton or a MacArthur in normal times, do they </span><span title="00:01:52">just sit around and open dry cleaners? </span><span title="00:01:55">Do they write essays for their local newspaper. </span><span title="00:01:59">What does a Winston Churchill do if there is no World War II to win? </span><span title="00:02:03">In such a situation I think it's very hard to come up with an answer, but I </span><span title="00:02:07">think that the best answer that I have is, is that these people would make movies. </span><span title="00:02:16">The following interview was recorded in front of a live audience. </span><span title="00:02:19">We joined the conversation in progress. </span><span title="00:02:22">May I just ask, first of all, before I try any theories of the kindness, do </span><span title="00:02:26">you see any clear organizing principle that unifies your output that is sort of </span><span title="00:02:34">subtle and non-obvious to your audience? </span> | |||
'''[00:02:36] Werner:''' <span title="00:02:36"> Yes, I do believe so. </span><span title="00:02:39">People are quite often puzzled about the range of the subjects </span><span title="00:02:43">that have attracted me. </span><span title="00:02:46">There's a world champion ski flyer from Switzerland, and there is a paleolithic </span><span title="00:02:53">cave, and there's a man who moves a ship over a mountain in the Peruvian jungle, </span><span title="00:02:58">and there's a film on the internet, and there's a film, you just name it. </span><span title="00:03:04">And it looks perplexing at first sight. </span><span title="00:03:09">But I do understand, although I don't like to look back at my films too </span><span title="00:03:16">often, I do understand that there's some sort of an architecture of concepts. </span><span title="00:03:23">And that's... </span><span title="00:03:24">You would immediately understand there is a common worldview. </span><span title="00:03:28">Very much is about a worldview and you could probably spot it very, very </span><span title="00:03:37">quickly, if you walked into a room and a TV was playing and there was a film </span><span title="00:03:44">within and you didn't see any credits, probably within two minutes you would </span><span title="00:03:50">understand, this must have been my film. </span><span title="00:03:55">People see it, they understand it, how they do it. </span><span title="00:03:58">I don't know. </span><span title="00:03:59">And how I do create this common world view, I don't know either, </span><span title="00:04:04">but it doesn't really matter. </span> | |||
'''[00:04:07] Eric:''' <span title="00:04:07"> Now, one of the things that I've been very struck by, which is what we </span><span title="00:04:13">all get wrong about Werner Herzog and because many of the stories that come </span><span title="00:04:19">out of these films and these undertakings involve tremendous seeming danger, </span><span title="00:04:26">physical risks, chaos, madness is all the things that are usually associated. </span><span title="00:04:31">I was trying to figure out what it was that those stories might cover up as if </span><span title="00:04:36">sort of cheap icing on a very rich cake. </span><span title="00:04:39">And one of the things that I saw, was what, and correct me if I'm wrong, </span><span title="00:04:42">it seems like you have tremendous concern for the people that you </span><span title="00:04:46">bring out onto these crazy projects for their safety and wellbeing. </span><span title="00:04:51">Am I getting that wrong? </span> | |||
'''[00:04:53] Werner:''' <span title="00:04:53"> No, we shouldn't waste any time of what some people get wrong about me. </span><span title="00:05:00">Doesn't really matter, let them be wrong. </span><span title="00:05:03">But, one of the things that comes up quite often, seems to be an </span><span title="00:05:09">identification of the creator of a story, a creator of a character, </span><span title="00:05:15">namely me, with the qualities that the creator automatically has to have. </span><span title="00:05:23">In other words if I do a film, like Aguirre, the Wrath of God about a </span><span title="00:05:28">demented crazed a conquistador, 1560s in the Peruvian Amazon, people quite </span><span title="00:05:37">often are misled to point out Herzog must have these qualities obsessive </span><span title="00:05:43">in demented and borderline paranoia. </span><span title="00:05:47">And so no day they are, I understand them, but they are not my qualities. </span><span title="00:05:52">They are inventions. </span> | |||
'''[00:05:54] Eric:''' <span title="00:05:54"> But you picked an actor in Klaus Kinski who might, I mean, I </span><span title="00:05:59">would venture to say, did have some of those qualities, is that wrong? </span><span title="00:06:02">And then you actually have the... </span> | |||
'''[00:06:03] Werner:''' <span title="00:06:03"> No, of course he had it. </span><span title="00:06:05">A part of being an actor who was really under the grace of creation </span><span title="00:06:15">to make things that we have not seen before or after on a screen. </span><span title="00:06:20">So, but otherwise, he was the mildest I could express would be, </span><span title="00:06:25">he was the ultimate pestilence, but he was also destructive. </span><span title="00:06:29">He would destroy a set. </span><span title="00:06:32">He would, when we had a, we actually had two plane crashes on </span><span title="00:06:36">Fitzcarraldo, small aircraft, and we didn't know what had happened. </span><span title="00:06:42">We had a very sketchy shortwave radio connection with Iquitos </span><span title="00:06:48">about 1,100 kilometers away and garbled messages would come in. </span><span title="00:06:55">"Plane is down." </span><span title="00:06:56">And we desperately tried, was it nearby? </span><span title="00:06:59">Could we send out a search party or what, who was on board, what had happened? </span><span title="00:07:04">And we had it happen in our camp, sometimes on days where we would start in </span><span title="00:07:10">the afternoon and shoot into the night. </span><span title="00:07:13">Breakfast would be served from hut to hut to hut, and so the </span><span title="00:07:17">last hut would have cold coffee. </span><span title="00:07:20">This morning, by coincident Kinski was the last hut, and I heard it from, </span><span title="00:07:25">from 150 yards away, screaming out. </span><span title="00:07:29">I mean the complete, not just a tantrum. </span><span title="00:07:32">It was just an outburst of rage, because his coffee was lukewarm and he stormed </span><span title="00:07:39">at the place where we were checking on the radio and trying to figure out, </span><span title="00:07:44">and he kept screaming and screaming. </span><span title="00:07:46">I could not calm him down. </span><span title="00:07:48">I could not get him away. </span><span title="00:07:49">I tried to tell him, there's a plane down. </span><span title="00:07:52">You have to keep quiet. </span><span title="00:07:54">We must listen to what has happened. </span><span title="00:07:59">It wouldn't help at all. </span><span title="00:08:01">He would scream and he would scream. </span><span title="00:08:02">He could scream a glass into he could shatter a glass, a wine glass. </span><span title="00:08:10">He, it really, I mean it, I do not exaggerate. </span><span title="00:08:15">And so the only way I could after an hour and a half when he had already </span><span title="00:08:23">froth, hardened froth at his mouth. </span><span title="00:08:27">I went to my hut and I had a little piece of Swiss chocolate left, which people </span><span title="00:08:34">would murder for such a treasure in our camp, and I stepped in front of him and </span><span title="00:08:40">ate this chocolate, and that silenced him. </span><span title="00:08:43">There was, there was something which was stunning. </span> | |||
'''[00:08:46] Eric:''' <span title="00:08:46"> And you knew, you intuited that this would have that effect? </span> | |||
'''[00:08:49] Werner:''' <span title="00:08:49"> I should have had the intuition after five minutes, it took over an hour. </span><span title="00:08:55">So, but, problem is that quite often, qualities of the characters in my </span><span title="00:09:02">films have been super imposed on my own character, or, for example, I've acted in </span><span title="00:09:10">some Hollywood films and some independent films, check Reacher, for example. </span><span title="00:09:15">And I'm playing the real, real dangerous badass bad guy. </span><span title="00:09:21">And I'm very, very dangerous and I had to, and I'm unarmed, and I have no </span><span title="00:09:27">fingers left, and I am blind on one eye. </span><span title="00:09:31">And yet I had to spread terror from the screen, and I did it so well. </span><span title="00:09:38">I did it so well that my reviews were much better than the reviews for Tom Cruise. </span><span title="00:09:46">No, it's true, I am not exaggerating. </span><span title="00:09:49">I was good, but it's not that I can say this kind of vile, </span><span title="00:09:54">dangerous character is really in me. </span> | |||
'''[00:09:59] Eric:''' <span title="00:09:59"> Really? </span> | |||
'''[00:10:00] Werner:''' <span title="00:10:00"> And it became very easy, I did it unprepared, you see, and I have </span><span title="00:10:05">learned that when we teach Fitzcarraldo in the first round of shooting, there </span><span title="00:10:09">was Mick Jagger as a sidekick of the leading character, and Jagger spent </span><span title="00:10:14">some six weeks with us in the jungle. </span><span title="00:10:17">We shot half the film had to stop because the leading character became ill. </span><span title="00:10:22">We had to send him to the States and the doctors wouldn't allow him to </span><span title="00:10:26">return to the jungle, so I knew I had to start all over again and on Jaggers </span><span title="00:10:32">contract, there was not time enough left for doing the whole film all over. </span><span title="00:10:37">I shot the film actually one and a half times. </span><span title="00:10:40">And, what is strange about, this recasting and restarting the whole </span><span title="00:10:52">thing, I knew if I did not find an actor quickly, in such a case, I had no </span><span title="00:10:59">alternative but playing the part myself. </span><span title="00:11:03">Because I would have been credible and I would have been good, not as good as </span><span title="00:11:08">let's say, Mick Jagger and Jason Robards or Kinski and I learned one thing from, </span><span title="00:11:14">from Mick Jagger, which astonished me. </span><span title="00:11:17">He took me once a backstage when they were recording, and I was there </span><span title="00:11:26">and he was arguing with somebody about some totally trivial things. </span><span title="00:11:32">Completely and utterly trivial things, and also an on my set, he </span><span title="00:11:38">was arguing about the mineral water or about the per diem or something. </span><span title="00:11:44">And I said to him "Mick, the camera is rolling." </span><span title="00:11:47">And he looked at me and he sees we are already doing it. </span><span title="00:11:51">And he steps three steps in front of the camera, and within </span><span title="00:11:57">three steps he becomes a demon. </span><span title="00:12:01">From a trivial, trivial little bickering, mediocre kind of character, </span><span title="00:12:07">his steps in front and he is a demon. </span><span title="00:12:10">And in that, in a way, I learned that from him. </span><span title="00:12:15">And, I didn't prepare myself. </span><span title="00:12:18">I, when I stepped in front of the camera, I knew there was only one thing, be </span><span title="00:12:24">calm and be frightening and I can do it. </span><span title="00:12:29">Yeah. </span><span title="00:12:30">And I would accept it only because I knew I could do it. </span> | |||
'''[00:12:33] Eric:''' <span title="00:12:33"> So you're really not the ultimate bad-ass, because... </span> | |||
'''[00:12:38] Werner:''' <span title="00:12:38"> I can't... </span><span title="00:12:39">Maybe I am, but unbeknownst to me. </span> | |||
'''[00:12:42] Eric:''' <span title="00:12:42"> Well, okay. </span><span title="00:12:43">It feels to me like I was just watching a video of you being interviewed by </span><span title="00:12:48">the BBC and improbably you're shot in the abdomen while being interviewed. </span><span title="00:12:55">And you seem to be somewhat irritated that the interviewer is treating this as </span><span title="00:13:00">a big deal, and like, otherwise, how would I know that you wear Paisley underwear? </span><span title="00:13:06">I mean you take your pants down- </span> | |||
'''[00:13:08] Werner:''' <span title="00:13:08"> Yeah, they wanted to see it. </span> | |||
'''[00:13:12] Eric:''' <span title="00:13:12"> -you're bleeding, and you're treating it like, why is every... </span><span title="00:13:13">It's not that big of a bullet. </span><span title="00:13:14">That was your attitude. </span> | |||
'''[00:13:16] Werner:''' <span title="00:13:16"> No, actually I said something more beautiful. </span><span title="00:13:18">I said, this is an insignificant bullet. </span> | |||
'''[00:13:21] Eric:''' <span title="00:13:21"> Yeah, that's true. </span> | |||
'''[00:13:22] Werner:''' <span title="00:13:22"> So, and I knew it had not perforated everything. </span><span title="00:13:28">It went through my, jacket in the catalog in the pocket and everything, </span><span title="00:13:32">but didn't perforate into my intestines. </span><span title="00:13:34">So that was insignificant, but they immediately hit the ground, the camera </span><span title="00:13:44">fled and I had the feeling, "Stay, let's finish at least the sentence." </span> | |||
'''[00:13:48] Eric:''' <span title="00:13:48"> Cause it was great video. </span><span title="00:13:50">I mean... </span> | |||
'''[00:13:51] Werner:''' <span title="00:13:51"> For them it was great video, it... </span> | |||
'''[00:13:52] Eric:''' <span title="00:13:52"> No, it would've been, but what I'm trying to suggest, sir, is that </span><span title="00:13:56">you are the unreliable narrator. </span><span title="00:13:58">You are actually.... </span> | |||
'''[00:13:59] Werner:''' <span title="00:13:59"> No, no, no. </span><span title="00:13:59">I made sense. </span><span title="00:14:00">No, no, no. </span><span title="00:14:02">I am the one who makes sense. </span><span title="00:14:03">I am the one who puts order into a chaotic situation. </span> | |||
'''[00:14:07] Eric:''' <span title="00:14:07"> That's what you did. </span><span title="00:14:08">But when I'm, well, what I'm saying is, is that when your autonomic </span><span title="00:14:11">nervous system is triggered. </span><span title="00:14:13">It barely registers. </span><span title="00:14:14">You've been shot in the abdomen. </span> | |||
'''[00:14:16] Werner:''' <span title="00:14:16"> It registered, it hurt. </span><span title="00:14:18">It hurt a year because when I was laughing hard, it was still hurting. </span><span title="00:14:24">Yes, but there's a sense of duty... </span> | |||
'''[00:14:26] Eric:''' <span title="00:14:26"> Which I very much appreciate, but that's very unusual. </span><span title="00:14:30">These are real... </span> | |||
'''[00:14:30] Werner:''' <span title="00:14:30"> Yes, but it's part of being a good soldier of cinema that I </span><span title="00:14:34">tried to be, a sense of duty, a sense of, you have to be reliable. </span><span title="00:14:41">You have to hold an outpost that others have given up. </span><span title="00:14:45">It's loyalty,, and it's loyalty to the entire crew that was there. </span><span title="00:14:51">However, they argued that we should call the police right away. </span><span title="00:14:56">And they said, let's not do it because do you want to spend the next six hours </span><span title="00:15:01">in a police station to file charges and do you want to see helicopter </span><span title="00:15:07">circling there, and do you want to see a SWAT team in 10 minutes flat? </span> | |||
'''[00:15:11] Eric:''' <span title="00:15:11"> Right. </span> | |||
'''[00:15:11] Werner:''' <span title="00:15:11"> Do you want to see that? </span><span title="00:15:13">My answer is no, but it's okay, let's move out of the danger zone. </span><span title="00:15:19">Because the man with a rifle was still somewhere hiding on a terrace, </span><span title="00:15:25">and hiding now inside the building. </span><span title="00:15:28">Get out of there, but let's continue. </span><span title="00:15:31">Let's continue this all your team has come from the UK and </span><span title="00:15:35">you have to return tomorrow. </span><span title="00:15:37">Let's get over with it. </span><span title="00:15:40">So it's a sense of duty. </span> | |||
'''[00:15:41] Eric:''' <span title="00:15:41"> I appreciate that very much, but I mean, what you're talking about </span><span title="00:15:44">is the highest levels of discipline and military style leadership. </span><span title="00:15:49">I mean, this goes far beyond... </span> | |||
'''[00:15:52] Werner:''' <span title="00:15:52"> Yes, but you should be careful about confusing it with military </span><span title="00:15:58">discipline where there's some sort of blind adherence to given orders. </span><span title="00:16:04">I do think, I do think what I'm doing, and I do not ask anyone to </span><span title="00:16:10">do blindly something in front of the camera, but there is a safety margin. </span><span title="00:16:15">Whenever things are difficult in then, let's say borderline dangerous, I would </span><span title="00:16:22">always do it myself first for the actor. </span><span title="00:16:25">I would go through the rapids with a small raft to see, does a rafter </span><span title="00:16:32">survive these three consecutive rapids. </span> | |||
'''[00:16:36] Eric:''' <span title="00:16:36"> Right. </span> | |||
'''[00:16:36] Werner:''' <span title="00:16:36"> Or a very simple thing, Christian Bale in a Rescue Dawn, he plays a chairman </span><span title="00:16:44">board and a Navy pilot who is shot down, 40 minutes in his first mission over</span><span title="00:16:51">Vietnam or Laos, he actually was the only American POW who managed to escape from </span><span title="00:16:58">Viet Cong captivity, an incredible story. </span><span title="00:17:04">And Christian Bale who plays a part of him and they're starving to death, </span><span title="00:17:09">almost starving to death, and they get some food that is infested by hundreds </span><span title="00:17:15">and hundreds of wriggling maggots. </span><span title="00:17:19">And we used maggots that native people would eat, but they would roast </span><span title="00:17:24">them, not alive and still wriggling. </span><span title="00:17:28">So, and I said to Christian, that was what Dieter Dengler, the real character, told </span><span title="00:17:34">me they had to do, there are nutrients that lot of nutrients in these maggots. </span><span title="00:17:38">I ate it. </span><span title="00:17:39">And I said to Christian, you know what? </span><span title="00:17:44">Give me the plate and give me a spoon. </span><span title="00:17:46">I'm going to eat a few spoonfuls, which I did. </span><span title="00:17:51">And he said, oh, come on, stop it. </span><span title="00:17:54">Stop it. </span><span title="00:17:54">I, let's roll the camera. </span><span title="00:17:56">I'm going to get over it quickly. </span><span title="00:17:59">So he did. </span><span title="00:18:00">And that was one of the very, very few, moments of controversy </span><span title="00:18:07">between the two of us because I told him and he didn't hear it. </span><span title="00:18:12">Apparently I told him, Christian, you know what, you stop eating when </span><span title="00:18:16">you really have, when you had it. </span><span title="00:18:19">And he keeps eating, eating, eating until the plate is empty. </span><span title="00:18:23">And then I say, cut. </span><span title="00:18:25">And he said, why didn't you say cut before? </span><span title="00:18:28">Why? </span><span title="00:18:28">What happened? </span><span title="00:18:29">And I said, Chris, you are the one who should have cut, set cuts. </span><span title="00:18:33">But he didn't hear it. </span><span title="00:18:35">And he was kind of miffed, but those, those moments say they do </span><span title="00:18:41">happen, and the unexpected on a set. </span><span title="00:18:49">That's movies. </span> | |||
'''[00:18:50] Eric:''' <span title="00:18:50"> Yeah, right. </span><span title="00:18:54">I guess those moments do happen. </span><span title="00:18:56">So, it does strike me though that... </span> | |||
'''[00:18:58] Werner:''' <span title="00:18:58"> I tested it first, you see, I would always test it first. </span> | |||
'''[00:19:03] Eric:''' <span title="00:19:03"> It seems like that's, you know, the Israelis have a theory of leadership, </span><span title="00:19:07">which is called follow me, where they take the highest value person on the </span><span title="00:19:11">team that the general or the Colonel, and he goes into danger first because </span><span title="00:19:16">the morale of the troops is so much heightened when you see a leader saying, </span><span title="00:19:21">I will actually take that kind of a risk. </span><span title="00:19:24">That seems to be a part of how you get fanatical loyalty. </span> | |||
'''[00:19:26] Werner:''' <span title="00:19:26"> It's a very long tradition. </span><span title="00:19:28">Alexander the Great, for example, always on foot with his soldiers. </span><span title="00:19:34">He would not ride on his horse. </span><span title="00:19:36">He would be on foot thousands of miles. </span><span title="00:19:39">He would be the first to climb the ramparts on a ladder. </span><span title="00:19:45">He would be the one who when they were thirsty and almost dying from thirst. </span><span title="00:19:51">One soldier collected a helmet full of water, bit by bit, drop by drop and when </span><span title="00:19:58">the thirst was at its worst, this footman comes and steps in front of Alexander and </span> | |||
'''[00:20:05] says:''' <span title="00:20:05"> "I saved this for you, drink this." </span><span title="00:20:09">And Alexander looks at it in, spills it away, and he says too much for one, </span><span title="00:20:14">too little for all and marches on. </span><span title="00:20:17">So that's leadership. </span><span title="00:20:20">Well, Hannibal who crossed the Alps on elephants, he would </span><span title="00:20:24">sleep with his soldiers at the outpost wrapped in his coat. </span><span title="00:20:31">And he would lose an eye crossing an ice cold river south of the Alps, </span><span title="00:20:39">and he would do things that, nobody else in his army would ever do. </span> | |||
'''[00:20:47] Eric:''' <span title="00:20:47"> Do you feel that this aspect of leadership, of putting oneself in the </span><span title="00:20:51">greatest situations of risk and harm is... </span> | |||
'''[00:20:57] Werner:''' <span title="00:20:57"> No. </span><span title="00:20:57">You avoid harm if possible. </span> | |||
'''[00:20:59] Eric:''' <span title="00:20:59"> Well, of course, but... </span> | |||
'''[00:20:59] Werner:''' <span title="00:20:59"> You eliminate harm before it even appears. </span><span title="00:21:04">You see, you have to be prudent, and in any kind of business, including </span><span title="00:21:09">the business of warfare, you have to evaluate a situation and you have to </span><span title="00:21:16">try to avoid the danger for anyone. </span><span title="00:21:20">The leader and the troop, you better stay out of it. </span><span title="00:21:25">And you use all sorts of military tricked trickery, deceit, you use ambushes. </span><span title="00:21:35">You use the so called cowardly things. </span><span title="00:21:39">And before you really put anyone into very grave danger. </span><span title="00:21:46">Eliminate whatever you can. </span><span title="00:21:48">Sometimes you can't eliminate everything but cheat... </span> | |||
'''[00:21:53] Eric:''' <span title="00:21:53"> Of course, of course, and lie... </span> | |||
'''[00:21:56] Werner:''' <span title="00:21:56"> Lie and trick. </span><span title="00:21:57">I liked, by the way, it comes to main Jesse Ventura, who used to be a bodyguard </span><span title="00:22:03">of the rolling stones, by the way, and he used to be a a studio wrestler, who played </span><span title="00:22:10">the bad guy, by the way, in the ring. </span><span title="00:22:13">Completely stylized. </span><span title="00:22:15">And he became governor of Minnesota. </span><span title="00:22:18">And I always liked him for his down to earth approach. </span><span title="00:22:21">And he said once about his time in the ring as a wrestler. </span><span title="00:22:27">It's just one of these WrestleMania people. </span><span title="00:22:30">And he said win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat. </span><span title="00:22:40">So I really like him for that. </span> | |||
'''[00:22:45] Eric:''' <span title="00:22:45"> Yeah. </span><span title="00:22:47">So this is one of the things that I found most enduring about your </span><span title="00:22:51">approach is that you teach film in this completely different fashion. </span><span title="00:22:58">It's, let's be honest, you're an outlaw before you're a film maker and </span><span title="00:23:01">you say to your students, you have to be prepared to steal, to forge, to </span><span title="00:23:06">pick locks, to do whatever it takes. </span> | |||
'''[00:23:09] Werner:''' <span title="00:23:09"> Forge documents, but still, you see, I wouldn't say steal. </span><span title="00:23:13">I have stolen once in a while, but more expropriation than stealing, than theft, </span><span title="00:23:19">like my first camera was expropriated from an institution, but do anything </span><span title="00:23:26">that's outside of the legal norms. </span><span title="00:23:31">As long as it as it does not hurt anyone. </span><span title="00:23:34">And foraging, a shooting permit in a country that has a military dictatorship </span><span title="00:23:42">is something fine and you should do it. </span><span title="00:23:44">You for forage, forage you must. </span> | |||
'''[00:23:47] Eric:''' <span title="00:23:47"> Yeah. </span> | |||
'''[00:23:51] Werner:''' <span title="00:23:51"> So you have to do it sometimes. </span> | |||
'''[00:23:52] Eric:''' <span title="00:23:52"> Definitely try this at home. </span><span title="00:23:54">All right, so you break into countries on a student visa that </span><span title="00:24:01">might severely punish you if they found out that you were filming. </span><span title="00:24:04">You did this in China. </span> | |||
'''[00:24:07] Werner:''' <span title="00:24:07"> No, not, well, yes, I did in China filming in the Western most part, near </span><span title="00:24:15">Kashgar, where there was an extremely high military and police presence, and I was </span><span title="00:24:21">filming with Michael Shannon, but we had no shooting permit, no working permit. </span><span title="00:24:27">We just went out to a local market. </span><span title="00:24:31">A very traditional market of weak word tribesmen a cattle market. </span><span title="00:24:37">And there was the real obvious thing was that we had a contraption built on </span><span title="00:24:46">the body of Michael Shannon, a tripod that held a camera in front of his face. </span><span title="00:24:53">So when he walks into a crowd, everybody who walks by would inevitably </span><span title="00:24:58">turn around and look after him. </span><span title="00:25:00">I wanted this effect. </span><span title="00:25:02">Everybody staring at him once he's moving through a crowd and he said to </span><span title="00:25:08">me, I'm going to do it as long as you're around next to me, because if I get </span><span title="00:25:15">arrested, you should be arrested as well. </span><span title="00:25:17">And I said, fine, let's do it. </span><span title="00:25:19">And because it was so brazen, it was so brazen that nobody actually stopped us. </span><span title="00:25:27">There was a lot of police, and when you have one or two police people, </span><span title="00:25:32">then it's dangerous because they would arrest you or they would </span><span title="00:25:36">stop you at least in check you out. </span><span title="00:25:38">But if you have 17, 18, 20 of them. </span><span title="00:25:42">There's a strange psychological reflex. </span><span title="00:25:46">Everybody thinks the other one will stop you and you walk straight through the </span><span title="00:25:51">middle whether, and I keep saying where the enemy comes it at its thickest, walk </span><span title="00:25:57">straight through there and I look into some sort of a vague distance as if I had </span><span title="00:26:03">spotted a friend 50 yards away, and I'd walk with this gaze upon them, and while </span><span title="00:26:10">I pass, I may say something in my variant dialect, I say "Hast du einen Hartig </span><span title="00:26:15">gesehen?", have you seen my friend Hartig? </span><span title="00:26:19">And they step aside and I'm out. </span><span title="00:26:22">So you have to understand the heart of men, and you have to </span><span title="00:26:27">understand the, the way police would react, and what would they do? </span><span title="00:26:33">It's so brazen that nobody of the Hun Chinese police would ever suspect we </span><span title="00:26:43">were working without any permits at all. </span> | |||
'''[00:26:49] Eric:''' <span title="00:26:49"> Yeah. </span><span title="00:26:49">Now in our time, there's this mania for truth and authenticity, and for </span><span title="00:26:59">acknowledging that it is always the group and never the individual that matters. </span><span title="00:27:03">Th the so-called great man theory of history is certainly at its cultural low. </span><span title="00:27:10">And yet here you are talking to us about the need to deceive, to break the </span><span title="00:27:16">law, and to affirm the violent act of creation in a very strong leadership </span><span title="00:27:23">context in which you're taking on all of this additional risk just to in part </span><span title="00:27:28">inspire and protect your people even. </span><span title="00:27:33">You seem to be a man completely out of time with the current era and it </span><span title="00:27:37">seems to suit you fine, is that wrong? </span> | |||
'''[00:27:39] Werner:''' <span title="00:27:39"> Not really, there are few of us, but I wish there were more. </span><span title="00:27:44">But of course, what we are doing in filmmaking is not always </span><span title="00:27:51">based on boardroom decision. </span><span title="00:27:53">The way we shape the dialogue today in the Hollywood industry is </span><span title="00:27:58">determined by boardroom decisions. </span><span title="00:28:01">And that's why movie-making has become so stale and so </span><span title="00:28:06">uninteresting and so predictable. </span><span title="00:28:08">So if you do the most the wildest of the stories and that's always what counts. </span><span title="00:28:14">You see, I do not step outside the boundaries of legality. </span><span title="00:28:19">It has to do with a caliber of your quest, with the depth of your story, </span><span title="00:28:25">with the vision that you are pursuing. </span><span title="00:28:28">If that has real, real depth and you know, it as enduring depth, then </span><span title="00:28:36">you have the task and the duty to do the things that are necessary. </span><span title="00:28:43">As long, as I said, as you do not damage or hurt anyone. </span> | |||
'''[00:28:49] Eric:''' <span title="00:28:49"> You are taking a fair amount of responsibility. </span><span title="00:28:51">We had Jim Watson come to this office and he's the co-discoverer </span><span title="00:28:56">of the three dimensional structure of DNA, of Watson and... </span> | |||
'''[00:29:00] Werner:''' <span title="00:29:00"> Oh yeah.. </span> | |||
'''[00:29:02] Eric:''' <span title="00:29:02"> Yeah. </span><span title="00:29:03">But he said something which was, you know, I found very </span><span title="00:29:06">disturbing, but also very sensible. </span><span title="00:29:08">He said, you're given about five opportunities to really </span><span title="00:29:12">level up in your life. </span><span title="00:29:13">This was how he saw it. </span><span title="00:29:15">And he said, you have to take each one of those, even though sometimes each </span><span title="00:29:20">of them comes with an opportunity where somebody may be put at risk or hurt. </span><span title="00:29:25">And I was curious. </span><span title="00:29:27">You have a very strong relationship with risk where you're both putting people </span><span title="00:29:32">at risk and trying to make sure you put them at risk as little as possible. </span><span title="00:29:36">If both of those are true, do you believe that, let's say Watson was </span><span title="00:29:40">correct, that you have to take these opportunities even if they do put others </span><span title="00:29:43">at risk, or do you really have a no harm? </span> | |||
'''[00:29:46] Werner:''' <span title="00:29:46"> Well, I think it's more than five opportunities, these things I've </span><span title="00:29:52">seen a hundred times, these moments, and risk-taking per se, has no great value. </span><span title="00:30:02">It depends on what you're doing and what kind of purpose it serves. </span><span title="00:30:08">And it's not a quality, per se, to take risks. </span><span title="00:30:13">I try to avoid risks, and you see, my proof that I have been prudent </span><span title="00:30:22">circumspect, and well-organized is that in over 70 films, not a single </span><span title="00:30:31">one of my actors ever was hurt. </span><span title="00:30:34">Not one. </span><span title="00:30:35">I was hurt sometimes. </span><span title="00:30:37">Sometimes it has happened that some very close collaborator physically next to </span><span title="00:30:43">me, like a cinematographer with a 20 kilo, a handheld camera at that time </span><span title="00:30:49">heavy, flies through the air on the deck of a ship that bangs into a rock. </span><span title="00:30:56">And we were flying some 10 meters, and he bangs with his hand on the deck, </span><span title="00:31:02">and the camera split his hand apart. </span><span title="00:31:04">So yes, it happens in, he didn't mind, by the way. </span> | |||
'''[00:31:08] Eric:''' <span title="00:31:08"> Well, he volunteered. </span><span title="00:31:09">Am I right that he... </span> | |||
'''[00:31:10] Werner:''' <span title="00:31:10"> Of course he did, every single one.. </span> | |||
'''[00:31:12] Eric:''' <span title="00:31:12"> You said, who's coming with me? </span><span title="00:31:13">Nobody has to. </span> | |||
'''[00:31:15] Werner:''' <span title="00:31:15"> Yeah, sure. </span><span title="00:31:16">And actually in this case, when we went with cameras through the rapids, that </span><span title="00:31:23">and we had shot the sequence with cameras on the, there's no real shores, but in </span><span title="00:31:31">the rocks on either sides of these rapids. </span><span title="00:31:35">I was even pushed by some collaborators. </span><span title="00:31:38">We should have a camera on board. </span><span title="00:31:40">I said, really? </span><span title="00:31:41">Yes, of course. </span><span title="00:31:41">I see that, but we do not know what's going to happen. </span><span title="00:31:45">It may sink. </span><span title="00:31:46">What happens then? </span><span title="00:31:48">The ship probably is not going to sink because we established it with a lot of </span><span title="00:31:55">very, very solid air chambers in there. </span><span title="00:31:58">It's probably wouldn't have sunk even under the worst case scenarios. </span> | |||
'''[00:32:06] Eric:''' <span title="00:32:06"> Let me ask you a very, very difficult question then. </span><span title="00:32:09">Assume that you were trying to make Fitzcarraldo, in which you drag this </span><span title="00:32:13">steamer over a mountain and it's not the year 1982, but it's some year, </span><span title="00:32:20">maybe around now, maybe a few years in the future where it's possible to do </span><span title="00:32:23">this completely with computer generated imagery so that you could do it in CGI. </span><span title="00:32:29">Now my question would be this. </span><span title="00:32:31">Would, if it produced the same visual effect as you did in Fitzcarraldo, </span><span title="00:32:38">would it be worth doing if it could be done cheaply and safely? </span> | |||
'''[00:32:42] Werner:''' <span title="00:32:42"> No, it doesn't it doesn't create the same effect. </span><span title="00:32:46">And even the five year old, six year old viewers know it, this was a digital </span><span title="00:32:52">effect and you will always know it. </span><span title="00:32:56">I don't think that digital effects will ever create some sort of an equal </span><span title="00:33:04">experience, maybe to some degree visually. </span><span title="00:33:08">But, you see, moving a ship over a mountain means you're </span><span title="00:33:15">exposing yourself to things that are unthinkable and unexpected. </span><span title="00:33:21">You incorporate, in your approach, the totally unknown and the </span><span title="00:33:28">totally unknown invades you and the unexpected and the unthinkable invades </span><span title="00:33:33">you every hour, and your create something, an authenticity of story. </span><span title="00:33:40">Not only visual effect, you create an authenticity of </span><span title="00:33:44">event that is unparalleled. </span><span title="00:33:47">And it's unparalleled by anyone who is sitting on a computer and creates </span><span title="00:33:53">a steam belt moving up on a hill. </span><span title="00:33:57">It does not, and it will not do so in the future. </span> | |||
'''[00:34:01] Eric:''' <span title="00:34:01"> You're quite confident of that. </span> | |||
'''[00:34:04] Werner:''' <span title="00:34:04"> Because the experience of a thing rooted in reality cannot be replaced. </span><span title="00:34:16">It can be substituted. </span><span title="00:34:18">It can be somehow paralleled in a way by an artificial world, by digital effects. </span><span title="00:34:27">Until today, I would still insist I should, if it's me who does </span><span title="00:34:33">it, I should move the ship. </span><span title="00:34:36">In one piece, 360 tons. </span> | |||
'''[00:34:39] Eric:''' <span title="00:34:39"> Right. </span> | |||
'''[00:34:40] Werner:''' <span title="00:34:40"> And let the others do their stuff and it will be inferior to mine. </span> | |||
'''[00:34:45] Eric:''' <span title="00:34:45"> Well, this is just it. </span><span title="00:34:47">I mean, you mentioned professional wrestling and Jesse Ventura and, you know, </span><span title="00:34:53">there is a theory amongst our group that maybe professional wrestling is a lot more </span><span title="00:34:58">real than anyone really wants to believe, that it's commonly thought to be fake. </span><span title="00:35:04">One interpretation of your works sir, is that you are making many more </span><span title="00:35:09">documentaries than you claim to be because in fact, in something like </span><span title="00:35:12">Fitzcarraldo, it's a fictional story about a man moving a ship over a </span><span title="00:35:17">mountain made by a real man who moved a real ship over a real mountain. </span><span title="00:35:21">And I remember when it came out in 1982, I was in college, we were electrified </span><span title="00:35:26">by this concept that if it had been done in CGI and we had known that it </span><span title="00:35:31">had been in CGI, we would not have been that interested in the story. </span><span title="00:35:34">But it was the fact that there was an insane man moving a ship </span><span title="00:35:38">over a mountain in reality... </span> | |||
'''[00:35:39] Werner:''' <span title="00:35:39"> Clinically sane man towing a ship over a mountain. </span> | |||
'''[00:35:42] Eric:''' <span title="00:35:42"> Sorry, I don't want to... </span><span title="00:35:44">You want to cast to the aspersions, but functionally, sir, it is a crazy quest. </span><span title="00:35:50">And you spoke about it in terms... </span> | |||
'''[00:35:52] Werner:''' <span title="00:35:52"> No, no, it's not a crazy quest. </span> | |||
'''[00:35:53] Eric:''' <span title="00:35:53"> Did you speak of it in those terms at the time? </span> | |||
'''[00:35:55] Werner:''' <span title="00:35:55"> No, no, no. </span><span title="00:35:55">It's not a crazy quest, it was doable. </span><span title="00:35:58">And I do the doable, you see, you do not go out and try to, let's </span><span title="00:36:06">say, go to Mars and spend there half a year on Mars in covering... </span><span title="00:36:12">in getting footage. </span><span title="00:36:13">You will fail. </span><span title="00:36:15">It's not going to work. </span><span title="00:36:16">And we will see the technological utopia is coming to an end in our very century, </span><span title="00:36:24">like we saw social utopias coming to an inevitable end in the last century. </span><span title="00:36:32">Communism paradise on earth. </span><span title="00:36:35">Nazism, a master race, dominating the planet and on. </span><span title="00:36:41">So we will see... </span><span title="00:36:42">So do the doable. </span><span title="00:36:43">Do the doable, and I knew it was doable because I had figured out how </span><span title="00:36:49">to move a very, very heavy object in one piece on top of a hill for example. </span> | |||
'''[00:36:55] Eric:''' <span title="00:36:55"> Trying to figure out the how the ancients moved... </span> | |||
'''[00:36:57] Werner:''' <span title="00:36:57"> Yes, neolithic people. </span> | |||
'''[00:36:59] Eric:''' <span title="00:36:59"> Say more about how you solved that, you saw that as a puzzle. </span> | |||
'''[00:37:03] Werner:''' <span title="00:37:03"> I was searching a coastline of Brittany for a completely different </span><span title="00:37:07">movie and I ended up at night when it was already dark at Carnac. </span><span title="00:37:13">It's 4,000 menhirs, these slabs of stone erected in parallel lines. </span><span title="00:37:19">Hill, uphill, downhill, uphill, down. </span><span title="00:37:21">It's, it's stunning. </span><span title="00:37:23">In what I saw in the headlights was stunning. </span><span title="00:37:26">And I slept in the car, and next morning I see there's a little kiosk. </span><span title="00:37:31">They sold brochures, and in the brochure, it's written that this </span><span title="00:37:36">couldn't have been done by neolithic people, they didn't have any technology. </span><span title="00:37:43">Yes, they had a rope and things like this. </span><span title="00:37:46">It could have been only alien astronauts, and I thought, bullshit, I can let... </span><span title="00:37:54">I will not move from this place until I as a niolithic person could do it. </span><span title="00:38:02">So what I would do is, let's assume I have the rock already, 300-400 tons. </span><span title="00:38:09">I would need disciplined men to build a ramp, but maybe one </span><span title="00:38:14">kilometer ramp, which has hardly any inclination, which is almost flat. </span><span title="00:38:20">At the end. </span><span title="00:38:20">It would end up in a 10 meter high hill and I would take a crater hole </span><span title="00:38:27">into the Hill and then I would move. </span><span title="00:38:30">Then I would move the stone on oak trunks, on hardened oak trunks, and it's very easy </span><span title="00:38:40">to move it, either with the turnstiles and ropes, or pushing it in a way with levers. </span><span title="00:38:48">And at the end it would drop into the crater hole and then you would have </span><span title="00:38:53">it erect with a heavier part up, and then you would remove the hill until, </span><span title="00:38:59">let's say, it was sticking only into two meters of grounded, harden the </span><span title="00:39:04">ground, so you would have it erected. </span><span title="00:39:07">And I kept puzzling about one, a menhir, the heaviest ever, 1100 </span><span title="00:39:17">tons heavy, near the coastal place Locmariaquer, not too far from Carnac. </span><span title="00:39:24">And this stone, this slab, was broken into four pieces. </span><span title="00:39:30">In the major, the biggest of all pieces, at least 600-700 tons heavy, was aligned </span><span title="00:39:38">in one direction, and a little bit further out, the rest of the fragmentation </span><span title="00:39:43">was perfectly aligned in one line. </span><span title="00:39:46">So why does this happen, if that stone falls and breaks, it will </span><span title="00:39:52">align the fragments, but it didn't. </span><span title="00:39:55">So I think what has happened is that they moved the stone, dropped </span><span title="00:40:00">it into a hole, and it broke. </span><span title="00:40:03">It broke at the rim, and the smaller fragments aligned, and thousands </span><span title="00:40:09">of years later due to erosion, some of these menhirs, fall over, topple </span><span title="00:40:15">over, and it toppled over in a different, in the wrong direction. </span><span title="00:40:20">So an accident, a neolithic accident, which must have happened, </span><span title="00:40:25">spoke to my as if it was proof of my way, how I would do it. </span><span title="00:40:31">And that's how I moved the ship over the mountain. </span> | |||
'''[00:40:35] Eric:''' <span title="00:40:35"> Wow. </span> | |||
'''[00:40:36] Werner:''' <span title="00:40:36"> So, and I knew it was doable. </span><span title="00:40:38">If it was doable for neolithic people 7,000 years ago, I can </span><span title="00:40:44">do the same thing as well. </span><span title="00:40:47">I have no doubt whatsoever. </span><span title="00:40:50">And in an ideal case, you would, according to primitive laws of </span><span title="00:40:56">physics, you could have one single child pulling it over the mountain. </span><span title="00:41:01">Let's say you introduced a pulley system of 10,000 fold returns. </span><span title="00:41:08">You pull on a string five miles until the ship moves 50 yards, and the </span><span title="00:41:16">child could pull it over a mountain. </span><span title="00:41:20">So you have to think you have to think, the bold ideas, but also those </span><span title="00:41:28">that are outside the common trend. </span><span title="00:41:31">It can only have been the alien astronauts that I showed you </span><span title="00:41:39">because I'm very proud of it. </span><span title="00:41:41">You should try to get hold of it because it's very interesting. </span><span title="00:41:46">It's called the Vanishing Area Paradox. </span><span title="00:41:49">I keep it in my agenda all the time, and it was published </span><span title="00:41:53">in the Scientific American. </span><span title="00:41:57">And it's very strange, you have a configuration of elements of </span><span title="00:42:03">pieces, and when you rearrange the configuration of these, all of a sudden </span><span title="00:42:10">there's an empty space of something that has filled out the entire space </span><span title="00:42:15">without a millimeter in between. </span><span title="00:42:19">And I kept thinking about it because it defies all my experience with reality. </span><span title="00:42:28">So within my reality, it is unthinkable, it is impossible. </span><span title="00:42:33">So, and I kept thinking about it and I was misled. </span><span title="00:42:36">The whole thing is a hoax. </span><span title="00:42:38">It turns out it's a hoax, it's fraudulent, and it gives it a certain veracity because </span><span title="00:42:47">it was posed this Vanishing Area Paradox. </span><span title="00:42:52">The question is posed in the scientific American, you do not believe that they </span><span title="00:42:57">are cheating you, and they cheat you. </span><span title="00:43:00">And what is happening is when you look at it very precisely, the area where all </span><span title="00:43:07">of a sudden in the middle there is an empty space, has been artificially made </span><span title="00:43:12">slightly larger by giving slight, slight more angles in the straight lines, and </span><span title="00:43:19">summing up creates a little empty space. </span> | |||
'''[00:43:22] Eric:''' <span title="00:43:22"> Yeah. </span> | |||
'''[00:43:23] Werner:''' <span title="00:43:23"> And I solved it myself because I thought, I cannot solve it because </span><span title="00:43:32">it defies my sense of reality, and the sense of reality of everyone around me. </span><span title="00:43:39">Something is wrong. </span><span title="00:43:42">What could be wrong. </span><span title="00:43:44">What could be wrong. </span><span title="00:43:46">And I started to check, and one of the questions I asked myself, could it be that </span><span title="00:43:53">this is a hoax, that this is a fraud, and if it's a fraud, how do they cheat you? </span><span title="00:44:00">How do they cheat your senses? </span><span title="00:44:02">Senses of observation in this case. </span> | |||
'''[00:44:06] Eric:''' <span title="00:44:06"> Well, that touches on something that fascinated me. </span><span title="00:44:09">There's a quote of yours where apparently you are facing a booing audience. </span><span title="00:44:13">Booing at you and you had the sense to say to them, you are all wrong. </span> | |||
'''[00:44:19] Werner:''' <span title="00:44:19"> Sure, and they were all wrong. </span> | |||
'''[00:44:21] Eric:''' <span title="00:44:21"> They were all wrong. </span> | |||
'''[00:44:22] Werner:''' <span title="00:44:22"> Yes. </span> | |||
'''[00:44:22] Eric:''' <span title="00:44:22"> What is it in you that has the courage to stand up to seemingly, </span><span title="00:44:29">I don't know, arbitrary levels of negativity to problems that other </span><span title="00:44:34">people think are insoluble, where they have to invoke ancient aliens. </span><span title="00:44:38">There's something so disagreeable about your personality that you're </span><span title="00:44:43">capable of shepherding an idea through that much negativity. </span><span title="00:44:47">What trait is that? </span> | |||
'''[00:44:51] Werner:''' <span title="00:44:51"> Well, it was a specific case when I was filming the fires </span><span title="00:44:55">in Kuwait in the first Gulf war when Saddam Hussein's retreating armies </span><span title="00:45:05">set every single oil well on fire. </span><span title="00:45:08">And I filmed it in a way that it looks as if it was shot on </span><span title="00:45:12">a, like a science fiction film. </span><span title="00:45:14">It cannot be our planet. </span><span title="00:45:15">And yet we know it must have been filmed on our planet. </span><span title="00:45:19">And, so it's highly aesthetic, highly stylized, and in the immediate outcry </span><span title="00:45:32">was a steady sizing of the horror. </span><span title="00:45:36">But it wasn't really horror, it was not horror for any human being. </span><span title="00:45:40">Nobody got burnt. </span><span title="00:45:41">Of course, it was a crime against creation itself, obscuring the </span><span title="00:45:46">sky for a wide, wide area, and something that should not happen. </span><span title="00:45:52">Not only a crime against the human race, it was a crime against creation. </span><span title="00:46:01">And this screaming, and people actually spat at me when I walked </span><span title="00:46:06">through the central island. </span><span title="00:46:08">That somehow reinforced my resolve, and I stepped up and I said Dante in </span><span title="00:46:15">his Inferno has done exactly the same. </span><span title="00:46:18">Hieronymus Bosch has done exactly the same in his hellish visions </span><span title="00:46:24">and Goya in his Los desatres de la guerra has done the same thing. </span><span title="00:46:30">And then in the end, I said, and you are all wrong. </span><span title="00:46:33">So do we have to burn the book, the divine comedy now, do we have to? </span><span title="00:46:41">Of course we don't. </span><span title="00:46:43">So indeed, there's an amount of certainty in me that and it's not </span><span title="00:46:51">really anything that I can say was bold. </span><span title="00:46:54">It was totally natural to say that. </span> | |||
'''[00:46:58] Eric:''' <span title="00:46:58"> Yeah. </span><span title="00:46:58">I mean to me, it sort of strikes me as, we need people to inspire us by showing </span><span title="00:47:04">us that it's not only possible, that it's necessary to stand up to large </span><span title="00:47:10">numbers of people inside of a crowd. </span><span title="00:47:12">Now, one of the things that... </span> | |||
'''[00:47:13] Werner:''' <span title="00:47:13"> I could have, it was literally the entire crowd... </span> | |||
'''[00:47:16] Eric:''' <span title="00:47:16"> The entire crowd. </span> | |||
'''[00:47:18] Werner:''' <span title="00:47:18"> Well, that's how I perceived walking down the central aisle, there </span><span title="00:47:24">probably was an amount of well-wishers and there must have been also some </span><span title="00:47:30">applause, but it was overwhelming. </span><span title="00:47:33">It was so overwhelming that some very credible reviewers like Amos </span><span title="00:47:40">Vogel, who wrote for The Village Voice, describes the scene. </span><span title="00:47:45">He described it. </span><span title="00:47:46">So it's not a figment of my fantasy. </span> | |||
'''[00:47:50] Eric:''' <span title="00:47:50"> You know that there's this very strange story with </span><span title="00:47:52">the reviewer, Joe Morgenstern. </span><span title="00:47:54">When he first saw Bonnie and Clyde, he gave it a terrible review because </span><span title="00:47:59">the violence was so disturbing and it was set to uptempo, happy music. </span><span title="00:48:04">And he said, well, this is an abomination. </span><span title="00:48:06">And then strangely, a week or two later, he said, I have to review this film again. </span><span title="00:48:10">I was totally wrong. </span><span title="00:48:12">The film is a masterpiece because it took a while to just understand </span><span title="00:48:16">that that wasn't an error, but it was actually a brilliant artistic choice. </span><span title="00:48:19">Do you find that? </span> | |||
'''[00:48:21] Werner:''' <span title="00:48:21"> You do not find it nowadays anymore. </span> | |||
'''[00:48:23] Eric:''' <span title="00:48:23"> No one will listen to.... </span> | |||
'''[00:48:24] Werner:''' <span title="00:48:24"> It must have been 40 years ago that somebody had the nerve and the </span><span title="00:48:29">guts and the caliber to declare himself wrong and taking a new fresh look at it. </span><span title="00:48:37">So, you hardly see it at all. </span> | |||
'''[00:48:40] Eric:''' <span title="00:48:40"> So let me ask, I would love to ask you one final question before </span><span title="00:48:43">opening it up to the audience. </span><span title="00:48:44">You've spoken quite a lot for a filmmaker about the importance of reading and </span><span title="00:48:49">the written word, and you've written obviously beautifully, and so many of your </span><span title="00:48:55">thoughts in this Guide for the Perplexed. </span><span title="00:48:57">And you have previously spoken about how television was turning us into idiots and </span><span title="00:49:05">dumbing us down, and that reading would be the key quality that determined who </span><span title="00:49:10">would inherit power in the future world. </span><span title="00:49:14">What do you see in the 21st century as having changed in this equation, with </span><span title="00:49:22">television having gotten much better, and the internet having seemingly gotten us </span><span title="00:49:27">into a state where we weren't even able to get there with the idiot box, as it was? </span> | |||
'''[00:49:31] Werner:''' <span title="00:49:31"> Well, television hasn't gotten that much better in some segments. </span><span title="00:49:34">Yes, in these long, limited, many season big stories that all of a </span><span title="00:49:42">sudden you can narrate large, large, expansive forms like War and Peace. </span><span title="00:49:49">So all of a sudden, we can create Dostoevsky on a TV screen, on </span><span title="00:49:54">Netflix screens or whatever. </span><span title="00:49:57">Of course the situation has become more precarious with </span><span title="00:50:01">the advent of the internet. </span><span title="00:50:05">But of course they are forces that have started way, way before the internet. </span><span title="00:50:11">We cannot blame it all, for example, people who would </span><span title="00:50:16">read, the numbers have declined considerably since 50 years or so. </span><span title="00:50:24">And today in universities, even in humanities or even in classics department </span><span title="00:50:31">where they should read ancient Greek and Latin, they do not read anymore and they </span><span title="00:50:37">have a hard time, and I've witnessed it. </span><span title="00:50:39">I've witnessed it in person. </span><span title="00:50:43">They are not even capable of writing three coherent signs and </span><span title="00:50:51">expressing one coherent, brief argument, and that's alarming. </span><span title="00:50:56">That's alarming, and that's why I tell young, aspiring filmmakers, </span><span title="00:51:02">yes, watch films and do whatever you need to learn in technical terms. </span><span title="00:51:06">But read, read, read, read, read, read. </span><span title="00:51:09">If you're don't read, you will be a filmmaker, but mediocre at best. </span><span title="00:51:16">If you really want to become somebody of significance, and everyone who is </span><span title="00:51:21">around at this time of significance is reading, they're all reading, everyone. </span><span title="00:51:29">And you are not, and it's not only for filmmaking, it's probably in </span><span title="00:51:33">your profession, the same thing. </span><span title="00:51:35">You cannot lose yourself in algorithms, and in a software questions, and </span><span title="00:51:45">in articulating of things, without conceptually being up to a very high </span><span title="00:51:52">standard of evolution, of not only technology, but civilization per se. </span><span title="00:51:58">We have a very, very deep task. </span><span title="00:52:01">And reading, in my opinion, is the thing that is absolutely needed. </span><span title="00:52:09">And what I keep saying sometimes, but nobody will understand it, but I say it </span><span title="00:52:16">anyway, traveling on foot and irrespective of the distance, and I've done very </span><span title="00:52:24">long distance traveling on foot, gives you an insight into the world itself. </span><span title="00:52:31">And I can say it only in a dictum, and I've repeated it before. </span><span title="00:52:35">The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot. </span><span title="00:52:40">Nothing else does with such clarity and such transparency, nothing, nothing. </span><span title="00:52:47">And yet nobody travels on foot. </span><span title="00:52:50">It doesn't matter. </span><span title="00:52:51">Stay where you are, but I just say it as a sign of hope. </span><span title="00:52:57">If you really want to understand the real world, and also conceptually </span><span title="00:53:03">where we are standing as human beings at this very moment in </span><span title="00:53:07">history, travel on foot and read. </span> | |||
'''[00:53:11] Eric:''' <span title="00:53:11"> Fantastic advice. </span><span title="00:53:12">Let's see if we can, anybody can follow it and I would love </span><span title="00:53:16">to open it up to questions. </span><span title="00:53:17">What questions do we have for Werner Herzog? </span> | |||
'''[00:53:22] Audience:''' <span title="00:53:22"> If there was one book or two books you would wish for this </span><span title="00:53:25">generation to read, what would it be? </span> | |||
'''[00:53:29] Werner:''' <span title="00:53:29"> Oh, it's I don't want to give you one or two books, because then you </span><span title="00:53:33">would sit down and you would read them and you'd think, yeah, you have done it. </span><span title="00:53:37">So, you should not read two books, but 2000 books. </span><span title="00:53:44">But I give you, for those who are into creative things, and </span><span title="00:53:50">including, I would say, including even creative forms of mathematics. </span><span title="00:53:57">It's a book written by an obscure British writer published in 1967 and it's called </span><span title="00:54:05">The Peregrine, about watching, it's diaries, watching peregrine falcons at a </span><span title="00:54:11">time when the falcons were almost extinct. </span><span title="00:54:15">J. </span><span title="00:54:15">A. </span><span title="00:54:16">Baker, I think we know, only after a few decades, we even </span><span title="00:54:20">know what J and A stands for. </span><span title="00:54:23">I even don't know what his first name's were and middle name. </span><span title="00:54:27">And it has prose that we have not seen since since Joseph Conrad. </span><span title="00:54:33">And it has precision of observing a small segment of the real world, </span><span title="00:54:40">with a precision and also with an emphasis and a passion, that </span><span title="00:54:45">is unprecedented in literature. </span><span title="00:54:48">So in whatever you are doing, whether you are musician, a filmmaker, </span><span title="00:54:52">into mathematics or into computers. </span><span title="00:54:55">This kind of very, very deep, relentless passion for what you are doing. </span><span title="00:55:02">Very specific. </span><span title="00:55:03">And it's a great, wonderful book. </span><span title="00:55:08">What else? </span><span title="00:55:12">Well, there are many, but I have a list of mandatory books for my rogue film school, </span><span title="00:55:18">and some guerilla-style antithesis to film schools, and there's five or six books. </span><span title="00:55:26">What comes to mind is Bernal DĂaz del Castillo, The Discovery </span><span title="00:55:33">and Conquest of New Spain, the original title is much, much longer. </span><span title="00:55:39">He was a foot man of Cortez, and when he was old, he wrote from his, apparently </span><span title="00:55:46">some diaries and reminiscences. </span><span title="00:55:48">He writes down an incredible story, incredibly rich in details and insight </span><span title="00:55:56">into the, into the heart of men. </span><span title="00:56:00">Anything else? </span><span title="00:56:01">Read the Russians, read Hölderlin and Kleist, the </span><span title="00:56:07">Germans, BĂŒchner, also a German. </span><span title="00:56:12">Read Hemingway, read Joseph Conrad, the short stories in particular. </span><span title="00:56:19">So but don't believe that this would make you into a different person. </span><span title="00:56:28">It's, it's the permanence of reading, the insistence of reading. </span> | |||
'''[00:56:36] Audience:''' <span title="00:56:36"> Is it more fulfilling to you to... </span> | |||
'''[00:56:38] Werner:''' <span title="00:56:38"> Can you speak up a little bit? </span> | |||
'''[00:56:40] Audience:''' <span title="00:56:40"> Is it more fulfilling for you to expose people to </span><span title="00:56:44">nuance, where they thought there were extremes or the reverse? </span> | |||
'''[00:56:49] Eric:''' <span title="00:56:49"> Is it more important to expose people to nuance or? </span> | |||
'''[00:56:53] Audience:''' <span title="00:56:53"> More fulfilling when you expose people to nuance where they had thought </span><span title="00:56:57">there was extreme or the opposite? </span> | |||
'''[00:57:02] Werner:''' <span title="00:57:02"> I've never asked myself this question. </span><span title="00:57:04">It doesn't factor in my work. </span><span title="00:57:08">Well, I follow a very, very clear vision. </span><span title="00:57:14">I see a film very, very clearly, and of course it has a big story and it </span><span title="00:57:21">has extremes in it and it has nuances. </span><span title="00:57:25">And of course, I would never want to touch a story that was not really big. </span><span title="00:57:32">Well, I was convinced this is big and it has excesses and </span><span title="00:57:36">it has all sorts of things. </span><span title="00:57:37">At the same time, the real life, the real life comes from the </span><span title="00:57:43">nuance and from the details. </span><span title="00:57:46">So, but it's I cannot even separate it, I cannot give you a satisfying </span><span title="00:57:53">juxtaposition of both, but it doesn't function in the way I make my films. </span> | |||
'''[00:58:08] Audience:''' <span title="00:58:08"> I heard you like carrying bolt cutters, have </span><span title="00:58:11">those ever gotten you in trouble? </span> | |||
'''[00:58:13] Werner:''' <span title="00:58:13"> Bolt cutters you have to take metaphorically, I </span><span title="00:58:22">have a whole list of things. </span><span title="00:58:25">Does anyone have the book A Guide for the Perplexed here, because I see it here </span><span title="00:58:32">on the can you give it to me please? </span><span title="00:58:34">Thank you. </span><span title="00:58:35">A Guide for the Perplexed, and we spoke about before, the title is so beautiful, </span><span title="00:58:41">I had to steal it from Maimonides, the great Jewish philosopher, middle </span><span title="00:58:47">age Spain, I think Seville or CĂłrdoba, I don't even remember, but anyway. </span><span title="00:58:54">And here on the back end, by the way, it's a real bear, it's no Photoshop. </span><span title="00:59:01">My wife, who sits back there, did this photo. </span><span title="00:59:05">I don't know how it was put together, but it's sums a lot of things up </span><span title="00:59:14">and it speaks of bolt cutters. </span><span title="00:59:16">Always take the initiative. </span><span title="00:59:18">There's nothing wrong with spending a night in a jail cell, if it means </span><span title="00:59:23">getting the shot you need, send all your dogs and one might return with </span><span title="00:59:28">prey, never wallow in your travels, despair must be kept private and brief. </span><span title="00:59:35">Learn to live with your mistakes. </span><span title="00:59:38">Expand your knowledge and understanding of music and literature, old and modern. </span><span title="00:59:44">That roll of unexposed celluloid you have in your hand might be </span><span title="00:59:48">the last in existence, so do something impressive with it. </span><span title="00:59:53">The laptop in front of you may be the last one in existence, do </span><span title="00:59:58">something good and impressive with it. </span><span title="01:00:01">There's never an excuse not to finish a film. </span><span title="01:00:04">Carry bolt cutters everywhere. </span><span title="01:00:07">Thwart institutional cowardice. </span><span title="01:00:11">There's too much institutional cowardice in the film industry, and I </span><span title="01:00:16">do believe the computer industry and software and so, has bolder designs. </span><span title="01:00:29">I think there's not too much institutional cowardice. </span><span title="01:00:34">It comes now after things like Facebook have been established. </span><span title="01:00:39">How do we stop excesses on Facebook? </span><span title="01:00:43">How do we stop excesses on Instagram? </span><span title="01:00:48">Do we show, do we have to stop a real beheading of a hostage </span><span title="01:00:53">in real time or do we not do it? </span><span title="01:00:55">So the institutionalization of content is coming post festum, after it has been </span><span title="01:01:04">normally but in the film industry, for example, the institutional cowardice </span><span title="01:01:12">comes before you even make a move. </span><span title="01:01:14">They ask you, do you have, for example, E and O insurance? </span><span title="01:01:23">Do you have a, how do you call it, some sort of insurance, a completion bond? </span><span title="01:01:35">No, I don't, and I make a film anyway, but in that case, I had to </span><span title="01:01:41">finance it out of my own pocket. </span><span title="01:01:44">Can I move in a wild way back to a very early question about </span><span title="01:01:53">something that is fabricated, like WrestleMania has a lot of truth in it. </span><span title="01:01:58">They get away with bruises and dislocated elbows. </span><span title="01:02:03">The last film I made is a feature film called Family Romance LLC. </span><span title="01:02:10">Romance is a business in Japan, in the Japanese language, where you can </span><span title="01:02:15">hire a missing friend, a family a father of a family during a wedding </span><span title="01:02:23">ceremony, because the real father allegedly suffers from epilepsy. </span><span title="01:02:30">In truth, he's an alcoholic and cannot be shown to the groom's parents and family. </span><span title="01:02:37">And there's an interesting thing that happens, the men who actually, in </span><span title="01:02:41">reality, founded this company, Family Romance, who sends out 1,600 agents </span><span title="01:02:49">and actors to help you feel less lonesome and replace a family member. </span><span title="01:02:56">He was filmed by Japanese television. </span><span title="01:03:00">They interviewed him and they interviewed one of his clients, </span><span title="01:03:05">who in his solitude had rented a friend, and he's in the film as well. </span><span title="01:03:11">It turns out that the client was actually not a client, he was also </span><span title="01:03:18">a rented member from Family Romance. </span><span title="01:03:21">He was an imposter put in front of the NHK cameras, NHK apologized </span><span title="01:03:29">profusely in print and on the air. </span><span title="01:03:33">And the founder of Family Romance says something very, very significant now, he </span><span title="01:03:39">says, I do believe that the imposter that was sent out from my pool of actor tells </span><span title="01:03:52">you more of the truth than a real one. </span><span title="01:03:56">The real one would lie to the cameras because in Japan, in their society, </span><span title="01:04:02">you have to keep face and you cannot admit that your life is miserable, </span><span title="01:04:06">and you were lonesome, and you were crying at home in your pillow. </span><span title="01:04:10">And so, this person, the real person would not say that, he would lie to the camera, </span><span title="01:04:16">but Mike, my man who was put in front of your camera, my man who has done it 200 </span><span title="01:04:23">times, comforting solitary people, he tells you the gist, the real truth about </span><span title="01:04:30">what is going on, and I think he's right. </span><span title="01:04:34">I'm sure he's right. </span> | |||
'''[01:04:37] Eric:''' <span title="01:04:37"> Yeah, I'm very... </span> | |||
'''[01:04:39] Werner:''' <span title="01:04:39"> The imposter has more truth in him than the real person, who </span><span title="01:04:45">wants to keep a facade of whatever well-behaved behavior in public. </span> | |||
'''[01:04:53] Eric:''' <span title="01:04:53"> Do we have some other questions? </span> | |||
'''[01:04:59] Audience:''' <span title="01:04:59"> If you could make a film about our generation, or the generation </span><span title="01:05:03">that sits in this room, what do you think the logline would be? </span> | |||
'''[01:05:07] Werner:''' <span title="01:05:07"> I wouldn't know any logline, but I have done a film on the internet. </span><span title="01:05:15">Lo and behold, which, has appealed very much to your generation </span><span title="01:05:22">or even the younger ones. </span><span title="01:05:23">You are already a veteran. </span><span title="01:05:26">It's the 15 year olds who probably come up and have to teach you, </span><span title="01:05:31">the 35 year old or 25 year old. </span><span title="01:05:36">No, I wouldn't know a logline, but I have made a lot of films that apparently, </span><span title="01:05:45">were for a general audience when I made them 40 years ago, 45 years </span><span title="01:05:50">ago, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. </span><span title="01:05:54">All of a sudden I get emails of 15 year old, young kids, from Missoula </span><span title="01:06:01">Montana, because today they can have access to the film by streaming or </span><span title="01:06:08">other ways through the internet. </span><span title="01:06:10">Piracy, for example, which is a successful distribution system. </span><span title="01:06:17">And all of a sudden, it's the very, very young who respond to my films. </span><span title="01:06:24">And it's not foreign to me, I have always made films for those who are mentally </span><span title="01:06:34">active and who are in turmoil and who are looking out for organizing their lives. </span><span title="01:06:43">So I have always been, in a way, I've been young and now the film in Japan is </span><span title="01:06:48">a return to the times when I was 23, 24, 25, when I made Aguirre, the Wrath of God.</span><span title="01:06:58">You wouldn't know what would come after the next bend of the river. </span><span title="01:07:02">What there be rapids or not? </span><span title="01:07:05">So, and this kind of readiness to face whatever is going to be thrown at you, </span><span title="01:07:14">and you just face it and you deal with it. </span> | |||
'''[01:07:18] Eric:''' <span title="01:07:18"> Do you actually, in terms of the generation that might </span><span title="01:07:23">now be rediscovering your films. </span><span title="01:07:26">Do you have any thoughts about the way in which we are going back and </span><span title="01:07:30">reevaluating cinematic work based on our new feelings about the directors? </span><span title="01:07:36">I'm thinking of Tarantino who put Uma Thurman at risk in Kill Bill, </span><span title="01:07:44">which I thought was a fantastic film, and Woody Allen, of course, with his </span><span title="01:07:47">difficulties having his work reevaluated. </span><span title="01:07:50">Are we how do you feel about bodies of work being reprocessed through the lens </span><span title="01:07:58">of the alleged failures of the creators? </span> | |||
'''[01:08:01] Werner:''' <span title="01:08:01"> I think there will be a renascence, and we see it already, for </span><span title="01:08:05">example, classical music, all of a sudden has, I just read yesterday or today, has </span><span title="01:08:13">new platforms on the internet, that's all steered towards mainstream pop. </span><span title="01:08:20">All of a sudden you can access it. </span><span title="01:08:22">For example, in movies, The Criterion Collection, which is a </span><span title="01:08:26">very, very fine collection of films, had disappeared and reappeared </span><span title="01:08:32">apparently as it's either independent streaming label or within Amazon. </span><span title="01:08:39">I have to find out. </span><span title="01:08:40">I don't know yet, but all of a sudden these things are back. </span><span title="01:08:43">And, the 15 year old from Missoula, Montana is not just </span><span title="01:08:50">back, he is just emerging. </span><span title="01:08:53">So now I have no doubts, that we are gonna see films set outside of the </span><span title="01:09:03">regular mainstream, but have depth and vision and wonderful stories. </span><span title="01:09:09">They will not disappear. </span><span title="01:09:12">The shallow will disappear. </span><span title="01:09:14">The shallow of of yesterday. </span><span title="01:09:16">When you look at talk shows, so at pop shows, often 1960s, it's </span><span title="01:09:23">just stunning how shallow they are and they disappear very quickly. </span> | |||
'''[01:09:30] Eric:''' <span title="01:09:30"> Yeah, are there some other questions? </span> | |||
'''[01:09:35] Audience:''' <span title="01:09:35"> You mentioned that technological utopianism will end just as social </span><span title="01:09:40">utopianism ended in the past century. </span><span title="01:09:44">What do you think that looks like, or perhaps what occupies </span><span title="01:09:47">the minds of men next? </span> | |||
'''[01:09:48] Werner:''' <span title="01:09:48"> Well, when I'm speaking about a technological utopia that inevitably </span><span title="01:09:56">will come to an end, what comes to mind is immediately space colonization. </span><span title="01:10:03">Not only is it an obscenity, it's also undoable. </span><span title="01:10:09">Obscenity because it hints at us, the human race, like locusts grazing </span><span title="01:10:16">our planet empty, and then moving on. </span><span title="01:10:19">We can move onto Mars, for example, but it should be contained and it's </span><span title="01:10:24">doable for a few scientists, a few astronauts who have a small, tiny </span><span title="01:10:29">little habitat, where they have enough drinking water, enough shelter against </span><span title="01:10:33">radiation, and enough air to breathe. </span><span title="01:10:37">Yes, we can create that. </span><span title="01:10:39">We will not put 1 million humans on planet Mars. </span><span title="01:10:45">It's not going to happen. </span><span title="01:10:47">It's technically not really doable and unwise, and a part from Mars, we cannot </span><span title="01:10:54">reach anything outside of our solar system because it's simply too far. </span><span title="01:10:59">It would take your 110,000 years to reach the next one, which is only three and a </span><span title="01:11:05">half or four and a half light years away. </span><span title="01:11:07">We just won't be able to do it, period. </span><span title="01:11:12">And this kind of illusion, this kind of utopia, technical utopia, will come to a </span><span title="01:11:20">fairly quick end in our century or other utopia that come to mind, immortality. </span><span title="01:11:30">Of course, we can stretch out longevity to a certain point, but that's about it. </span><span title="01:11:36">We are going to die. </span><span title="01:11:38">That's what the entire creation everywhere, and not only on our planet, </span><span title="01:11:43">everywhere, points to the same thing, that there's an impermanence of what is around </span><span title="01:11:51">everywhere, so that's one of the things. </span><span title="01:11:56">I have to think about other utopias, technical utopias, but </span><span title="01:12:02">you are much closer to approaching technical utopias than I am. </span><span title="01:12:09">So you have to find out what we should do and what we should not </span><span title="01:12:13">do, and what is a utopia and what is within realities of human beings. </span> | |||
'''[01:12:24] Eric:''' <span title="01:12:24"> You have time for one or two last questions. </span> | |||
'''[01:12:27] Audience:''' <span title="01:12:27"> Mr. </span><span title="01:12:27">Herzog, I would like to ask... </span> | |||
'''[01:12:29] Werner:''' <span title="01:12:29"> Can you speak up a little? </span> | |||
'''[01:12:31] Audience:''' <span title="01:12:31"> I'd like to ask about the way you think a camera </span><span title="01:12:35">changes a real situation. </span><span title="01:12:37">The way in which you talk about the real world, when you interject </span><span title="01:12:42">a camera into it, how it affects the perception of people who are </span><span title="01:12:47">aware that the camera is there. </span> | |||
'''[01:12:50] Werner:''' <span title="01:12:50"> Yeah. </span><span title="01:12:50">It's an old philosophical question and a physical question of how </span><span title="01:12:55">deep do you insert your camera or your position as an observer? </span><span title="01:13:01">Does it change the reality that's out there? </span><span title="01:13:04">Hopefully it does because I'm a creator. </span><span title="01:13:07">I'm not an observation camera in the bank, that waits for 15 years </span><span title="01:13:13">and no bank robber ever shows up. </span><span title="01:13:15">So we are not, we are not the fly on the wall. </span><span title="01:13:18">I want to insert myself. </span><span title="01:13:20">I want to create, I want to mold, I want to influence my </span><span title="01:13:25">story, even the documentaries. </span><span title="01:13:28">And I do change facts. </span><span title="01:13:34">And I'm quoting now, André Gide, the French writer who said: "I change </span><span title="01:13:40">facts to such a degree that they resemble truth more than reality." </span><span title="01:13:47">And it's a wonderful way to say it. </span><span title="01:13:50">And, you'll see you are too. </span><span title="01:13:54">If you are seriously asking the question with an indignant undertone, it means </span><span title="01:14:01">that you are very much fact oriented, which I don't believe in your case, </span><span title="01:14:06">but many people are too fact oriented and cinema does not have to be. </span><span title="01:14:12">Even documentaries have to only partly be fact oriented, because </span><span title="01:14:18">the effects do not equal truth. </span><span title="01:14:22">They do not, and it's the same thing like with Family Romance, the imposter gives </span><span title="01:14:27">you a deeper truth than the real person. </span><span title="01:14:30">And my simplest of all explanations is, and I have used it many times, so if </span><span title="01:14:38">you have heard it from me, my apologies. </span><span title="01:14:42">Michelangelo creating the sculpture of the Pietà , Jesus in the arms </span><span title="01:14:50">of Mary as a 33 year old man. </span><span title="01:14:56">And when you look at Mary, she's 17. </span><span title="01:14:58">His mother is 17. </span><span title="01:15:01">So of course it's not factually correct, but he didn't want to </span><span title="01:15:06">cheat us or lie to us or whatever. </span><span title="01:15:09">He just wanted to point out an essential truth was something that resembles </span><span title="01:15:16">more truth, because I do not know what truth is, nor do mathematicians. </span><span title="01:15:22">I think only deeply religious people know what it is. </span><span title="01:15:27">So they have an easier life than those who are not religious. </span> | |||
'''[01:15:33] Eric:''' <span title="01:15:33"> Do we have a last question? </span> | |||
'''[01:15:39] Audience:''' <span title="01:15:39"> I worked years ago with David Blaine on a show called Vertigo. </span><span title="01:15:45">They had me watch a film called The Passion of the Woodcarver Steiner. </span><span title="01:15:53">There's a scene at the end with a raven, and they wanted to be very </span><span title="01:16:00">much to focus on that and find what, who the raven was in Blaine's life, </span><span title="01:16:06">and we couldn't really find them. </span><span title="01:16:08">And the implication being that the raven maybe wasn't real in your film. </span><span title="01:16:14">So I guess I have waited awhile to ask you this, but was the </span><span title="01:16:16">Raven real, and does it matter? </span><span title="01:16:18">And with all these questions about truth, are there any things in documentary </span><span title="01:16:22">film that would be revolting for you? </span><span title="01:16:26">Like for example, Martin Scorsese was recently accused of putting a </span><span title="01:16:30">fake character in his Bob Dylan film. </span><span title="01:16:33">Is there anything that wouldn't be okay? </span> | |||
'''[01:16:37] Werner:''' <span title="01:16:37"> No, I think putting a fictitious character in a Bob Dylan </span><span title="01:16:42">documentary, congratulations to Scorsese, who is normally cowardly </span><span title="01:16:47">when it comes to expanding forums. </span><span title="01:16:50">He follows very much the norm. </span><span title="01:16:53">He's a wonderful filmmaker, but not really extravagantly </span><span title="01:16:58">courageous into creating new things. </span><span title="01:17:01">I have not seen the Bob Dylan film, but I welcome what you are saying. </span><span title="01:17:06">What you are saying about Harmony Korine and David Blaine, the magician, he </span><span title="01:17:12">seems, I don't like David Blaine at all. </span><span title="01:17:16">He's repulsive in everything he's doing, but what seems to be significant is he </span><span title="01:17:27">tries, he started as an illusionist, doing card tricks and illusions. </span><span title="01:17:33">He seems to be moving away from the illusionist into trying to strain </span><span title="01:17:40">his body to its utmost limits, to the brink of death, which is stupid. </span><span title="01:17:46">It's outright stupid to immerse yourself in a water tank for a whole week. </span><span title="01:17:51">It can't get any more stupid than that. </span><span title="01:17:54">And he's just making a living out of something that is definitely obscene. </span> | |||
'''[01:18:02] Eric:''' <span title="01:18:02"> Do you not have a cactus needle stuck in your kneecap now? </span> | |||
'''[01:18:07] Werner:''' <span title="01:18:07"> No, it stayed for a few years in my knee sinew, I </span><span title="01:18:12">jumped for a cast of midgets. </span><span title="01:18:15">I made a film, Even Dwarfs Started Small, and one of them was run </span><span title="01:18:20">over by a car that was driverless going in circles, one caught fire, </span><span title="01:18:26">and so atthe end I said, you... </span> | |||
'''[01:18:28] Eric:''' <span title="01:18:28"> You threw yourself on a midget to put out the fire, and then... </span> | |||
'''[01:18:32] Werner:''' <span title="01:18:32"> Sure, you better do that, because everybody else was just looking at </span><span title="01:18:36">like, at a Christmas tree burning, and the first thing you do, throw yourself </span><span title="01:18:42">on the him and extinguish the guy. </span><span title="01:18:45">I didn't smother him. </span><span title="01:18:46">I didn't squish him. </span> | |||
'''[01:18:47] Eric:''' <span title="01:18:47"> No one is saying that. </span> | |||
'''[01:18:48] Werner:''' <span title="01:18:48"> Yes, but I said, if all of you come out unscathed at the end of the </span><span title="01:18:53">movie, I'm gonna, from this ramp, I'm gonna jump into this field of cacti. </span><span title="01:18:57">And you all have your, at that time, eight millimeter cameras and your photo </span><span title="01:19:02">cameras and you can take your picture. </span><span title="01:19:05">And I take off and I leaped and, yeah sure, some of them got stuck in my knee </span><span title="01:19:11">sinews, and they don't get out easily. </span> | |||
'''[01:19:14] Eric:''' <span title="01:19:14"> It would be an honor, sir, to take you to lunch with David </span><span title="01:19:17">Blaine to work this thing out. </span> | |||
'''[01:19:19] Werner:''' <span title="01:19:19"> Yes. </span><span title="01:19:19">No, no, to the next parking lot, not for dinner. </span><span title="01:19:23">I wouldn't like to have a dinner with him. </span><span title="01:19:26">I do not want to ruin my appetite, but I would gladly take him to </span><span title="01:19:32">the men's room to fight it out, to take him to the parking lot. </span><span title="01:19:39">Ask the... </span> | |||
'''[01:19:40] Eric:''' <span title="01:19:40"> We can settle this however you want to. </span> | |||
'''[01:19:41] Werner:''' <span title="01:19:41"> Ask the valets to step into obscurity and just </span><span title="01:19:47">let us sort it out among men. </span><span title="01:19:50">Okay. </span> | |||
'''[01:19:50] Eric:''' <span title="01:19:50"> Werner, I gotta tell you, your life has been an inspiration to me since I </span><span title="01:19:56">was 16 and it doesn't even feel like you can meet a Werner Herzog in real life. </span><span title="01:20:02">So it's a very special day in my life. </span><span title="01:20:03">I want to thank you for coming, bringing your stories, your </span><span title="01:20:06">wisdom, your views on arts and your admonitions, which no one is following. </span><span title="01:20:11">I think that probably there's some in our audience who are going to </span><span title="01:20:13">make a special note, that this is the advice that's hard to get behind. </span> | |||
'''[01:20:18] Werner:''' <span title="01:20:18"> Yeah, but it's your life still. </span><span title="01:20:20">You don't need to listen to me. </span><span title="01:20:21">You will find your own guidance and your own vision. </span><span title="01:20:27">Best of luck to all of you. </span> | |||
'''[01:20:30] Eric:''' <span title="01:20:30"> All right. </span><span title="01:20:30">A huge hand for Werner Herzog people.</span> | |||
[[Category:The Portal Podcast]] | |||
[[Category:Podcast Episodes]] | |||
[[Category:Interview Episodes]] | |||
[[Category:YouTube]] | |||
[[Category:Video]] | |||
[[Category:Audio]] | |||
[[Category:Transcript]] | |||
Latest revision as of 05:09, 23 September 2024
Werner Herzog | |
Information | |
---|---|
Guest | Werner Herzog |
Length | 01:10:38 |
Release Date | 25 July 2019 |
YouTube Date | 31 July 2019 |
Apple Podcasts | Listen |
Links | |
YouTube | Watch |
Portal Blog | Read |
All Episodes Episode Highlights |
In this episode of The Portal Podcast, Eric interviews legendary filmmaker and director Werner Herzog about his life in outlaw filmmaking in front of a live audience.
Transcript[edit]
[00:00:03] Eric: Hello. You've found The Portal. I'm your host Eric Weinstein, and this will be our second interview episode to be released. I think we have something really remarkable for you today because we have a human being who's led a life that even though he makes movies that are fictional, I would say that his actual nonfiction life is more interesting than any movie he's ever made. This is a person who has been shot on camera. A person who has stolen, who has forged and who's taught other filmmakers to steal and to forge. The person I'm talking about is Werner Herzog. Now, I first became aware of Werner Herzog when I was 16 and just entering the University of Pennsylvania, and a friend of mine said, you've got to see this movie. Fitzcarraldo I said, what is Fitzcarraldo? He says, if nothing else, it's a story about a man so possessed by an idée fixe that he drags a boat over a mountain in the jungle, in order to somehow build an opera house. And the whole thing sounded incredibly mad. And in fact, what was so interesting about this film was that the director actually had to do in real life what the crazy fictional character did inside of the storyline. This led me to a fascination with a today's interview subject Werner Herzog. This is a man who has lived so richly and so profoundly that I actually started to get a different idea about what he was doing as a film maker. The idea that I could not shake was, is that Werner Herzog needed to live so deeply and so profoundly that he had to make movies simply to justify what it meant to be Werner Herzog. Now, I've often asked myself this question, what is it the great generals do between wars? It's hard to imagine, let's say a Patton or a MacArthur in normal times, do they just sit around and open dry cleaners? Do they write essays for their local newspaper. What does a Winston Churchill do if there is no World War II to win? In such a situation I think it's very hard to come up with an answer, but I think that the best answer that I have is, is that these people would make movies. The following interview was recorded in front of a live audience. We joined the conversation in progress. May I just ask, first of all, before I try any theories of the kindness, do you see any clear organizing principle that unifies your output that is sort of subtle and non-obvious to your audience?
[00:02:36] Werner: Yes, I do believe so. People are quite often puzzled about the range of the subjects that have attracted me. There's a world champion ski flyer from Switzerland, and there is a paleolithic cave, and there's a man who moves a ship over a mountain in the Peruvian jungle, and there's a film on the internet, and there's a film, you just name it. And it looks perplexing at first sight. But I do understand, although I don't like to look back at my films too often, I do understand that there's some sort of an architecture of concepts. And that's... You would immediately understand there is a common worldview. Very much is about a worldview and you could probably spot it very, very quickly, if you walked into a room and a TV was playing and there was a film within and you didn't see any credits, probably within two minutes you would understand, this must have been my film. People see it, they understand it, how they do it. I don't know. And how I do create this common world view, I don't know either, but it doesn't really matter.
[00:04:07] Eric: Now, one of the things that I've been very struck by, which is what we all get wrong about Werner Herzog and because many of the stories that come out of these films and these undertakings involve tremendous seeming danger, physical risks, chaos, madness is all the things that are usually associated. I was trying to figure out what it was that those stories might cover up as if sort of cheap icing on a very rich cake. And one of the things that I saw, was what, and correct me if I'm wrong, it seems like you have tremendous concern for the people that you bring out onto these crazy projects for their safety and wellbeing. Am I getting that wrong?
[00:04:53] Werner: No, we shouldn't waste any time of what some people get wrong about me. Doesn't really matter, let them be wrong. But, one of the things that comes up quite often, seems to be an identification of the creator of a story, a creator of a character, namely me, with the qualities that the creator automatically has to have. In other words if I do a film, like Aguirre, the Wrath of God about a demented crazed a conquistador, 1560s in the Peruvian Amazon, people quite often are misled to point out Herzog must have these qualities obsessive in demented and borderline paranoia. And so no day they are, I understand them, but they are not my qualities. They are inventions.
[00:05:54] Eric: But you picked an actor in Klaus Kinski who might, I mean, I would venture to say, did have some of those qualities, is that wrong? And then you actually have the...
[00:06:03] Werner: No, of course he had it. A part of being an actor who was really under the grace of creation to make things that we have not seen before or after on a screen. So, but otherwise, he was the mildest I could express would be, he was the ultimate pestilence, but he was also destructive. He would destroy a set. He would, when we had a, we actually had two plane crashes on Fitzcarraldo, small aircraft, and we didn't know what had happened. We had a very sketchy shortwave radio connection with Iquitos about 1,100 kilometers away and garbled messages would come in. "Plane is down." And we desperately tried, was it nearby? Could we send out a search party or what, who was on board, what had happened? And we had it happen in our camp, sometimes on days where we would start in the afternoon and shoot into the night. Breakfast would be served from hut to hut to hut, and so the last hut would have cold coffee. This morning, by coincident Kinski was the last hut, and I heard it from, from 150 yards away, screaming out. I mean the complete, not just a tantrum. It was just an outburst of rage, because his coffee was lukewarm and he stormed at the place where we were checking on the radio and trying to figure out, and he kept screaming and screaming. I could not calm him down. I could not get him away. I tried to tell him, there's a plane down. You have to keep quiet. We must listen to what has happened. It wouldn't help at all. He would scream and he would scream. He could scream a glass into he could shatter a glass, a wine glass. He, it really, I mean it, I do not exaggerate. And so the only way I could after an hour and a half when he had already froth, hardened froth at his mouth. I went to my hut and I had a little piece of Swiss chocolate left, which people would murder for such a treasure in our camp, and I stepped in front of him and ate this chocolate, and that silenced him. There was, there was something which was stunning.
[00:08:46] Eric: And you knew, you intuited that this would have that effect?
[00:08:49] Werner: I should have had the intuition after five minutes, it took over an hour. So, but, problem is that quite often, qualities of the characters in my films have been super imposed on my own character, or, for example, I've acted in some Hollywood films and some independent films, check Reacher, for example. And I'm playing the real, real dangerous badass bad guy. And I'm very, very dangerous and I had to, and I'm unarmed, and I have no fingers left, and I am blind on one eye. And yet I had to spread terror from the screen, and I did it so well. I did it so well that my reviews were much better than the reviews for Tom Cruise. No, it's true, I am not exaggerating. I was good, but it's not that I can say this kind of vile, dangerous character is really in me.
[00:09:59] Eric: Really?
[00:10:00] Werner: And it became very easy, I did it unprepared, you see, and I have learned that when we teach Fitzcarraldo in the first round of shooting, there was Mick Jagger as a sidekick of the leading character, and Jagger spent some six weeks with us in the jungle. We shot half the film had to stop because the leading character became ill. We had to send him to the States and the doctors wouldn't allow him to return to the jungle, so I knew I had to start all over again and on Jaggers contract, there was not time enough left for doing the whole film all over. I shot the film actually one and a half times. And, what is strange about, this recasting and restarting the whole thing, I knew if I did not find an actor quickly, in such a case, I had no alternative but playing the part myself. Because I would have been credible and I would have been good, not as good as let's say, Mick Jagger and Jason Robards or Kinski and I learned one thing from, from Mick Jagger, which astonished me. He took me once a backstage when they were recording, and I was there and he was arguing with somebody about some totally trivial things. Completely and utterly trivial things, and also an on my set, he was arguing about the mineral water or about the per diem or something. And I said to him "Mick, the camera is rolling." And he looked at me and he sees we are already doing it. And he steps three steps in front of the camera, and within three steps he becomes a demon. From a trivial, trivial little bickering, mediocre kind of character, his steps in front and he is a demon. And in that, in a way, I learned that from him. And, I didn't prepare myself. I, when I stepped in front of the camera, I knew there was only one thing, be calm and be frightening and I can do it. Yeah. And I would accept it only because I knew I could do it.
[00:12:33] Eric: So you're really not the ultimate bad-ass, because...
[00:12:38] Werner: I can't... Maybe I am, but unbeknownst to me.
[00:12:42] Eric: Well, okay. It feels to me like I was just watching a video of you being interviewed by the BBC and improbably you're shot in the abdomen while being interviewed. And you seem to be somewhat irritated that the interviewer is treating this as a big deal, and like, otherwise, how would I know that you wear Paisley underwear? I mean you take your pants down-
[00:13:08] Werner: Yeah, they wanted to see it.
[00:13:12] Eric: -you're bleeding, and you're treating it like, why is every... It's not that big of a bullet. That was your attitude.
[00:13:16] Werner: No, actually I said something more beautiful. I said, this is an insignificant bullet.
[00:13:21] Eric: Yeah, that's true.
[00:13:22] Werner: So, and I knew it had not perforated everything. It went through my, jacket in the catalog in the pocket and everything, but didn't perforate into my intestines. So that was insignificant, but they immediately hit the ground, the camera fled and I had the feeling, "Stay, let's finish at least the sentence."
[00:13:48] Eric: Cause it was great video. I mean...
[00:13:51] Werner: For them it was great video, it...
[00:13:52] Eric: No, it would've been, but what I'm trying to suggest, sir, is that you are the unreliable narrator. You are actually....
[00:13:59] Werner: No, no, no. I made sense. No, no, no. I am the one who makes sense. I am the one who puts order into a chaotic situation.
[00:14:07] Eric: That's what you did. But when I'm, well, what I'm saying is, is that when your autonomic nervous system is triggered. It barely registers. You've been shot in the abdomen.
[00:14:16] Werner: It registered, it hurt. It hurt a year because when I was laughing hard, it was still hurting. Yes, but there's a sense of duty...
[00:14:26] Eric: Which I very much appreciate, but that's very unusual. These are real...
[00:14:30] Werner: Yes, but it's part of being a good soldier of cinema that I tried to be, a sense of duty, a sense of, you have to be reliable. You have to hold an outpost that others have given up. It's loyalty,, and it's loyalty to the entire crew that was there. However, they argued that we should call the police right away. And they said, let's not do it because do you want to spend the next six hours in a police station to file charges and do you want to see helicopter circling there, and do you want to see a SWAT team in 10 minutes flat?
[00:15:11] Eric: Right.
[00:15:11] Werner: Do you want to see that? My answer is no, but it's okay, let's move out of the danger zone. Because the man with a rifle was still somewhere hiding on a terrace, and hiding now inside the building. Get out of there, but let's continue. Let's continue this all your team has come from the UK and you have to return tomorrow. Let's get over with it. So it's a sense of duty.
[00:15:41] Eric: I appreciate that very much, but I mean, what you're talking about is the highest levels of discipline and military style leadership. I mean, this goes far beyond...
[00:15:52] Werner: Yes, but you should be careful about confusing it with military discipline where there's some sort of blind adherence to given orders. I do think, I do think what I'm doing, and I do not ask anyone to do blindly something in front of the camera, but there is a safety margin. Whenever things are difficult in then, let's say borderline dangerous, I would always do it myself first for the actor. I would go through the rapids with a small raft to see, does a rafter survive these three consecutive rapids.
[00:16:36] Eric: Right.
[00:16:36] Werner: Or a very simple thing, Christian Bale in a Rescue Dawn, he plays a chairman board and a Navy pilot who is shot down, 40 minutes in his first mission overVietnam or Laos, he actually was the only American POW who managed to escape from Viet Cong captivity, an incredible story. And Christian Bale who plays a part of him and they're starving to death, almost starving to death, and they get some food that is infested by hundreds and hundreds of wriggling maggots. And we used maggots that native people would eat, but they would roast them, not alive and still wriggling. So, and I said to Christian, that was what Dieter Dengler, the real character, told me they had to do, there are nutrients that lot of nutrients in these maggots. I ate it. And I said to Christian, you know what? Give me the plate and give me a spoon. I'm going to eat a few spoonfuls, which I did. And he said, oh, come on, stop it. Stop it. I, let's roll the camera. I'm going to get over it quickly. So he did. And that was one of the very, very few, moments of controversy between the two of us because I told him and he didn't hear it. Apparently I told him, Christian, you know what, you stop eating when you really have, when you had it. And he keeps eating, eating, eating until the plate is empty. And then I say, cut. And he said, why didn't you say cut before? Why? What happened? And I said, Chris, you are the one who should have cut, set cuts. But he didn't hear it. And he was kind of miffed, but those, those moments say they do happen, and the unexpected on a set. That's movies.
[00:18:50] Eric: Yeah, right. I guess those moments do happen. So, it does strike me though that...
[00:18:58] Werner: I tested it first, you see, I would always test it first.
[00:19:03] Eric: It seems like that's, you know, the Israelis have a theory of leadership, which is called follow me, where they take the highest value person on the team that the general or the Colonel, and he goes into danger first because the morale of the troops is so much heightened when you see a leader saying, I will actually take that kind of a risk. That seems to be a part of how you get fanatical loyalty.
[00:19:26] Werner: It's a very long tradition. Alexander the Great, for example, always on foot with his soldiers. He would not ride on his horse. He would be on foot thousands of miles. He would be the first to climb the ramparts on a ladder. He would be the one who when they were thirsty and almost dying from thirst. One soldier collected a helmet full of water, bit by bit, drop by drop and when the thirst was at its worst, this footman comes and steps in front of Alexander and
[00:20:05] says: "I saved this for you, drink this." And Alexander looks at it in, spills it away, and he says too much for one, too little for all and marches on. So that's leadership. Well, Hannibal who crossed the Alps on elephants, he would sleep with his soldiers at the outpost wrapped in his coat. And he would lose an eye crossing an ice cold river south of the Alps, and he would do things that, nobody else in his army would ever do.
[00:20:47] Eric: Do you feel that this aspect of leadership, of putting oneself in the greatest situations of risk and harm is...
[00:20:57] Werner: No. You avoid harm if possible.
[00:20:59] Eric: Well, of course, but...
[00:20:59] Werner: You eliminate harm before it even appears. You see, you have to be prudent, and in any kind of business, including the business of warfare, you have to evaluate a situation and you have to try to avoid the danger for anyone. The leader and the troop, you better stay out of it. And you use all sorts of military tricked trickery, deceit, you use ambushes. You use the so called cowardly things. And before you really put anyone into very grave danger. Eliminate whatever you can. Sometimes you can't eliminate everything but cheat...
[00:21:53] Eric: Of course, of course, and lie...
[00:21:56] Werner: Lie and trick. I liked, by the way, it comes to main Jesse Ventura, who used to be a bodyguard of the rolling stones, by the way, and he used to be a a studio wrestler, who played the bad guy, by the way, in the ring. Completely stylized. And he became governor of Minnesota. And I always liked him for his down to earth approach. And he said once about his time in the ring as a wrestler. It's just one of these WrestleMania people. And he said win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat. So I really like him for that.
[00:22:45] Eric: Yeah. So this is one of the things that I found most enduring about your approach is that you teach film in this completely different fashion. It's, let's be honest, you're an outlaw before you're a film maker and you say to your students, you have to be prepared to steal, to forge, to pick locks, to do whatever it takes.
[00:23:09] Werner: Forge documents, but still, you see, I wouldn't say steal. I have stolen once in a while, but more expropriation than stealing, than theft, like my first camera was expropriated from an institution, but do anything that's outside of the legal norms. As long as it as it does not hurt anyone. And foraging, a shooting permit in a country that has a military dictatorship is something fine and you should do it. You for forage, forage you must.
[00:23:47] Eric: Yeah.
[00:23:51] Werner: So you have to do it sometimes.
[00:23:52] Eric: Definitely try this at home. All right, so you break into countries on a student visa that might severely punish you if they found out that you were filming. You did this in China.
[00:24:07] Werner: No, not, well, yes, I did in China filming in the Western most part, near Kashgar, where there was an extremely high military and police presence, and I was filming with Michael Shannon, but we had no shooting permit, no working permit. We just went out to a local market. A very traditional market of weak word tribesmen a cattle market. And there was the real obvious thing was that we had a contraption built on the body of Michael Shannon, a tripod that held a camera in front of his face. So when he walks into a crowd, everybody who walks by would inevitably turn around and look after him. I wanted this effect. Everybody staring at him once he's moving through a crowd and he said to me, I'm going to do it as long as you're around next to me, because if I get arrested, you should be arrested as well. And I said, fine, let's do it. And because it was so brazen, it was so brazen that nobody actually stopped us. There was a lot of police, and when you have one or two police people, then it's dangerous because they would arrest you or they would stop you at least in check you out. But if you have 17, 18, 20 of them. There's a strange psychological reflex. Everybody thinks the other one will stop you and you walk straight through the middle whether, and I keep saying where the enemy comes it at its thickest, walk straight through there and I look into some sort of a vague distance as if I had spotted a friend 50 yards away, and I'd walk with this gaze upon them, and while I pass, I may say something in my variant dialect, I say "Hast du einen Hartig gesehen?", have you seen my friend Hartig? And they step aside and I'm out. So you have to understand the heart of men, and you have to understand the, the way police would react, and what would they do? It's so brazen that nobody of the Hun Chinese police would ever suspect we were working without any permits at all.
[00:26:49] Eric: Yeah. Now in our time, there's this mania for truth and authenticity, and for acknowledging that it is always the group and never the individual that matters. Th the so-called great man theory of history is certainly at its cultural low. And yet here you are talking to us about the need to deceive, to break the law, and to affirm the violent act of creation in a very strong leadership context in which you're taking on all of this additional risk just to in part inspire and protect your people even. You seem to be a man completely out of time with the current era and it seems to suit you fine, is that wrong?
[00:27:39] Werner: Not really, there are few of us, but I wish there were more. But of course, what we are doing in filmmaking is not always based on boardroom decision. The way we shape the dialogue today in the Hollywood industry is determined by boardroom decisions. And that's why movie-making has become so stale and so uninteresting and so predictable. So if you do the most the wildest of the stories and that's always what counts. You see, I do not step outside the boundaries of legality. It has to do with a caliber of your quest, with the depth of your story, with the vision that you are pursuing. If that has real, real depth and you know, it as enduring depth, then you have the task and the duty to do the things that are necessary. As long, as I said, as you do not damage or hurt anyone.
[00:28:49] Eric: You are taking a fair amount of responsibility. We had Jim Watson come to this office and he's the co-discoverer of the three dimensional structure of DNA, of Watson and...
[00:29:00] Werner: Oh yeah..
[00:29:02] Eric: Yeah. But he said something which was, you know, I found very disturbing, but also very sensible. He said, you're given about five opportunities to really level up in your life. This was how he saw it. And he said, you have to take each one of those, even though sometimes each of them comes with an opportunity where somebody may be put at risk or hurt. And I was curious. You have a very strong relationship with risk where you're both putting people at risk and trying to make sure you put them at risk as little as possible. If both of those are true, do you believe that, let's say Watson was correct, that you have to take these opportunities even if they do put others at risk, or do you really have a no harm?
[00:29:46] Werner: Well, I think it's more than five opportunities, these things I've seen a hundred times, these moments, and risk-taking per se, has no great value. It depends on what you're doing and what kind of purpose it serves. And it's not a quality, per se, to take risks. I try to avoid risks, and you see, my proof that I have been prudent circumspect, and well-organized is that in over 70 films, not a single one of my actors ever was hurt. Not one. I was hurt sometimes. Sometimes it has happened that some very close collaborator physically next to me, like a cinematographer with a 20 kilo, a handheld camera at that time heavy, flies through the air on the deck of a ship that bangs into a rock. And we were flying some 10 meters, and he bangs with his hand on the deck, and the camera split his hand apart. So yes, it happens in, he didn't mind, by the way.
[00:31:08] Eric: Well, he volunteered. Am I right that he...
[00:31:10] Werner: Of course he did, every single one..
[00:31:12] Eric: You said, who's coming with me? Nobody has to.
[00:31:15] Werner: Yeah, sure. And actually in this case, when we went with cameras through the rapids, that and we had shot the sequence with cameras on the, there's no real shores, but in the rocks on either sides of these rapids. I was even pushed by some collaborators. We should have a camera on board. I said, really? Yes, of course. I see that, but we do not know what's going to happen. It may sink. What happens then? The ship probably is not going to sink because we established it with a lot of very, very solid air chambers in there. It's probably wouldn't have sunk even under the worst case scenarios.
[00:32:06] Eric: Let me ask you a very, very difficult question then. Assume that you were trying to make Fitzcarraldo, in which you drag this steamer over a mountain and it's not the year 1982, but it's some year, maybe around now, maybe a few years in the future where it's possible to do this completely with computer generated imagery so that you could do it in CGI. Now my question would be this. Would, if it produced the same visual effect as you did in Fitzcarraldo, would it be worth doing if it could be done cheaply and safely?
[00:32:42] Werner: No, it doesn't it doesn't create the same effect. And even the five year old, six year old viewers know it, this was a digital effect and you will always know it. I don't think that digital effects will ever create some sort of an equal experience, maybe to some degree visually. But, you see, moving a ship over a mountain means you're exposing yourself to things that are unthinkable and unexpected. You incorporate, in your approach, the totally unknown and the totally unknown invades you and the unexpected and the unthinkable invades you every hour, and your create something, an authenticity of story. Not only visual effect, you create an authenticity of event that is unparalleled. And it's unparalleled by anyone who is sitting on a computer and creates a steam belt moving up on a hill. It does not, and it will not do so in the future.
[00:34:01] Eric: You're quite confident of that.
[00:34:04] Werner: Because the experience of a thing rooted in reality cannot be replaced. It can be substituted. It can be somehow paralleled in a way by an artificial world, by digital effects. Until today, I would still insist I should, if it's me who does it, I should move the ship. In one piece, 360 tons.
[00:34:39] Eric: Right.
[00:34:40] Werner: And let the others do their stuff and it will be inferior to mine.
[00:34:45] Eric: Well, this is just it. I mean, you mentioned professional wrestling and Jesse Ventura and, you know, there is a theory amongst our group that maybe professional wrestling is a lot more real than anyone really wants to believe, that it's commonly thought to be fake. One interpretation of your works sir, is that you are making many more documentaries than you claim to be because in fact, in something like Fitzcarraldo, it's a fictional story about a man moving a ship over a mountain made by a real man who moved a real ship over a real mountain. And I remember when it came out in 1982, I was in college, we were electrified by this concept that if it had been done in CGI and we had known that it had been in CGI, we would not have been that interested in the story. But it was the fact that there was an insane man moving a ship over a mountain in reality...
[00:35:39] Werner: Clinically sane man towing a ship over a mountain.
[00:35:42] Eric: Sorry, I don't want to... You want to cast to the aspersions, but functionally, sir, it is a crazy quest. And you spoke about it in terms...
[00:35:52] Werner: No, no, it's not a crazy quest.
[00:35:53] Eric: Did you speak of it in those terms at the time?
[00:35:55] Werner: No, no, no. It's not a crazy quest, it was doable. And I do the doable, you see, you do not go out and try to, let's say, go to Mars and spend there half a year on Mars in covering... in getting footage. You will fail. It's not going to work. And we will see the technological utopia is coming to an end in our very century, like we saw social utopias coming to an inevitable end in the last century. Communism paradise on earth. Nazism, a master race, dominating the planet and on. So we will see... So do the doable. Do the doable, and I knew it was doable because I had figured out how to move a very, very heavy object in one piece on top of a hill for example.
[00:36:55] Eric: Trying to figure out the how the ancients moved...
[00:36:57] Werner: Yes, neolithic people.
[00:36:59] Eric: Say more about how you solved that, you saw that as a puzzle.
[00:37:03] Werner: I was searching a coastline of Brittany for a completely different movie and I ended up at night when it was already dark at Carnac. It's 4,000 menhirs, these slabs of stone erected in parallel lines. Hill, uphill, downhill, uphill, down. It's, it's stunning. In what I saw in the headlights was stunning. And I slept in the car, and next morning I see there's a little kiosk. They sold brochures, and in the brochure, it's written that this couldn't have been done by neolithic people, they didn't have any technology. Yes, they had a rope and things like this. It could have been only alien astronauts, and I thought, bullshit, I can let... I will not move from this place until I as a niolithic person could do it. So what I would do is, let's assume I have the rock already, 300-400 tons. I would need disciplined men to build a ramp, but maybe one kilometer ramp, which has hardly any inclination, which is almost flat. At the end. It would end up in a 10 meter high hill and I would take a crater hole into the Hill and then I would move. Then I would move the stone on oak trunks, on hardened oak trunks, and it's very easy to move it, either with the turnstiles and ropes, or pushing it in a way with levers. And at the end it would drop into the crater hole and then you would have it erect with a heavier part up, and then you would remove the hill until, let's say, it was sticking only into two meters of grounded, harden the ground, so you would have it erected. And I kept puzzling about one, a menhir, the heaviest ever, 1100 tons heavy, near the coastal place Locmariaquer, not too far from Carnac. And this stone, this slab, was broken into four pieces. In the major, the biggest of all pieces, at least 600-700 tons heavy, was aligned in one direction, and a little bit further out, the rest of the fragmentation was perfectly aligned in one line. So why does this happen, if that stone falls and breaks, it will align the fragments, but it didn't. So I think what has happened is that they moved the stone, dropped it into a hole, and it broke. It broke at the rim, and the smaller fragments aligned, and thousands of years later due to erosion, some of these menhirs, fall over, topple over, and it toppled over in a different, in the wrong direction. So an accident, a neolithic accident, which must have happened, spoke to my as if it was proof of my way, how I would do it. And that's how I moved the ship over the mountain.
[00:40:35] Eric: Wow.
[00:40:36] Werner: So, and I knew it was doable. If it was doable for neolithic people 7,000 years ago, I can do the same thing as well. I have no doubt whatsoever. And in an ideal case, you would, according to primitive laws of physics, you could have one single child pulling it over the mountain. Let's say you introduced a pulley system of 10,000 fold returns. You pull on a string five miles until the ship moves 50 yards, and the child could pull it over a mountain. So you have to think you have to think, the bold ideas, but also those that are outside the common trend. It can only have been the alien astronauts that I showed you because I'm very proud of it. You should try to get hold of it because it's very interesting. It's called the Vanishing Area Paradox. I keep it in my agenda all the time, and it was published in the Scientific American. And it's very strange, you have a configuration of elements of pieces, and when you rearrange the configuration of these, all of a sudden there's an empty space of something that has filled out the entire space without a millimeter in between. And I kept thinking about it because it defies all my experience with reality. So within my reality, it is unthinkable, it is impossible. So, and I kept thinking about it and I was misled. The whole thing is a hoax. It turns out it's a hoax, it's fraudulent, and it gives it a certain veracity because it was posed this Vanishing Area Paradox. The question is posed in the scientific American, you do not believe that they are cheating you, and they cheat you. And what is happening is when you look at it very precisely, the area where all of a sudden in the middle there is an empty space, has been artificially made slightly larger by giving slight, slight more angles in the straight lines, and summing up creates a little empty space.
[00:43:22] Eric: Yeah.
[00:43:23] Werner: And I solved it myself because I thought, I cannot solve it because it defies my sense of reality, and the sense of reality of everyone around me. Something is wrong. What could be wrong. What could be wrong. And I started to check, and one of the questions I asked myself, could it be that this is a hoax, that this is a fraud, and if it's a fraud, how do they cheat you? How do they cheat your senses? Senses of observation in this case.
[00:44:06] Eric: Well, that touches on something that fascinated me. There's a quote of yours where apparently you are facing a booing audience. Booing at you and you had the sense to say to them, you are all wrong.
[00:44:19] Werner: Sure, and they were all wrong.
[00:44:21] Eric: They were all wrong.
[00:44:22] Werner: Yes.
[00:44:22] Eric: What is it in you that has the courage to stand up to seemingly, I don't know, arbitrary levels of negativity to problems that other people think are insoluble, where they have to invoke ancient aliens. There's something so disagreeable about your personality that you're capable of shepherding an idea through that much negativity. What trait is that?
[00:44:51] Werner: Well, it was a specific case when I was filming the fires in Kuwait in the first Gulf war when Saddam Hussein's retreating armies set every single oil well on fire. And I filmed it in a way that it looks as if it was shot on a, like a science fiction film. It cannot be our planet. And yet we know it must have been filmed on our planet. And, so it's highly aesthetic, highly stylized, and in the immediate outcry was a steady sizing of the horror. But it wasn't really horror, it was not horror for any human being. Nobody got burnt. Of course, it was a crime against creation itself, obscuring the sky for a wide, wide area, and something that should not happen. Not only a crime against the human race, it was a crime against creation. And this screaming, and people actually spat at me when I walked through the central island. That somehow reinforced my resolve, and I stepped up and I said Dante in his Inferno has done exactly the same. Hieronymus Bosch has done exactly the same in his hellish visions and Goya in his Los desatres de la guerra has done the same thing. And then in the end, I said, and you are all wrong. So do we have to burn the book, the divine comedy now, do we have to? Of course we don't. So indeed, there's an amount of certainty in me that and it's not really anything that I can say was bold. It was totally natural to say that.
[00:46:58] Eric: Yeah. I mean to me, it sort of strikes me as, we need people to inspire us by showing us that it's not only possible, that it's necessary to stand up to large numbers of people inside of a crowd. Now, one of the things that...
[00:47:13] Werner: I could have, it was literally the entire crowd...
[00:47:16] Eric: The entire crowd.
[00:47:18] Werner: Well, that's how I perceived walking down the central aisle, there probably was an amount of well-wishers and there must have been also some applause, but it was overwhelming. It was so overwhelming that some very credible reviewers like Amos Vogel, who wrote for The Village Voice, describes the scene. He described it. So it's not a figment of my fantasy.
[00:47:50] Eric: You know that there's this very strange story with the reviewer, Joe Morgenstern. When he first saw Bonnie and Clyde, he gave it a terrible review because the violence was so disturbing and it was set to uptempo, happy music. And he said, well, this is an abomination. And then strangely, a week or two later, he said, I have to review this film again. I was totally wrong. The film is a masterpiece because it took a while to just understand that that wasn't an error, but it was actually a brilliant artistic choice. Do you find that?
[00:48:21] Werner: You do not find it nowadays anymore.
[00:48:23] Eric: No one will listen to....
[00:48:24] Werner: It must have been 40 years ago that somebody had the nerve and the guts and the caliber to declare himself wrong and taking a new fresh look at it. So, you hardly see it at all.
[00:48:40] Eric: So let me ask, I would love to ask you one final question before opening it up to the audience. You've spoken quite a lot for a filmmaker about the importance of reading and the written word, and you've written obviously beautifully, and so many of your thoughts in this Guide for the Perplexed. And you have previously spoken about how television was turning us into idiots and dumbing us down, and that reading would be the key quality that determined who would inherit power in the future world. What do you see in the 21st century as having changed in this equation, with television having gotten much better, and the internet having seemingly gotten us into a state where we weren't even able to get there with the idiot box, as it was?
[00:49:31] Werner: Well, television hasn't gotten that much better in some segments. Yes, in these long, limited, many season big stories that all of a sudden you can narrate large, large, expansive forms like War and Peace. So all of a sudden, we can create Dostoevsky on a TV screen, on Netflix screens or whatever. Of course the situation has become more precarious with the advent of the internet. But of course they are forces that have started way, way before the internet. We cannot blame it all, for example, people who would read, the numbers have declined considerably since 50 years or so. And today in universities, even in humanities or even in classics department where they should read ancient Greek and Latin, they do not read anymore and they have a hard time, and I've witnessed it. I've witnessed it in person. They are not even capable of writing three coherent signs and expressing one coherent, brief argument, and that's alarming. That's alarming, and that's why I tell young, aspiring filmmakers, yes, watch films and do whatever you need to learn in technical terms. But read, read, read, read, read, read. If you're don't read, you will be a filmmaker, but mediocre at best. If you really want to become somebody of significance, and everyone who is around at this time of significance is reading, they're all reading, everyone. And you are not, and it's not only for filmmaking, it's probably in your profession, the same thing. You cannot lose yourself in algorithms, and in a software questions, and in articulating of things, without conceptually being up to a very high standard of evolution, of not only technology, but civilization per se. We have a very, very deep task. And reading, in my opinion, is the thing that is absolutely needed. And what I keep saying sometimes, but nobody will understand it, but I say it anyway, traveling on foot and irrespective of the distance, and I've done very long distance traveling on foot, gives you an insight into the world itself. And I can say it only in a dictum, and I've repeated it before. The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot. Nothing else does with such clarity and such transparency, nothing, nothing. And yet nobody travels on foot. It doesn't matter. Stay where you are, but I just say it as a sign of hope. If you really want to understand the real world, and also conceptually where we are standing as human beings at this very moment in history, travel on foot and read.
[00:53:11] Eric: Fantastic advice. Let's see if we can, anybody can follow it and I would love to open it up to questions. What questions do we have for Werner Herzog?
[00:53:22] Audience: If there was one book or two books you would wish for this generation to read, what would it be?
[00:53:29] Werner: Oh, it's I don't want to give you one or two books, because then you would sit down and you would read them and you'd think, yeah, you have done it. So, you should not read two books, but 2000 books. But I give you, for those who are into creative things, and including, I would say, including even creative forms of mathematics. It's a book written by an obscure British writer published in 1967 and it's called The Peregrine, about watching, it's diaries, watching peregrine falcons at a time when the falcons were almost extinct. J. A. Baker, I think we know, only after a few decades, we even know what J and A stands for. I even don't know what his first name's were and middle name. And it has prose that we have not seen since since Joseph Conrad. And it has precision of observing a small segment of the real world, with a precision and also with an emphasis and a passion, that is unprecedented in literature. So in whatever you are doing, whether you are musician, a filmmaker, into mathematics or into computers. This kind of very, very deep, relentless passion for what you are doing. Very specific. And it's a great, wonderful book. What else? Well, there are many, but I have a list of mandatory books for my rogue film school, and some guerilla-style antithesis to film schools, and there's five or six books. What comes to mind is Bernal DĂaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of New Spain, the original title is much, much longer. He was a foot man of Cortez, and when he was old, he wrote from his, apparently some diaries and reminiscences. He writes down an incredible story, incredibly rich in details and insight into the, into the heart of men. Anything else? Read the Russians, read Hölderlin and Kleist, the Germans, BĂŒchner, also a German. Read Hemingway, read Joseph Conrad, the short stories in particular. So but don't believe that this would make you into a different person. It's, it's the permanence of reading, the insistence of reading.
[00:56:36] Audience: Is it more fulfilling to you to...
[00:56:38] Werner: Can you speak up a little bit?
[00:56:40] Audience: Is it more fulfilling for you to expose people to nuance, where they thought there were extremes or the reverse?
[00:56:49] Eric: Is it more important to expose people to nuance or?
[00:56:53] Audience: More fulfilling when you expose people to nuance where they had thought there was extreme or the opposite?
[00:57:02] Werner: I've never asked myself this question. It doesn't factor in my work. Well, I follow a very, very clear vision. I see a film very, very clearly, and of course it has a big story and it has extremes in it and it has nuances. And of course, I would never want to touch a story that was not really big. Well, I was convinced this is big and it has excesses and it has all sorts of things. At the same time, the real life, the real life comes from the nuance and from the details. So, but it's I cannot even separate it, I cannot give you a satisfying juxtaposition of both, but it doesn't function in the way I make my films.
[00:58:08] Audience: I heard you like carrying bolt cutters, have those ever gotten you in trouble?
[00:58:13] Werner: Bolt cutters you have to take metaphorically, I have a whole list of things. Does anyone have the book A Guide for the Perplexed here, because I see it here on the can you give it to me please? Thank you. A Guide for the Perplexed, and we spoke about before, the title is so beautiful, I had to steal it from Maimonides, the great Jewish philosopher, middle age Spain, I think Seville or CĂłrdoba, I don't even remember, but anyway. And here on the back end, by the way, it's a real bear, it's no Photoshop. My wife, who sits back there, did this photo. I don't know how it was put together, but it's sums a lot of things up and it speaks of bolt cutters. Always take the initiative. There's nothing wrong with spending a night in a jail cell, if it means getting the shot you need, send all your dogs and one might return with prey, never wallow in your travels, despair must be kept private and brief. Learn to live with your mistakes. Expand your knowledge and understanding of music and literature, old and modern. That roll of unexposed celluloid you have in your hand might be the last in existence, so do something impressive with it. The laptop in front of you may be the last one in existence, do something good and impressive with it. There's never an excuse not to finish a film. Carry bolt cutters everywhere. Thwart institutional cowardice. There's too much institutional cowardice in the film industry, and I do believe the computer industry and software and so, has bolder designs. I think there's not too much institutional cowardice. It comes now after things like Facebook have been established. How do we stop excesses on Facebook? How do we stop excesses on Instagram? Do we show, do we have to stop a real beheading of a hostage in real time or do we not do it? So the institutionalization of content is coming post festum, after it has been normally but in the film industry, for example, the institutional cowardice comes before you even make a move. They ask you, do you have, for example, E and O insurance? Do you have a, how do you call it, some sort of insurance, a completion bond? No, I don't, and I make a film anyway, but in that case, I had to finance it out of my own pocket. Can I move in a wild way back to a very early question about something that is fabricated, like WrestleMania has a lot of truth in it. They get away with bruises and dislocated elbows. The last film I made is a feature film called Family Romance LLC. Romance is a business in Japan, in the Japanese language, where you can hire a missing friend, a family a father of a family during a wedding ceremony, because the real father allegedly suffers from epilepsy. In truth, he's an alcoholic and cannot be shown to the groom's parents and family. And there's an interesting thing that happens, the men who actually, in reality, founded this company, Family Romance, who sends out 1,600 agents and actors to help you feel less lonesome and replace a family member. He was filmed by Japanese television. They interviewed him and they interviewed one of his clients, who in his solitude had rented a friend, and he's in the film as well. It turns out that the client was actually not a client, he was also a rented member from Family Romance. He was an imposter put in front of the NHK cameras, NHK apologized profusely in print and on the air. And the founder of Family Romance says something very, very significant now, he says, I do believe that the imposter that was sent out from my pool of actor tells you more of the truth than a real one. The real one would lie to the cameras because in Japan, in their society, you have to keep face and you cannot admit that your life is miserable, and you were lonesome, and you were crying at home in your pillow. And so, this person, the real person would not say that, he would lie to the camera, but Mike, my man who was put in front of your camera, my man who has done it 200 times, comforting solitary people, he tells you the gist, the real truth about what is going on, and I think he's right. I'm sure he's right.
[01:04:37] Eric: Yeah, I'm very...
[01:04:39] Werner: The imposter has more truth in him than the real person, who wants to keep a facade of whatever well-behaved behavior in public.
[01:04:53] Eric: Do we have some other questions?
[01:04:59] Audience: If you could make a film about our generation, or the generation that sits in this room, what do you think the logline would be?
[01:05:07] Werner: I wouldn't know any logline, but I have done a film on the internet. Lo and behold, which, has appealed very much to your generation or even the younger ones. You are already a veteran. It's the 15 year olds who probably come up and have to teach you, the 35 year old or 25 year old. No, I wouldn't know a logline, but I have made a lot of films that apparently, were for a general audience when I made them 40 years ago, 45 years ago, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. All of a sudden I get emails of 15 year old, young kids, from Missoula Montana, because today they can have access to the film by streaming or other ways through the internet. Piracy, for example, which is a successful distribution system. And all of a sudden, it's the very, very young who respond to my films. And it's not foreign to me, I have always made films for those who are mentally active and who are in turmoil and who are looking out for organizing their lives. So I have always been, in a way, I've been young and now the film in Japan is a return to the times when I was 23, 24, 25, when I made Aguirre, the Wrath of God.You wouldn't know what would come after the next bend of the river. What there be rapids or not? So, and this kind of readiness to face whatever is going to be thrown at you, and you just face it and you deal with it.
[01:07:18] Eric: Do you actually, in terms of the generation that might now be rediscovering your films. Do you have any thoughts about the way in which we are going back and reevaluating cinematic work based on our new feelings about the directors? I'm thinking of Tarantino who put Uma Thurman at risk in Kill Bill, which I thought was a fantastic film, and Woody Allen, of course, with his difficulties having his work reevaluated. Are we how do you feel about bodies of work being reprocessed through the lens of the alleged failures of the creators?
[01:08:01] Werner: I think there will be a renascence, and we see it already, for example, classical music, all of a sudden has, I just read yesterday or today, has new platforms on the internet, that's all steered towards mainstream pop. All of a sudden you can access it. For example, in movies, The Criterion Collection, which is a very, very fine collection of films, had disappeared and reappeared apparently as it's either independent streaming label or within Amazon. I have to find out. I don't know yet, but all of a sudden these things are back. And, the 15 year old from Missoula, Montana is not just back, he is just emerging. So now I have no doubts, that we are gonna see films set outside of the regular mainstream, but have depth and vision and wonderful stories. They will not disappear. The shallow will disappear. The shallow of of yesterday. When you look at talk shows, so at pop shows, often 1960s, it's just stunning how shallow they are and they disappear very quickly.
[01:09:30] Eric: Yeah, are there some other questions?
[01:09:35] Audience: You mentioned that technological utopianism will end just as social utopianism ended in the past century. What do you think that looks like, or perhaps what occupies the minds of men next?
[01:09:48] Werner: Well, when I'm speaking about a technological utopia that inevitably will come to an end, what comes to mind is immediately space colonization. Not only is it an obscenity, it's also undoable. Obscenity because it hints at us, the human race, like locusts grazing our planet empty, and then moving on. We can move onto Mars, for example, but it should be contained and it's doable for a few scientists, a few astronauts who have a small, tiny little habitat, where they have enough drinking water, enough shelter against radiation, and enough air to breathe. Yes, we can create that. We will not put 1 million humans on planet Mars. It's not going to happen. It's technically not really doable and unwise, and a part from Mars, we cannot reach anything outside of our solar system because it's simply too far. It would take your 110,000 years to reach the next one, which is only three and a half or four and a half light years away. We just won't be able to do it, period. And this kind of illusion, this kind of utopia, technical utopia, will come to a fairly quick end in our century or other utopia that come to mind, immortality. Of course, we can stretch out longevity to a certain point, but that's about it. We are going to die. That's what the entire creation everywhere, and not only on our planet, everywhere, points to the same thing, that there's an impermanence of what is around everywhere, so that's one of the things. I have to think about other utopias, technical utopias, but you are much closer to approaching technical utopias than I am. So you have to find out what we should do and what we should not do, and what is a utopia and what is within realities of human beings.
[01:12:24] Eric: You have time for one or two last questions.
[01:12:27] Audience: Mr. Herzog, I would like to ask...
[01:12:29] Werner: Can you speak up a little?
[01:12:31] Audience: I'd like to ask about the way you think a camera changes a real situation. The way in which you talk about the real world, when you interject a camera into it, how it affects the perception of people who are aware that the camera is there.
[01:12:50] Werner: Yeah. It's an old philosophical question and a physical question of how deep do you insert your camera or your position as an observer? Does it change the reality that's out there? Hopefully it does because I'm a creator. I'm not an observation camera in the bank, that waits for 15 years and no bank robber ever shows up. So we are not, we are not the fly on the wall. I want to insert myself. I want to create, I want to mold, I want to influence my story, even the documentaries. And I do change facts. And I'm quoting now, André Gide, the French writer who said: "I change facts to such a degree that they resemble truth more than reality." And it's a wonderful way to say it. And, you'll see you are too. If you are seriously asking the question with an indignant undertone, it means that you are very much fact oriented, which I don't believe in your case, but many people are too fact oriented and cinema does not have to be. Even documentaries have to only partly be fact oriented, because the effects do not equal truth. They do not, and it's the same thing like with Family Romance, the imposter gives you a deeper truth than the real person. And my simplest of all explanations is, and I have used it many times, so if you have heard it from me, my apologies. Michelangelo creating the sculpture of the Pietà , Jesus in the arms of Mary as a 33 year old man. And when you look at Mary, she's 17. His mother is 17. So of course it's not factually correct, but he didn't want to cheat us or lie to us or whatever. He just wanted to point out an essential truth was something that resembles more truth, because I do not know what truth is, nor do mathematicians. I think only deeply religious people know what it is. So they have an easier life than those who are not religious.
[01:15:33] Eric: Do we have a last question?
[01:15:39] Audience: I worked years ago with David Blaine on a show called Vertigo. They had me watch a film called The Passion of the Woodcarver Steiner. There's a scene at the end with a raven, and they wanted to be very much to focus on that and find what, who the raven was in Blaine's life, and we couldn't really find them. And the implication being that the raven maybe wasn't real in your film. So I guess I have waited awhile to ask you this, but was the Raven real, and does it matter? And with all these questions about truth, are there any things in documentary film that would be revolting for you? Like for example, Martin Scorsese was recently accused of putting a fake character in his Bob Dylan film. Is there anything that wouldn't be okay?
[01:16:37] Werner: No, I think putting a fictitious character in a Bob Dylan documentary, congratulations to Scorsese, who is normally cowardly when it comes to expanding forums. He follows very much the norm. He's a wonderful filmmaker, but not really extravagantly courageous into creating new things. I have not seen the Bob Dylan film, but I welcome what you are saying. What you are saying about Harmony Korine and David Blaine, the magician, he seems, I don't like David Blaine at all. He's repulsive in everything he's doing, but what seems to be significant is he tries, he started as an illusionist, doing card tricks and illusions. He seems to be moving away from the illusionist into trying to strain his body to its utmost limits, to the brink of death, which is stupid. It's outright stupid to immerse yourself in a water tank for a whole week. It can't get any more stupid than that. And he's just making a living out of something that is definitely obscene.
[01:18:02] Eric: Do you not have a cactus needle stuck in your kneecap now?
[01:18:07] Werner: No, it stayed for a few years in my knee sinew, I jumped for a cast of midgets. I made a film, Even Dwarfs Started Small, and one of them was run over by a car that was driverless going in circles, one caught fire, and so atthe end I said, you...
[01:18:28] Eric: You threw yourself on a midget to put out the fire, and then...
[01:18:32] Werner: Sure, you better do that, because everybody else was just looking at like, at a Christmas tree burning, and the first thing you do, throw yourself on the him and extinguish the guy. I didn't smother him. I didn't squish him.
[01:18:47] Eric: No one is saying that.
[01:18:48] Werner: Yes, but I said, if all of you come out unscathed at the end of the movie, I'm gonna, from this ramp, I'm gonna jump into this field of cacti. And you all have your, at that time, eight millimeter cameras and your photo cameras and you can take your picture. And I take off and I leaped and, yeah sure, some of them got stuck in my knee sinews, and they don't get out easily.
[01:19:14] Eric: It would be an honor, sir, to take you to lunch with David Blaine to work this thing out.
[01:19:19] Werner: Yes. No, no, to the next parking lot, not for dinner. I wouldn't like to have a dinner with him. I do not want to ruin my appetite, but I would gladly take him to the men's room to fight it out, to take him to the parking lot. Ask the...
[01:19:40] Eric: We can settle this however you want to.
[01:19:41] Werner: Ask the valets to step into obscurity and just let us sort it out among men. Okay.
[01:19:50] Eric: Werner, I gotta tell you, your life has been an inspiration to me since I was 16 and it doesn't even feel like you can meet a Werner Herzog in real life. So it's a very special day in my life. I want to thank you for coming, bringing your stories, your wisdom, your views on arts and your admonitions, which no one is following. I think that probably there's some in our audience who are going to make a special note, that this is the advice that's hard to get behind.
[01:20:18] Werner: Yeah, but it's your life still. You don't need to listen to me. You will find your own guidance and your own vision. Best of luck to all of you.
[01:20:30] Eric: All right. A huge hand for Werner Herzog people.