An Evening with Werner Herzog

my connection to Hollywood my friendship with Hollywood although of course I have a certain distance to it and I just always want to make a point not not someone who would ever condemn it would be so stupid Hollywood has given us extraordinary films I've just recently seen Elia Kazan's film Viva Zapata which is one of the finest films finest storytelling you've said you love it because it's movies movies its movies movies I mean come foo is movies movies God are is not movies movies it's cerebral stuff and it's much of it is counterfeit money but but come foo Fred Astaire porno films that's movies movies those three together easily yes that movie has a great band width and and it continues to to give us new forms unexplored things recently I've been very fascinated by 360 degrees immersive virtual realities there's a new form of in the fairly certain it is not an extension of of 3d cinema it is can something completely different and new it's not an extension of video games it is not anything that we can edit like we could edit a film because you see really all around you and when you have this mask on when something is coming at you and and you see a car flying by and you bend down and of course you have to step on a on some sort of a match that has sensors it feels and calculates where you are moving and where you are looking and you look around the corner and all of a sudden there's a bad guy coming the end in waiting and you have to look around the corner even that is possible but it's not cinema are you excited by that possibility I don't know yet I find it's a totally utterly new instrument and nobody knows how to fill it nobody knows of course very simple things more contemplative things all of a sudden interesting you have a Mongolian yurt the camera which looks in all directions are there around you and all of a sudden somebody laughs next to you and you turn you affect your head and there's an old man who who is telling a joke in Mongolian and has just laughed so it's very very strange and I'm asking myself about how can it be filled what what are the parameters what's so new about it not what happens when anything is new now normally you can see very early on you could see what you could do with cinema and you can tell when you look at the brothers Lumiere 1898 or so they sent people around the world filming the world a market in Vietnam India and the Yogi's some traveling shots and and everything that's in cinema possible was basically there with the exception of 3d cinema but it was all there already from its first moments and here it's very very hot and it's number one you you feel uncomfortable in almost everyone if you have it longer than five six minutes is mask on only you you do mean uncomfortable in the sense of being assaulted no not really something else you are immersed in a space that is not yours and you start to feel uncomfortable and I don't know exactly why and what is the effect maybe because things were not contemplative enough they are trying to give us a 3d action film effects and they do not work so and something Lucia my something comes to my mind when you mentioned Lumiere yeah when you went back and looked at your very first film the last Western you saw in it what Lamia had already started no no no first met the Lost Western it's just a tiny high school joke with my friend when we were 15 or 16 he was tall he was our tallest man in the in class and he looked like Eric Cooper and he said I'm like Gary Cooper and I'm better as an actor than Gary and I said come on let's pick up the camera and show it to us so we did that it has no no consequences film we shouldn't we shouldn't we should can talk about and memorize let's let's not talk about it let's move right on I'm sorry let let me say one more thing about immersive reality there's a very interesting case my wife is good friend with a young woman who lives in New York and she works in in selecting and arranging photos and from her office she has she has a corner office and she sees two-thirds of the skyline of New York a spectacular Vista that's one one part of the reality of images second she has two screens or three screens for the work she is doing photos from all over the world next reality is two screens in the corner as next to it and both are live broadcasts one of an eagle's nest in the other one of some owls both of them are hatching young ones both of him so during day you see the Eagles when she works at night she sees the Owls and it's heartbreaking because among the among the Isles has one feisty bigger one that eats everything and finally tosses the weakling the puny runt out of the nest and in debt is all of a sudden a drama that makes her cry and I understand that I understand that and if what I'm trying to say is if virtual reality becomes completely and utterly contemplative so that 24 hours some reality outside of yourself is going on where all the spectacle doesn't have to be hammered into you then it may be something really good for let's say people who are in hospital or people who are in rehab or people who are on human on death row that would be good cinema for them we will have a moment talking about death row in in a while but before we get to that a little passage from this most extraordinary book that I encourage you Vanna has signed many copies for you Vanna hats like a guide for the perplexed conversations was Paul Cronin right away and Paul is here and is here tonight I'm leaving right right him yes he has been 10 years into it and has forced me to be precise and to go back into memories that were already buried somewhere so if I faint here he will step in if you faint he will step in as well he can too he claimed to be both faint you'll have a trouble but but we'll try we'll try to I want to just congratulate Paul on this most amazing achievement I highly recommend you read this book in it he very early on relates this story which I'd like you to expand a little bit on what might speak about the imagination you had as a child when I was five or six i felt quite ittle there was no point in calling an ambulance because we were too deeply snowed in so my mother wrapped me in blankets tied me on a sleigh and dragged me through the night to a show where I was admitted to hospital she visited eight days later coming on foot through deep snow 15 kilometers and was amazed that I was out complained I had pulled a single piece of thread from the blanket on the bed and played with it for all that time I wasn't bored this strand was full of stories and fantasies for me going back into that memory what what what engaged you in that piece of thread I think I was very self contained in a way as a child and not easy to deal with me although I was a very sociable kid but at the same time irascible and somehow withdrawn and I would figure out mathematical things very simple things why 7x3 the same like three by seven so and I went before I was in school I figured that out and I and my peers would not understand why I was into this so there was a certain amount of loneliness although contrary to that all the refugee children I was bombed out from Munich when I was only two weeks old my mother fled to the mountains to the most remote Bavarian mountains there were other refugee kids and we formed a gang we were something like 14 and there was one girl we were 15 but when one girl was here who was really good within this gang and so we were constantly together in - in wild stuff and after the world World War of course our weapons and explosives and with it kind of mischief with it but [Music] it's the world even the tiny things were always full full of fantasy full of stories I do not recall which stories but I remember for the first time in my life I saw an orange in the hospital they gave me an orange and I studied the orange because nobody showed me they said eat it and I very carefully licked at the skin and then I understood you had to peel it and then inside this the segments and I peeled the segment's very carefully at inside the segments you have this tiny little liquid fluid filled tiny parts and I took them apart and for me it was armies and it was friends and it was a tiny bit by tiny bit I actually ate it it took me it took me five days until I had eaten until I had eaten the orange and and it was something like that with a thread i I do not physically or directly recall what that trendy knife eel in a way you've expressed what that thread was yes and I understood him yes and I understood I understand I understand what a thread what a rope is all about it's it's a it's a very and it's not just an instrument it's it's more than that it has some secret life in it it has some purpose in it and you can develop whole stories around a rope or a thread so that's that's something which was always somehow in me I'm I want you to tell one story that I just adore in in poor Cronin's book your arrival in 1964 in Pittsburgh in the Franklin family well I have to make it very short I came by bioterror scholarship and I could have been every any I could have chosen pretty much any University and I said now not these fancy Ivy League things and actually the scholarship was because somehow I caught the attention because I wrote of righta fraudulent paper in in about a historical subject and I had a scholarship and it was so stupid I wanted to go to Pittsburgh real people steel factory steel workers welders because I had worked as a welder the night shift during school because I wanted to earn money for my first film so I arrived in Pittsburgh after a few days I returned by scholarship and it was a lot of money and my guest family I had to leave and I lost free passage back and I I was homeless for about three weeks four weeks means sometimes slept out in the street or on the couch of somebody whom I knew from the few days in in the university and then I had a place outside of Pittsburgh where I could sleep and I had to walk out from a bus station about two miles up a hill in the rain it was always raining and and I saw a car passing me the third time the car passes me it stops and and there's a lady in there and four children they were all between 17 and 27 they were already grown up and she said hey can we give you a ride and within the two miles up to the hill she said to me I said I'm German and I having no real place she said hey kraut you know what you can stay I have six children her husband has died an alcoholic but we have an attic which was actually as as tallest as when I was standing I touched all this a main beam and it was an attic with old furniture in it and there was a bed and then I lived there for half a year and it was the most wonderful acceptance in America you see that's among in in Mid America you see you find this and that's what what I love in politics the the highbrow eastern coast and the highbrow western coast called him the flyovers the flyovers from east to west or west to east and I do not like this term because I have had my my best experiences in America there and the family was completely crazed a crazed 94 year old grandmother failed rock singer Billy who spoke to a cocker spaniel in a invented language would emerge stark naked at 4:00 in the afternoon because he played in a little bar in a seedy bar out in the countryside in the twin girls who were 17 just came back by school bus and they had some girlfriends so Billy would walk down stark naked and strum his guitar and sing and speak to the dog and there was a young other boy who had fallen from a car and it went on and on and he was the first first fanatical friend of Arnold Schwarzenegger and he showed me these magazines where Arnold 17 or 18 year old blob was pumping irons and I had my best time in America ever there for five six months until when I started to work without having a permit I was summoned to immigration and anywhere they would expel me from the country that was clear so I fled across the border to Mexico I didn't want to to go to back to Germany but shortly before I had a very very bad fracture of my of this anchor here I had jumped out from third floor in order to trap the girls who were who were ambushing trying to ambush me always with the worst OD Colombia from Woolworths and spray me all over and that would smell like a skunk for two days in two nights so I jumped out the window and tried to tackle them from behind with with the shaving foam but this whole thing didn't didn't go well I had a with this leg I still can they jump until they day they introduced you to to the Rolling Stones I think yes I enjoyed that the twin girls and their girlfriends there was the first time ever Rolling Stones and I think the second concert in the United States Pittsburgh and I was in the Civic Arena 11,000 capacity crowd and all of them screaming teenage ID mostly girls and when the thing was over and this thing was over I was completely stunned what was going on and they they all stood up and left and I was a little behind and and all these plastic seats in which you set not all all of them but at least let's say one out of four was peed it was was contained in P and was still steaming and I walk past that I walk past that and I said to myself this is going to be big thank you [Music] I want to talk about the importance that literature has had for you in terms of being offering you what you have called consolation which I find you often talk about literature as offering you solace and consolation and you mature there are other things as well but utilize you you speak about it in terms of the book of Job but you also speak about it in terms of the the Punic Wars you you you take these books on trips they accompany you know when I should Emily when I to obey now it's going to be a difficult Judy you need a loser loses original translation which is earlier than King James Bible and in a very beautiful stylized herb and actually the birth of the German High German language Punic War Second Punic War Second Punic woman before we get to this the Punic War consolation literature as offering consolation it yes it does for me in death all forms of it recently the Peregrine by Jay a baker book an English writer about whom we know literally nothing Jay a baker published it in 1967 and it's one of the most wonderful books everyone who wants to make films wants a be an artist should read this the intensity of observation in the passion in it that becomes completely almost in Cantor Tori and then moments of Proust said you only have you have to go all the way back to Joseph Conrad this kind of caliber of prose in reading this I I I know this is this it's myself as well at least I have somebody a brother out there who may who's fully named Jay aI don't even know the the first names what they mean I think by now it's known I don't even want to know what ji stands for and yet Jay a baker is like like a deep friend to me who who gives me consolation meaning music sometimes has said indeed and and of course religion that I'm not religious that the amount of consolation you can have when when you are really religious what did I have my problems with religion earlier I know but what what does consolation quite mean when you are exposed in in the in this universe where we only partially really belong we are strange guests here that do not really fit there and there's some some sort of a permanent self-destruction going on and in the self-destruction where the archetypical the arch sin started in Neolithic times when we gave up a nomadic existence of course until today you have some very very few pockets of of nomadic existence and Bruce Chatwin by the way speaks about it very very very clearly so you should listen more to Bruce Chatwin them to me with him I had this Nexus that we do about traveling on foot also something reminiscent of nomadic existence but there is there something self-destructing since then cities science evolution into a into a highly technical society that has the seed of self-destruction in it we are too many and we consume too much and it's not it doesn't look good what's going what's going on so at the same time we cannot be nostalgic and say aya let's all go back and become nomads again we won't this is what it is and it's it's a very precarious existence and we are in a very precarious situation and I hear it all the time I are technology will evolve and we'll colonize the planets no we won't because the biggest planets are only gaseous and the Sun is is unfriendly it's hundred thousand atomic explosions going on every second there it's not friendly we shouldn't be on we shouldn't be on the moon we have you just you see we need air to breathe and it's not it's a breath of hundreds of millions and millions of human beings who have exhaled and trees that have exhaled in volcanoes that have shaped our atmosphere it's the entire history of breath that we don't have out there it is hundred times more feasible to live at the bottom of the oceans or in Antarctica or colonized Greenland with millions of people much easier than maintaining 25 people on Mars it just will not work it's not gonna work period and we will not we will not reach our next star outside of our solar system because it's four and a half light-years away which means with the fastest fastest acceleration that a human body can take it's 110 years until you reach it because you have to accelerate and decelerate which just won't do it period and there will be 500 generations of freaks of mad people who have forgotten why they are on this trip and they will leave there will be Palace revolts and there will be that there will be unspeakable unspeakable merchants reaching Alpha Centauri unspeakable we don't belong there we belong here and it doesn't look that good it doesn't look that good belonging here well it's a problem yes but but we can make the very best out of it and it's wonderful to be here and to be alive and to to plant an apple tree or make a movie Martin Luther was asked what would he do if the world came to an end tomorrow he would say today I would plant an apple tree that was a good one so and you had you had a response to that well I would make him start a movie of course it would remain unfinished but so what but you work fast I work yes I do work fast but not in a day I can if you force me I could write a screenplay in a day or two but not filming a film and editing it edit fast the consolation though is as I understand it in part is an awareness and acknowledgement that you're not alone that's part part of it but it's not the only thing it is it is some sort of guiding guiding light for me second punic war heroic figures that come out of nowhere from North Africa from cartage comes Hannibal heavily contested at helm there was a very strong party who didn't want him to do the attack on Rome via Spain and what today's France and crossing the Alps with elephants and they knew he would probably he would probably bring the ruin upon upon cartage so that there was heavily contested and in the man of a boldness in leadership that we have not seen very often in the history of the human race at the same time a man of incredible designs and incredible initial successes bringing Rome to the brink of extinction the battles of Kali and Lake Trasimene II end and now in the complete moment of utter brink of extinction Rome votes in into office fabulous Maximus with the greatest of all heroes derided and by the way derided until today and unknown until today as a great savior of Rome and probably of the entire Occident because we would be much more Phoenician in North African as as what we are now you--you'll of honeybells single-line I know the destiny of corral the fate yeah yes when and that was actually brought upon by fermius Maximus who avoided for two and a half one and a half years open field battle he knew they would lose and that would be the end of Rome and he fought a war of attrition receding receding receding attacking a small foraging party of Hannibal and on and on and his own countrymen his own fellow citizen derided him as a coward the hesitant coward cooked Otto in Latin it means the the hesitant but the mother the cowardly hesitant who when the army comes retreats retreats retreats and he brings Hannibal's army to a point where they are exhausted and have no more provisions and Hospital by the brother of Hannibal his fleet is destroyed near Sicily when honeyBun hears it a messenger comes in tells honey by the fleet with all the sub Isis destroyed Hannibal just hold silent for a moment and then he says mutters to himself I know the fate of cartage and he really knew it was the end of cartage I mean it came later yes a few years later but but it was it was clear that was the end and the consolation in making a film in the kind of obstacles in the kind of daily humiliations you have to go through every single day is full of banality is full of humiliations you you until today with you every single day you say thank eunuch war you say when the boat was slipping back in the mud during the shooting of it's corralled Oh fab use maxim would had a hand on my shoulder yes it was well said it was exactly so I'll say yes I think it was well said because that's exactly how I felt you will need alone I mean here somewhere in you hang in and you know you know this overwhelming weight and momentum of the enemy can be somehow overcome the hand sometimes yes the hand was on my shoulder and I in that way it's a really it's not it's not a metaphor no I know it's not a metaphor it's literally yes and so that about consolation when when I where I like to read Psalm so I read of course the book of Job that's that's real consolation for me you know I had occasion well you know well of interviewing Mike Tyson who said the past is just us in funny clothes well Tyson I I like him a lot in that I advised Paul to have him on his program at the New York public library and and I also asked Paul now please take it seriously I I said to Paul don't speak just about boxing and about jail and about all these other things speak with him about the Roman Republic and speak with him about pipping the short language in Frankish Kings Clovis and Pippin the short and you asked in the audience no you told me you asked the audience in this very everything here yes yeah no no it wasn't just I asked you said you turn to your audience at the New York Public Library and ask them who knows about Pepin the short Clovis you might you probably would and of course nobody knew and that's when Tyson started to speak about Clovis and Charlemagne and especially about Pepin and how well she'll Direction Childebert and fadec under the murderers and nobly and he got so involved in saying the Frankish Kings and he got so excited I said but why do you love the Frankish Kings and he says they really knew how to kill and then you know and yeah get got very and and I remember very clearly also that he he got so excited when we showed him a first edition of Machiavelli's a prince in the rare book room at the library and he looked at the chief curator and he said I think there's an earlier edition and he was absolutely right yes and when I when I said to him on stage you seemed so immersed I didn't use a word consolation there but there's something similar you seem so immersed in all this literature he said a home without books is like a body without a soul and I was stunned of course and then two or three days later a journalist called me up and said do you know that make that that line isn't Tysons it comes from Cicero and the journalists were saying that to me to say look the fraud and I said but it's Mike Tyson quoting cícero yes exactly uh yes and India what body cell what is so wonderful about it is when you look at where does Tyson come from I think he was a semi-literate and his mother prostitute and they live in one singing room and her clients are in that's room with him and while they were edit he would he would they go through the pockets of the men through through the trousers they were over the chair and and before he was before he was 11 I think he was 40 times arrested already and on and on and on and now this man is his fervent hunger for literature for history for I find it absolutely not not only astonishing it moves me very deeply that's that's something we we should never overlook in which we cannot dismiss him as just a violent man yes he has been dangerous and he has been violent but he is one of these wonderful wonderful men that I that I really like and I'm glad that I ever met him you did your best conversation probably when I've had a few others that I've loved very much but I would say that among all the conversations I had he certainly was one of the most extraordinary conversations two maybe two months before my mother died she would always ask me who Paulie who are you interviewing next and I said Mike Tyson and she said who might he be and I said well he was a heavy world champion of the world in boxing and my mother said my son is interviewing and then she sort of caught herself and she said but how interesting and she used to always say when I interviewed all these very fancy writers she would say tell them that they have a that she they have a fan in Brussels in this case she couldn't say that but she said you know you should ask him something asked him what it feels like to be hit so strongly on the head what does it feel like and I asked Tyson yeah he immediately I didn't tell him it was from my mother he immediately responded he said what I did for a living is what you have tried to avoid your whole life and it was just such a candid immediate answer and and as you would say end of story in in poor Cronin's book the you answer one of his questions about the various characters in your film and you say if one were to watch all of my movies in one go you would recognize immediately walking down the street someone a character and my villain you would know that he's part of the clan and I'm what is that clan made of the humiliated and the insulted to use Dostoyevsky's line the those who have suffered in one form or another those who have overcome certain obstacles I mean what is that clan of the the heads of clan of of those we would recognize well that's a very complex thing as complex as families our families are very strange creatures and and yet you you do recognize aiya this is one from the holding caber family when I see your children I know yes Wow how do you ever good luck yes good yeah well yes it's very complex and I I can't I can't simplified him I wish I could and could give a short formula but there's a kinship and and you know they belong together somehow and for the oldest reason somehow the great ecstasy of the sculptor Steiner the chief jumper who flies and defies gravity and deaths is a is a close relative for Fitzcarraldo who defies the laws of nature the laws of gravity moves a ship over the mountain and of course solitude and many things and a veneer how Binger yes at the end of silencer actus but but it's not only these few films I think when when you look here and I would dissuade everyone to try to look at all my films in one go that would probably drive you into a when you have to go into a cruise ship afterwards I guess or something to recover now it's it's complicated and I do not I do not fully understand but I know I now right away they belong together well you don't understand in the same way that you don't quite understand what that whole deal in line is or what those poems are they sort of you don't need to explain everything yeah and you don't need to know yourself completely in order to explain your figures only the shallow know themselves so I should be careful about that what can I say Thank You hind in these figures all all these figures have at one point in my life or the other come with great vehemence at me and if intent call you yes yes sir and so I I deal with them and I transform them and I I can articulate them and I can embed them in stories and I start to invent around them and I embed them in music and images and and and of course ultimately shout business you see when you are asking so serious questions about solid he ordered all this ultimately I'm show business are you telling me to lighten up pardon to to lighten up no no no it's just that I'm trying to to say I don't want to lose myself now in in some depth from which we will not rise again before the end of this evening there's there's quite some human on death row as well so I like to to bring something out in them some some sort of humanity of course I I do not sympathize with him and I tell everyone yeah the beginning of every film yes well that I of course I'm not an advocate of capital punishment they know but to one young man Perry who was actually in the film into the abyss within two minutes into the film I tell him I sympathized with some of your arguments of your last appeal he was scheduled for execution 8 days late 8 days later and I said but this does not necessarily mean that I have to like you and nobody has spoken to him like this and of course the film could have been over right then and there but I have a way to talk to them and you see it says it's completely separated and divorced from journalism and I think this is a massive mistake of much of what we see in terms of documentaries they have not divorced themselves from from journalism and I do that and and I have no question they I don't have a catalogue of questions I come in and I have no idea what's going to happen and I have to I have to be ready for anything and I do it I do it with probably now much better than many years ago because I have more experience in life and I I can aspire I can better I can respond I'm quicker in in in figuring out and after many years of doing hard worker so I know the heart of men and that's a key to it well in beginning of into the abyss as the chaplain of death row he rushes on on the set and he says I have only 25 minutes and I have to be in the death house I thought I had an hour with him so and he starts in front of the camera talking like like a TV preacher completely and utterly funny and how beautiful God's creation is and how he goes in the morning in his golf cart and nobody there and he sees a squirrel and then a horse with big eyes looking at him and deer and I stopped him and I asked him something that no one else would ask tell me about an encounter with a squirrel and he comes apart he unravels and it's really it's worthwhile to see the film just for that moment it's a very beginning of it and how do I do it I don't now I have it in me somehow and and that's that's why why I'm doing these films I only had to stop I did quite a few for films first and then the longer into the abyss then the production what is it Eric Nelson I think he's even here I think well we'll see afterwards I think he's here in town and he is here with us and then since I was successful on television I was asked here can you do some more and I did it and and that was then too much you can you have to be economical with what you can absorb stories of such horror in such incredible you are like like in a maelstrom like like run over by trucks and confined in that space because yes yes is that yeah mirror that separates you for ideas and creative differences Eric Nelson's company understood yes I have to I have to stop here and we actually stop there and and we always had collaborated in a very fine way and and there has to be some sort of a basic understanding substance vanity they this man we just saw is part of the clan I didn't think about that yes but he is in a way ok since this is uber and Salieri because I exuberance in him of course and an appetite I mean young in that the kind of hunger for life and of course hunger for every single detail that we take for granted that we can have an apple juice when we go down to the bar and we can have a cappuccino or whatever and they don't and they are restricted in their living in a in a cell that is as narrow as that 23 hours a day and only one hour in so to speak outside but of course it's outside but like a like a dogs cage like a small cage like from here to this ramp here and about this wide and in something I remember I remember in one of the movies you mentioned that one of the inmates had not felt rain yes for 12 or 18 years yes not has not had the experience of rain on his skin I don't know 16 or 18 years and and we forget easily quickly what what a privilege it is that we can walk out the door and we experience rain and this opening and closing of doors it was for decent oh yeah and this this takes me immediately to another transformation of a character another person who I think is part of the head so again clan as it were perhaps one of my I mean I I suffer from having many of favorite movies of yours but this one in particular which is a late discovery for me only in the last two three years that I see it everybody here you must see little detail needs to fly I have towards dieter Dengler a feeling that is not so different from the feeling I have seen below s yes and of course very similar to in some parts to to my own childhood experiences both of us grew up with a pret without the presence of a father both of us were very hungry as children that's a very significant experience I mean my brothers and I were just hungry for about two years and so and I remember it very vividly but dieter Dengler he and his mother and his brother were so hungry that they went to bombed-out houses in ripped down the wallpaper and cooked it the mother would cook the wallpaper because there were nutrients in the glue so I was not that far down and in this kind of dream about what he would do and but it's really very very expensive reliance here it's still speaking about dreams it's extraordinary that the dream came from such a shattering experience yes it's it's unexpected or defies our vanilla ice cream sort of idea about how children form fascinations well for example I think we we grow up in a way that we very often stylize and beautify and beatify and sometimes it's very harsh and and we are brought to two important steps in our life by very often by banalities or by very harsh things that that become mild and milder and milder after many years and it's been nine and memory has something benign about it and it shapes itself I think memories are shaping itself in a way within us as something almost independent of us they have a very strange nature in memories of some childhood experiences that came to me when I was let's say 25 the way I remember day 25 is completely different from how I remembered it at 65 they are stylizations in it that their transformations in it and we do not have really memory of pain it desert disappears and this is why for example and I think it's a natural good thing because otherwise women who give birth which is a which is a very drastic extremely painful act it's it's it's really awful and painful and they forget the pain that they remember other things of giving birth never hardly another payment my mother remembered nothing about my birth but just seeing me and in thinking man is he ugly so because I was born with the yellow jaundice yes I was ugly sure and that's my mother remembered and it's beautiful that she remembered that one you you shaped Kinski's hysteria now-now-now he had it and and you couldn't shape it you only could give it a frame and make it productive that I didn't invent it and I didn't really shape it well it's it's quite something why he was he was on his own what he was he writes about what he writes about you that I've coated once before here he should be thrown alive to crocodiles he said about youth and anaconda should strangle him slowly a poisonous spider should sting him and paralyze his lungs the most venomous serpent should bite him and make his brain explode all exclamation points are there Johanna exclamation point nope nope antic clothes penta clothes should rip open his throat that would be much too good for him know the huge red ants should piss his pits into his lying eyes and gobble up his balls and his guts he should catch the plague syphilis malaria yellow fever leprosy it snowy not use the more I wish him the most gruesome deaths the more he haunts me okay it it is actually fine Prowse yeah and I never had a problem with it sometimes I helped him to find metaphors and in the vilest expletives from the Oxford Dictionary you helped him write the summer some examples you he when he went into this rageous and needed some more somewhere ideas what what would be what would be particularly insulting him sound good of course he wrote it and he does these things and he's always said to me when I have to do this because of vermin out there and he meant the readers the vermin out there needs that kind of stuff otherwise they don't buy the book and it was right yes I wouldn't have bought it he had his yell out and was fine sometimes it was good to have him in the scene that I was preparing quite mellow and quiet and calm and exhausted so sometimes i provoked things to make him scream at the top of his lungs and sometimes you screamed for a long time but but of course says acoustic energy which is quite some some energy and you waste yourself he didn't frighten you now never but he frightened well I thought because all the natives around there the shalinka campus in some magic angers they after a while of screaming they would huddle together and they whispered and then they fell silent and and you could tell they were very very very uncomfortable and and I knew yes among them this when there are conflicts it's done in whispers they sort it out very very quietly and they have a politeness in the tenderness when when they shake your hand and I stylized it in the film they just touch you like this just and so and I had the feeling yeah they they are scared of Kinski but then one of the Chiefs took me aside and he said er you have seen we are we are kind of afraid but don't you believe of this screaming madman unless said yeah what what is it then and they said we are afraid of you because you are so silent so and I think there was a truth in it and you had to deal with it when you make films you have to deal with this if you can't deal with it don't do the jars you have to do a different job you have to deal with it and in some some of these footage is a good lesson and of course I always try to to give some sort of shape to to this crazy hysterical energy and of course I tried to always make it productive for the screen and when it was well and when you say you try to articulate you you mean in a sense offering some form of guidance I not offering sometimes enforcing it or tricking him into guidance defrauding him telling him God knows what and and he would buy it very often we had street wisdom sometimes he wouldn't buy it and be even more violent in his rage but you have to you see that's what I like about Jesse Ventura Jesse Ventura was a former studio wrestler and he was also for a very short time bodyguard of the Rolling Stones and he became governor of Minnesota very very eloquent man and and I have one wonderful dictum from from him he says when if you can lose if you must but always cheat and here's some also some very very beautiful saying about it's actually in the Minnesota declaration my manifesto about fact and truth in in cinema and he when he was governor of Minnesota had immediately the media and everyone at his converging on him he should pass legislation against snow mobile drivers who would when spring came still drive out on the thinning ice on the lakes and many fatalities happen because opposers would would drive out on the thin ice and break through it and drown many of them Strunk and Jesse Ventura answer was you can't legislate stupidity and when are you you you have said that you you think that in the future people will perhaps remember your writing even more than your films that you believe that your writing in some way is better now I will outlast and I think I wrote something about stupidity is there that which I want to I it's a nice segue I want you to to really has got you completely about it but it's when I walked around Germany in nineteen eighty-two whatever I I walked along the border I mean literally the border line in all its sin you Asians because I wanted to hold the country together really blunt in a statement at the Bundestag Kevin main statement said that the book of the German reunification is closed in the German Chancellor cannot say that and I said it's only the poet's who can hold the country together I walk around my own country and held it together I didn't walk all around it I fell ill and had to go to hospital but while I was walking I wrote I haven't seen it since I wrote it when it is all up with Germany when human beings cease to exist and ants and cockroaches have taken over and subsequently al guy in the oceans that have started spoiling when the earth when the earth is then extinguished and the universe goes dark collapsing in on itself to nothing it is possible that something abstract will remain behind perhaps something akin to a state of happiness but I have a deep fear inside me but I have a deep fear inside me that what will fill the darkness in the space that no longer exists will be a form of stupidity it does not need to be apart it does not need a particular place it is everywhere happiness at least requires open space okay thank you [Applause]

Channel: How To Academy Mindset

Views: 26,259

Rating: 4.9633026 out of 5

Keywords: Werner herzog, film, interview, conversation

Id: PcR0ZxvUr6o

Length: 60min 34sec (3634 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 30 2016