Werner Herzog career interview: "You have to brace yourself for the bozos"

it was only the cinematographer Thomas mouth on the raft in me with a sound and of course four-hundred monkeys and they were kind of afraid and they would accumulate under Cameron about hundred fifty of them would pile up under the cannon and I saw the camera approaching in they stirred them up quickly jumped aside and the camera was panning there and I was bitten at least thirty times during this shooting and the cinematographer Thomas Bach he had a monkey on his he had his camera on that side on the other side a monkey was was hanging on to his neck and bit him in the ear when one looks at the beginnings of most directors they've often had something that that's sent them indoors to look at cinema a lot when they're children I mean they've often had an illness or something that's made them alone watching films on television or they would take and you know buy parents but you did not I mean this is done anything you didn't really have a cinematic childhood at all I didn't have an illness either but since I grew up in a very remote or the remotest of valleys in the Bavarian Alps I did not see films in fact I had no idea that cinema existed until I was 11 and by coincidence a traveling projectionist came to this little schoolhouse there was one classroom but for for first second third and fourth grade in one classroom we were 25 or so children and had one teacher so and I saw films for the first time and they were lousy and didn't impress me so I grew up without all this but I grew up as well without running water I had to go where we had to go to the well with a bucket and bring water into the house and electricity much of the time not always no telephones no radio anything so it was a it was a very beautiful in Pleasant time so what was the moment what was that as it were the galvanic moment when you realize that cinema might be the medium in which you would want there was no galvanic moment per se it it somehow was quite clear to me that I would be that I would be a poet or rather I would make films but I I knew I would make better films than what I saw when I moved to Munich at age 11 or 12 and there's maybe one moment I could in fact pinpoint at dr. Phu Manchu and my friends we always took films were real and we thought people who were shot dead were really dead and in dr. foo Manchu there was a one of I think they're about 20 or 30 doctor foo Manchu films and one of his henchmen got shot from a rock and flies through the end and is dead and something like 20 minutes later another gun battle and they recycled this three-second shot with a guy flipping through the air and I said to my friends that there was something wrong and didn't you see that now they hadn't seen it and they thought somebody who was shot dead could not reappear and be shot dead again and I started to look at cinema slightly differently how do they put it together how do they create suspense how do they so I had some sort of a different different perspective but that's the only thing that I can somehow somehow name otherwise it was quite clear I would make films the real question was would I shoulder what I shoul date I knew it was going to be a difficult life it dawned on me very early and what I accept my destiny or not so it became clear yes because you founded your own production company at 21 I think which suggests you know tremendous confidence in your ability to be able to yes confidence but at the same time it was a necessity because nobody would produce the films I had in mind so while I was still in school and it started much earlier 16 17 18 while I was in school during night I worked the night shift as a welder in a in a steel factory and earn money for me the moment I finished school I started to produce and I had the money film production and were you always interested right from the beginning in if you had people who were visionaries or adventurers or something that went beyond the everyday well I was always fascinated by by those who were ahead of their time for example the Pharaoh Akhenaten was very fascinating for me he was a thousand years ahead of his time or musician like composer like Geraldo who in Mont about his time created music that we had heard only later on when Stravinsky burst onto the scene or artists like Hercules saygus early Rembrandt time who made images mostly landscapes completely abstract in very very strange staged landscapes and and only in the 20th century we started to see something that was created by Hercules saygus 400 years earlier and it ended in Hawaiian insulation I did further be an ally at the Whitney Museum and it's called hearsay of the soul was partly music partly images a insulation of various screens in music so which I mean the idea of the visionary the people who are ahead of their time brings us in sense to the film that is to be released here at the end of this month which is just had its premiere lo and behold and that very much has the idea of watch the internet how the internet came about but also watch the internet may deliver for us Armour and you're fascinated by people who who both the people who have the foresight going back but also those who are even now considering where we might be going next yes of course I am fascinated by what's going on but the strange thing here is lo and behold even the Pioneers had no clue whoo that they were triggering an avalanche of monumental proportions they had no idea what they're that this was momentous and you see in the film in the opening sequence scientist and electrical engineer Leonard Kleinrock who actually did the very first internet connection between UCLA and Stanford University and they only managed to get two letters across instead of log in they typed in Elland and oh and when they typed in the G the computer crashed so that's how the title lo and behold but they had no clue that this was big they were doing and there's only a very very thin little log book entry and that's that 20 years 15 or 20 years later it dawned on them and they reconstructed the room where the message was sent out and they put the old massive computer back into it and they had to find the furniture which was somewhere in storage in a basement and they restored the room to make it into some sort of a shrine meaning that it dawned on them 20 years later that they had done something of of monumental importance and that that in the sense is the pattern for shrines all the way through history isn't it that we kind of reconstruct them again we're going to see that clip of if we could see that now and where we're actually in to see Leonard Kleinrock himself and you follow him into so is this the room that we're at see it's actually the room yes in in one of those science buildings and and I in my commentary I don't know whether the kit contains it before he enters I'm I'm saying with my commentary and in my own voice in one of the science buildings in one of those repulsive looking quarry to us you would never hear that on national to Graff you would never sir I have no problem to do such a thing and and I it's it's good that I'm kind of jolting the audience right away and I do wild things once in a while that you cannot do on television or in National Geographic for example in the in the other film that I am releasing as well into the inferno about volcanoes I'm speaking towards the end about the magma under us under the crust of the continents and under the sea beds and it's monumentally indifferent to scurrying roaches reptiles and vapid humans alike so and so you do not hear that normally when you watch television where when you watch National Geographic so could we see the clip from Lobo please and it's it's a beginning of of the very beginning of the film why do you think the corridor was repulsive it looks repulsive to me I mean it's you just don't want to live there for example it's it looks like like either hospital or a prison yard a corridor in a prison I have seen a corridor like that in Vacaville prison for the mentally the criminally insane it's the same sort of of corridors it doesn't look as though the future of humanity is going to lie in one of those doors off is it no you don't expect that something of that's that's importance happened there why they while they wind the cliff oh yeah I mean you you look at different aspects of the Internet in in the film did you find that any prejudices or preconceptions that you might have had beforehand were overtaken no I don't have prejudices when I make a film I'm curious that's that's my basic attitude but there is a there is running through that film that constant idea of the adventurers I mean there's the lovely section with Elon Musk and when he's talking about how the that may eventually be on Mars you know we'll be having that well the internet on Mars is easy I think any idiot can do that if you send out satellites around Mars but to create a colony on Mars would be would be much harder and you would need rapid fire of rockets every 60 seconds hundreds of them with robots to create a cupola where we could live in moving atmosphere and water and provisions there so it's number one as a colony for survival it's it's not really doable this it's in a way at an end of a utopia and it shouldn't be a utopia at all because utopia should be here on our planet we should not care about the hability the habitability of a foreign planet we should rather look at improving what is happening here yes and it's when you say Moskva Kleinrock it's casting you see that there was on the other end at Stanford there were also scientists much more boring than Kleinrock and Kleinrock I filmed him at least two or three times and he said well this is military Hardin didn't and just touched it like this I said I stopped it and I said no it doesn't look hardened show me how hard it is and he banged Edit I said we do it again and you bang it it so of course some of it is is emphasized or staged in cast like in a feature film of course and I mean that's clearly that's what's made so many of your films very distinctive but all the people in I mean they're obviously in on this you say to him hit the side of it and he says great because it was a sort of slight only a slight exaggeration of what he was going to do before but do you ever get people going I'm not going to do that not really because I do get things across and I would not ask you to do things on camera that are not within your nature that he wouldn't enjoy to do so you have to read you have to read the the personality you have to know the heart the heart of men when you are director and of course that's what I do in my profession otherwise I should make films and I'm in the heart of men and the ambitions of men have been so much the feature of of your films I mean going way back and we're going to show a clip from a gira mode where you know you cannot get a greater representation of the power of will really there but people do mistakenly often refer to Agora as being sort of like your first helps your first internationally recognised film but you'd be making feel so quite a well yeah well I think I was 28 or so when I made the film a very fairly young but it was my 11th film I think something like that so people always think they come to me and they say I saw your first film I saw your first film and I said which one which one Oh Gary no it's not really my first film I made things before in very good ones I think one of the things that is so that remains I've seen it several times a film is is did you actually do every single time you feel you are in that place with those people and that I know that you took the basic facts of the story of it created a kind of meditation on it but it feels they all everything to do with the circumstances of it feels so real yeah of course what what you see is his very strong sense of authenticity we lived on rafts like this the rafts actually followed us to bends of the river behind and we would stay overnight on the raft and people were rotting and rusting there caresses started to rust their swords started to rust and I wanted to have a scene where Kinski were Gary yells at the horses the horse drops and we had a lot of things we tested a lot of things and finally just did it as as it was the horse actually it was slippery on the on the raft and it fell and we had said I did it in a way we knew it was it was going to come down in in a few seconds and we timed it but I had I had done tests because I wanted to start the film at an altitude of over 4,000 meters 4,500 meters with hundreds of Spaniards and native Indian slaves coming down on a glacier into hundreds of pigs and the pigs were supposed to be somehow swaying and and suffering from altitude sickness and drop over and so and we tested certain medications with veterinarians that that would make them unconscious but it just didn't function it was and by the way I tested I was up on a glacier that's altitude we were six people in four of my guys were altitude sick and had to be somehow transported down so what I keep doing is a doable to the doable no four hundred Peaks all somehow swaying and in staggering in altitude sickness it just does not function it us does not work and I keep always I keep telling to my collaborators in particular cinematographers who say AHA we could dig a hole in the ground they'd have the camera solo and we are looking up at the person I would say yes but just calculate how much it would take to dig the hole but we have five more scenes today we have sixteen days of shooting this film so let's do the doable and that's what I do here well but did that doable would be undoable for most people actually that's the four it's doable for you and there's still that idea that and okay the staggering pigs may not have worked but you have monkeys all over the place yeah it was over 400 and yes doable in fact it was only the cinematographer Thomas Mouse on the raft in me with a sound and of course 400 monkeys and they were kind of afraid and they would accumulate under cannon about 150 of them would pile up under the cannon and I saw the camera approaching and I stirred him up quickly jumped aside and the camera was panning there and I was bitten at least 30 times during this shooting and the cinematographer Thomas Bach he had a monkey on his he had his camera on that side on the other side a monkey was was hanging on to his neck and bit him in the ear so it was wild wild wild and he couldn't scream and he kept on filming and we could shoot it only once that was done once and that was that and it's it's one of the finest things I ever did in my life it's the most extraordinary sequence because just at the point you think that can't be more monkeys yeah but but of course it was do a blower ship over a mountain many people in the crew practically everyone tried to dissuade me from my own madness quote-unquote when we couldn't move the ship and I knew we technically I knew how to do it and we had to create a certain environment which would allow us to go ahead as as we were as we were planning so you have to develop a sense of the doable even the impossible seemingly impossible like moving a steamboat over a mountain that's that's a hard one and those and all those are obviously so many of your films from that period Fitzcarraldo in particular are surrounded by great stories of the struggles between you and Klaus Kinski and the idea that there was as much drama as it was behind the camera as there was in front of it yeah but it's that it's only a very distant echo and and it doesn't really count it's it's a kind of stuff for for little anecdotes here and there but what counts is what you see on the screen and what counts is said Kinski is phenomenally good and everybody not not only not only Kinski was a pestilence in screaming and destroying a set and throwing tantrums and so it was also that not only Kinski was a problem the other actors in the technical crew became the problem because I said how can you do this again to us Kinski again this pestilence and we cannot we are in there threatening to walk to leave the set and in in girl because Kinski was unbearable so it's just something you have to help with well and that extraordinary kind of the energy the drive the will that is a gear ER or is Fitz corralled I mean that in a sense is one of the things that really fascinates you doesn't it it in whatever form of activity you come across it and as far as the subjects for your documentary we're moving towards talking about dieter Dengler now it's it's that idea of how people can survive these extraordinary ordeals and and how they do it is that also what interest you I think dieter Dengler the protagonist in little T des needs to fly and also in a transformed shape in the feature film rescued on where Christian Bale played him his part I think dieter Dengler came into this survival well prepared because it's a child he grew up in that took us very close brought us very close to each other he he Groot grew up without the presence of a father he grew up hungry like I grew up in he in the Black Forest I in the Bavarian mountains so there were many things similar however dieter Dengler indeed at eggless childhood it was much more severe I I remember I was hungry for maybe two and a half years but in his in his childhood it was so bad that his mother would take his younger brother to bombed out buildings and they would rip down the wallpaper and the mother would cook the wallpaper because there were nutrients in the clew so he was down dead that far and so he had a sense of survival a sense of danger sense of responsibility also so dieter Dengler it's in no one's nature to be so courageous as he was but he in a way grew into it because it is an extraordinary because he comes from Germany to the United States where he then enters the forces and becomes a pilot in Vietnam I mean and is he's almost like as opposed to boy pilot didn't he very good-looking and you know sort of positive and brave and then he's shot down in over Laos in 1966 first 40 minutes we were shocked out in fact he never wanted to go to war he only made it to the United States because he has this had this dream of flying and it's almost like in an ancient Greek tragedy a man who a young man and has his dream and he fulfills a dream to fly and is being punished for it and almost perishes in in a jungle prison and when he escapes is being saved when he's down to 85 pounds had maybe one one day to live so it was very lucky and some sort of redemption it's almost like like an ancient Greek drama and so in a way he's his is a real cinema character in the cinema figure and has seen things that nobody of us has ever ever imagined could be possible and in the most extraordinary way iterates his story I mean in such a vivid and you know sort of performance kind of way for the camera tells the story goes but you take him back to the places themselves where he recalls the things that happened to him yeah that there was no mercy I told him data we have to go back to to the jungly and actually we couldn't go into Laos we were not allowed to film but we filmed on the other side of the Mekong River in Thailand you see Laos on the other side and we had a plan to locate actually the his plane wreck there was still an engine in some pieces of the fuselage which were very pinpointed clear at this place and we planned to swim across the Mekong at night and take a small camera with us and go into Laos in film there were some more prudent members in the in the crew who dis waded us from doing it and I didn't do it because I thought to myself would it bring much to have some footage of some of the fuselage in the jungle being over ground by vines now it wouldn't have so much value it would be much more valuable to have DITA recounting what what he went through and in our in our imagination take us through the ordeal little data needs to fly is the most extraordinary documented absolutely I mean you know the pictures are there in your head and yet you wanted to make a feature film why was I mean clearly you know Christian Bale is fantastic the formalism is amazing and you do have again that real sense of being in the jungle but why did you feel that it needed that feature treatment no it was only a feature film there was only a plan to make a feature film and it was clearly planned Christian Bale was ready to do it but we couldn't finance a film for years and the situation emerged that all of a sudden German TV channel was interested in the story and I said to data we can do a documentary shall we do it in in a way the feature film that hadn't been created informed the documentary so it was a very strange crossover from the future into little data needs to fly by the way and that's what I have to tell every young person who is starting to make films you will have your defeats and you will have your your problems with networks with the producers actually the chief Network executive who had somehow been the one who promoted the film and got the finances he saw the film after it was finished in the editing room he flew to Los Angeles sees it and he crouches down and and he becomes silent it watches a film and at the end of the film he looks at the editor and means he says can you show me quickly where some where's a toilet a restroom and we said yet out there and then to the left and he says before he leaves he says this film is so bad I've never seen anything so bad in my life I need to vomit now and he walks out comes back after a while and he says this film is so unspeakably bad that I cannot and it was meant for a prime time it was part of a series it was meant for primetime 8:30 in the evening and he buried it at 12:15 after midnight when only two percent were left in front of TV screens and 90% of them sleeping anyway so the film bus was hidden and buried and it's one of my best so and these things happen and you have to brace yourself for for further bozos I mean since you mentioned young filmmakers you're not a great fan of film schools no although I ran my own films called er the rogue film school but it's some sort of her against what what you normally see worldwide in in film schools very disappointing very very dull what's going on there so it's more the real guerrilla style sort of stuff and very intense in its the film school doesn't have a place not as it have a specific time I could hold my film school for example in Hyde Park over a long weekend 3/4 day so I done abandoned quarry in in Yorkshire somewhere I could do it and and I would determine once I know five six months ahead of time I'm not under contract I'm not filming at that moment let's say beginning of March next year I'd I'm certainly going to be free I could hold one of those sessions of the rogue film school and of course it's not for the faint-hearted and since I have announced I would I would the only thing I really teach is how to pick locks and how to for its documents forge for it shooting permit for example for which I used when I did Fitzcarraldo I couldn't have made the film without massive forgery because I was not allowed to move my ship up a river there were military camps springing up one after the other in nobody knows knew what was what what was happening so I brought massively for it's beautiful shooting permit what we did not know there was that a border war would break out soon between Peru and Ecuador and I had built a camp and it was for over thousand people and it was attacked and burned to the ground so I had to start all over again somewhere else two thousand kilometer further to the south of that was doing a rule that was do it had to be done yes and it was doable there but of course you have to face other other problems and in there was some of them were serious we had two plane crashes or we had I lost my leading actor out of the film Jason Robards and his sidekick Mick Jagger he's the singer from the Rolling Stones and yeah you know him I am sure and and on and on and on so there were real real problems there catastrophes of great consequence of course so and they had shot half the film and had start to to begin all over again from the beginning the next room the next we're going to show is from a project where much of the footage is actually found footage it's from Grizzly Man and the subject Timothy Treadwell that the environmentalist and activist he was already dead I mean you you never met him did you no I didn't he was already 10 months dead however I do have an ongoing argument with him and I thought it was all right because I I differ with him in for example understanding his understanding of of nature wild nature I don't know which clip you well again just where absol absolutely going to show a clip which which partly discusses that this he's a very complicated character Timothy Trevor I say oh that's a slight understatement but he's a very complicated character because on the one hand he spent 13 summers thing wasn't it with these bears in Alaska extraordinary video footage of them clearly a degree of courage but would also report on it as if he was in a reality television show with a kind of cue even worse in a Disney movie yeah yeah as if as if Bears were fluffy creatures you could approach he actually does it in the film he reaches you see his hand reaching out and touching touching the the face of a bear and he would sing a song to the bear you just don't do it you better wispy you see I I differ with him I do not love the bears I would rather you rather respect the bears so of course I had quite difference in opinion and I voice it and I think it's it's kind of legitimate that I do this because as it's not only Timothy Treadwell there's some sort of a trend in highly technical civilization which does not understand wild nature anymore and it's what I call the Disney's ation of wild nature and unfortunately this philosophical sort of deep misunderstanding cost him his life and also cost the life of his girlfriend Amy who Guignard who was with him at the time and when Park Rangers were called in two bears had to be shot dead in because they started to attack the Park Rangers as well and they had to be shot dead so it was counterproductive what he did in a way and so it's it's one of those projects where I it's not that I started to develop it was how I it just in a way jumped at me and and I served a project that basically somebody else was was ready to do is that just get away it had so many because there's obviously and one of the the things that everybody picked up on was that the fact that there was an audio recording an audio recording of of the moment of death of of Treadwell and his companion and so there's a sort of sensationalism that that surrounds it as well um and in a sense what I feel that you're doing and well you tell me for you or not was that she was sort of tackling trying to strip away that but also trying to redress the kind of sentimental ization that surrounds already at the same show sure the sentiment realization I'm kind of allergic against that but you are referring to a tape what happened is when the bear attacked it was in both Amie Huguenard in Treadwell with all probability were in the tent Treadwell apparently left the tent in order to confront the bear and his girlfriend started switched on the camera it must have been so violent that she didn't have time to take the lens cap off the lens and drop the camera so it the tape ran but it only recorded the audio and everybody who was into this production the TV network and the distributor in the producer they said to me you have to address this type because it was discussed in all the media everybody wanted to know what's on the tape and I said okay I'm gonna address it but I will not play it for an audience unless I know what's on it and this is why I staged you see me from behind and I'm listening to the tape and opposite to me is this young woman jewel palovak who lived with him once and who is the owner of the tape now she inherited the tape and she tries to read from my face what I'm hearing you see her face not mine and she starts to cry she sees is something going on inside of me and I took it off and I said this is not going to happen this is not going to be in my film and I was under pressure and I said no I'll walk out of this project it's not going to be in this film only over my dead body so it's not in the film they had to respect it and you describe that I mean at one point you described the story as being beautiful and I'm interested to know because I don't find Treadwell's life but I understand I understand the endeavor of trying to get close to the animals but I find the whole thing sort of his personality in the whole question of his attitude so problematic I'm obviously the end of it is not beautiful does the beauty refer to the affection with which he's still held by so many people or all the kind of the love that you see from his friends and unform oh well it's a beauty of these animals and it's a beauty of the landscape and it's it's um something very coherent out there that he did not did not really fully understand and and of course I give him the chance to create his own stardom he wanted to be a star of his own movie and he was very selective for example he would do something step in front of the camera and make a grandiose statement and he would say oh now now this was really bad and the next one is going to be the and he steps in front of the camera again but we know for example that he must have taken one of these things at least 14 times because he erased we have taken number two we have taken umber eleven and we have take number fourteen three takes it are still visible so he must have deleted all the rest maybe he did a few more takes it deleted them at least 14 times like an actor in in a feature film and I wanted to give him the chance to be the star of his movie and he's very coherent names in really grandiose and at the next moment he is crumbling and he's he's defeated and his melancholic and in whatever so his there's a lot of facets in his personality and I I tried to give him the chance to to show the entire cross-section of his personality whilst at the same time also inviting us to reflect on on the relationship of humanity within the world which which increasingly does seem to be sort of more overtly what your interest is sure of course I had my own preferences and he had something like 100 hours of footage I personally saw only something like 12 14 hours all in all because I had to be very fast with editing and it was kind of odd the production said to me are I started shooting on my birthday early in September and I was back from shooting three weeks later around 25th or 22nd of September and the production people told me out this looks like a film for Sunday answer festival do you think you can finish it until Sundance which is end of January I said yeah I'm always fast I can do that and they said but there's a glitch and I asked what is that leads well the submissions for Sundance and at the beginning of October in ten days from now can you manage to edit the film in ten days I said yeah let me try and I finished it in nine days it I mean it's not completely correct after that we still fiddled with still it didn't have the final music there was only temp music and because of this pressure of time I could not watch hundred hours of footage of treadwheel and I said to everyone what what I've seen of our 90% of fluffy bear cubs and so I don't need these look out for for example encounters with foxes because he was completely off guards with foxes he was not the magnificent warrior who had to defend at 1100 pounds grizzly behind him against the bad guys with foxes he was much more personal and he had friendship with foxes that was genuine in a way and I would have very clear criteria what to search for and even though some in there were intelligent young people who sifted through it I found things thrown away there's a wonderful moment he plays Starsky and Hutch I've never seen it but it seems to be detectives or so who are wildly out there and he jumps in front of the camera and play some moment of Starsky and Hutch and then he disappears in for 15 seconds he's gone and you see Reed grass wafting in the wind and in then he jumps back and appears again and I only saw how he jumps in front of the camera and how he comes back and I asked the young man who who was sifting through this I said isn't there something in between yeah I said but I I deleted it I left it out and I said show me what happens in between 15 or 20 seconds and all of a sudden I see something magnificent an image of such great beauty where an image where landscape demands to be shown on a screen some sort of an aesthetic that that has its own power that is beyond the person who did the shooting and the person who was editing the film it had to be in the film and I reintroduced it into the film that the time in-between which was literally nothing but it had a great strange beauty and demanded to be in the film and that of course is why cinema is cinema can allow us those moments to meditate on that it's one of the few places in life yeah meditate no I'm not not so much into meditation yeah no I I prefer people who who are not sitting in lotus position and do meditation and empty themselves out never heard anything decent from any one of those I I prefer to see you doing some solid thinking and come back with a coherent argument so much for the meditation okay in in Hollywood by the way you you have yoga classes in meditation classes for the five-year-old so you just want to toss a hand-grenade sorry I'd forgotten how charged some words become on the other side that the very I'm just allergic against certain things the last clip we're going to show is from a very different from a group of people very different kind of people in a different environment which is Antarctica and a group of scientists and this will sort of also lead towards some of the films you've been working on more recently and this is encounters at the end of the world and you went down there to McMurdo to this extraordinary place which is both the very end of the world and also a little community a little town in itself I mean was there any way to prepare for that no because you're you fly in only once it's very expensive to bring a person into the Arctic our McMurdo Station which is the biggest settlement there but the problem is to maintain one person to keep you warm give you a place to sleep feed you with a warm lunch or so that's extremely expensive a single glass of water is very expensive because you have to fly in gasoline and melt glacier water so a glass of water like this would be ten dollars costs and on and on to maintain one person for one day is something like ten dollars sorry ten thousand dollars so even the most expensive suite at the Ritz is probably less expensive so and you are not you cannot come there before and do research you are thrown into into Antarctica and then you have to come back with a film and the people who are working there are contemplating there really whether they are beneath the ice or whether they are looking over the edge of the volcano or if they are contemplating the great questions of what will happen to the planet as well also but not only I mean what what is happening there and it's an ideal place to do astronomical research because you have five months of darkness for example during the into Arctic winter why you do have certain underwater singing cell creatures that you can retrieve from there and that was my interest I wanted to go underwater under the ice and it's so strange and so science fiction that I actually based some of this I based of science fiction film the wild blue yonder on footage that was shot under the ice shelf of McMurdo of the Ross Ice Shelf I was more interested in that but I was not allowed to go underwater you cannot have an amateur trying to dive there and then an accident happens and retrieving a body or or somebody half-dead would take so many resources they wouldn't allow it and it was it was corrected I didn't allow it so I decided I'd like to do more than just underwater filming which others actually did for me and I just ventured out one thing is a is important about this wheel and it we were only a two men Enterprise cinematographer and I did the sound directed the film and we land and he looks at me with this glaring sunlight on the ice and and you see a very far into the distance hundred kilometers in the distance there are mountains across the Bay of the Ross Ice Ross Bay and he'll Peter titling he looks at me and he's completely confused and he says Werner how for heaven's sake are we going to explain a whole continent like this to an audience back home and I said to him we do it like virtually in the George --ax who actually writes it's a wonderful one of the arguably the finest poetry ever written about the beauty of Farb life and the glory of the beehives and pruning of apple trees and so and Virgil never really explains in practical terms what agriculture meant were living in the countryside meant he names the glory and I said we do it like Virgil we come here we film and we only name the glory of this continent and every single person who is in front of our camera is royalty everyone and that's an attitude I always have when I have actors I do not have stars I do not treat anyone like star a star but everyone who shows up in front of my camera and says only to two words in dialogue is treated like royalty everyone is royalty but there's no stars so I'm just about on that note about to open it out to to questions from the audience but a pessimism about or a realism about the way the world is combined with a tremendous faith in humanity at the same time well when when we look at it human species in particularly now with our dependence on the internet for exam we are much more vulnerable s than we used to be before when there was homestead farming the Amish for example have a good chance of of coping with a severe disaster because it's homestead they work they live without electricity and without motorcars and things like that and it's interesting because in the film that into the inferno which I did with Clive Oppenheimer we filmed in Ethiopia and they are excavating were finding fossil remains of early homo sapiens hundred thousand years back and and we were very lucky because I found dozens and dozens of fragments of a skeleton within 30 minutes or so and one of the Ethiopian scientists we asked him you are looking back hundred thousand years in time do we have yet another hundred thousand yes as a species as Homo sapiens and he has an interesting argument he says with all the mistakes we are doing right now and with the overpopulation and and all the consequences in about a thousand years from now the human race will probably into a very critical phase and I think he's right there's something coming at us and and we better do quick learning from our mistakes so it's it's not a it's not a question of pessimism it's obvious that that human beings are not as robust less for example reptiles reptiles have a much better chance of surviving all sorts of cataclysms or the cockroach of course has a wonderful chance it even it even survives nuclear radiation so they're in they're well off and we should envy them you well that's a moment which you you do not learn this in film school anywhere he opens a film there's a prologue and Chaplin who had to be in the death house in the death chamber only 40 minutes later I thought it was in the afternoon sometime and he comes on the set and taps his wristwatch and he says quick quick quick I have to be in the death house in 20 minutes so I dragged him in front of the camera I apologize said I got him into this mess and I start filming and and he speaks like a phony TV preacher about how grandiose creation is and he would see that how beautiful the world was created by God when he's on his golf cart early in the morning and you would see a squirrel or a horse or some deer looking at him and and God was merciful and full of redemption and it would have gone on for the next ten minutes like a TV preacher and I stopped him and I and I asked him tell me about an encounter with a squirrel I just had it in me that this would break him out and he he unravels why I asked him that I have no idea it just you have to be alert you have to be you have to to to understand the the heart of mend in a way and I I never saw him before never again I met him for 20 minutes and every other person in the film I did not meet more than one hour in my entire life only for filming and that was that so as a consequence I had only six or eight hours of footage for an almost two-hour documentary and it my heart sinks when I hear from young filmmakers oh I shot 650 hours of film and I'm editing since two and a half years you see it maze it may become a good film but but normally they do not know what they are doing and they film everything that's coming near their camera and it's brainless and I to tell filmmakers be specific to good casting you should know what you are doing and then you can be much faster in the market out there the wilderness out there when young people leave film school all of a sudden they are exposed to the real market meaning they have to be on budget they have to be on time and they they get lost and very talented young people lose themselves because I never learned this kind of discipline and tell me about an encounter with a squirrel it was just some sort of a of an inspiration I had at that very moment completely unprepared it's the first time that I hear from you that Lao was also used in connection of talking about Native American people completely news to me because for me it was always biblical lo and behold there was light and God created the heavens in the earth so it was this kind of biblical thought and I didn't come up with lo and behold it was actually the character Leonard Kleinrock who says we typed in we wanted to type in login we typed in L did the L arrived yep did the O arrived yep and when they typed in G the computer crashed so the first word ever passing through the internet was lo like lo and behold that's where the title comes from it's not my invention and he refers very clearly to to a biblical term and I had no idea that it was ever used in conjunction with the with a perishing of of Indian nations native Indian nations in in America but similar things are going on right now and it's and I'm I'm saying that because my wife while we are here she's at the British Museum on the 21st she opens a big sort of event which is called last whispers and oratorio for composed out of voices of languages that are already extinct or voices in songs where there is one single last surviving speaker in a few other languages where there's only a handful of speakers left so it's a big oratorio in the video and it's going to open at the British Museum in 10 days from now or less than 10 days and I have been fascinating because of her about loss of cultures and languages we do have 7,000 CEL languages still spoken on this planet at this moment and we are losing them at enormous velocity it's a incredible V immense of loss by the end of this century 95% of all languages will be extinct and only 5% left and and you have to see it's not not just perishing of let's say native Indian people it's its loss of whole cultures what if we lose the last spanish-speaking person on this planet no more Cervantes no more flamenco no more Velasquez no more Goa no more Spanish poetry so it's there there is a loss going on that is in happening in silence in the very form of loss when we lose languages is silence so that's what what touches me much more and lo and behold as you say has to be seen in in connection with the extinction of North American native Indians news for me and I have to look into it filmmaking of course is a permanent permanent struggle with the with adverse realities out there and from day one I knew you had to you had to accept the medium as it was and it hasn't done anything to me that every single day of shooting I do at least twenty thirty compromises I do the doable and it has not not diminished the quality of the film it has actually sometimes a compromises forced me into being more intelligent of doing solutions that are much more like a shortcut in narration much more economical in my narration it has been quite often the compromise has been to the advantage of the film and if you are a filmmaker you will experience the same thing every single days is a chain of banality and a chain of compromises and I have absolutely no problem with that so it's nothing has ever hurt me and I couldn't even name a film where I would say well this is painful that I had to to make this this or that compromise has never happened to me the compromise is yes but no pain it was it was wonderful that I had to do the compromises and it was in the very nature of my profession well I Fermi there's no such clear distinction it's all movies for me sometimes they are harder to make sometimes easier in as a rule of thumb but it's not an easy profession and I think my films inform each other either way from the documentaries into the feature films and and the other way around and when you see a film like Fitzcarraldo for example sometimes I feel intrigued to be provocative and I would tell people this is my best documentary because moving a ship over a mountain is some some real realistic sort of feat you have to do it and you can see it how it was done it has elements that are almost documentary however when I pull the ship over the mountain it's not for the sake of realism it's for the sake of stylization it's like if it looks the way you see it in the film it had to look and it looks like a fever dream in the jungle or it had to look like a big operatic event so realism in stylizations inform each other in a way and you have to see the clear goals in the state clear stylizations that's a much more important aspect of what I'm doing your observation about the chapters in the numbered chapters it goes back into the idea of how the film actually originated I was asked by a very prestigious very well-respected big internet company that somehow keeps gigantic flows of data moving and looks for an anomalies and spams and intrusions by hackers net-net scout and they wanted me to do a series of films five six or so films short films five-minute films for YouTube and I had done a similar thing for YouTube before a few years earlier for YouTube about texting and driving which was I was asked by AT&T one of the big telephone providers in the United States and then Verizon Sprint t-mobile jumped on board when I started to make the film about catastrophic events it happens when somebody's driving a car looking down at the texting and in writer writes a mail and in the statistics went through the roof I mean it was catastrophic now it has slowed down in the the film was a phenomenal success on the internet and I was asked could I do a series one two three four five or so for YouTube and I started out like that on the first day of shooting I hate the feeling oh my god I cannot condense my conversation with Leonard Kleinrock to a five-minute clip I can't do that on second day I stopped everything after shooting and it was it was very significant one in between was an advertisement agency yup he's a creative director was next to me I didn't know what to do with him and and I had a wonderful conversation and they watched it three rooms away from me on a screen and at the end of this almost one hour conversation this yuppie from the ad agency comes in total excitement he was genuinely excited and it comes applauding and he said one I've never seen anyone having such a lively wonderful and intelligent conversation what was your favorite soundbite today and he meant three five second soundbite in our stunned being asked that and without missing a beat I said after the first introduction the next 14 minutes uncut and in having given this kind of impertinent answer I knew I was right I had to step out of the sound bites and putting it together into YouTube clips and I knew I had to do something much bigger a lager film much more depth much more joy of the characters involved in that much more joy of my own discoveries all that in one film and they understood very quickly that this should be done in a different way and result now we have lo and behold and I'm very happy that we have this film and thank you that you I got you into the mess here and and I have to thank the festival in dog woof who distributes the film and I had a new experience connecting to over 60 theaters live in the discourse so it's beautiful new possibilities thanks to the Internet thank you very much for coming you you

Channel: BFI

Views: 76,776

Rating: 4.9411144 out of 5

Keywords: British Film Institute (Publisher), british, film, institute, films, movie, movies, BFI, Werner Herzog, Lo and Behold, London Film Festival

Id: Q3908U5h3XE

Length: 68min 46sec (4126 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 17 2016