Werner Herzog Walker Dialogue with Roger Ebert

you [Music] six months after I became a film critic I met Vanna Hertzog at the New York Film Festival and that began a dialogue that has continued to this day on various continents at various cities at various times I have never found him less than fascinating on the subject of film and all during all those years my entire career as a film critic been a Hertzog has been a touchstone a person who constantly challenged me with the strength of his new ideas and of his strong visuals I'm Roger Ebert and I'm at the Walker Art Center where we're going to have a dialogue of Anna Hertzog tonight and he has promised to start with a declaration of principles that he calls the Minnesota declaration to welcome to the stage of the Walker for a Regis dialogue mr. Roger Ebert mr. Vera Hertzog [Applause] thank you ladies and gentlemen before we start this dialogue and Roger Ebert knows about that I would like to make a statement and it is something I've reflected upon for many years in the frustration of seeing so many documentary films and when you look at television you probably have experienced a similar frustration there's something ultimately and deeply wrong about concept of what constitute fact and what constitutes truth in documentary cinema in particular and very recently traveling around a lot I was jet-lagged woke up a couple of times during the night and tried to switch on television and it was all bad so between 3:00 and 3:15 in the morning in Sicily I wrote down quickly a manifesto which I would like to read to you it's I would like to call it the money the Minnesota declaration truth in fact in documentary cinema and it has a title lessons of darkness and the lessons are numbered one by dint of declaration the so called cinema Verity is devoid of reality it reaches a merely superficial truth the truth of accountants to one well-known representative of cinema verite declare publicly the truths can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest he resembles a night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures for me quote he says there should be only one thing in law the bad guys should go to jail unfortunately he is part right for most of the many much of the time three cinema verite confounds fact and truth and thus plows only stones and yet facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes the inherent truth seem unbelievable for fact creates norms in truth illumination 5.the a deeper strata of truth in cinema and there's such a thing as poetic ecstatic truth it is mysterious and elusive and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization six filmmakers of cinema verite resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts 7 tourism is sin and travel on foot Virtua 8 each year at springtime scores of people on snow mobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law he the former wrestler and bodyguard has the only sage answer to that you can't legislate stupidity 9 the gauntlet is hereby thrown down 10 the moon is dull Mother Nature doesn't call doesn't speak to you although a glacier eventually farts and don't you listen to the song of life 11 we ought to be grateful that the universe out there knows no smile 12 life in the oceans must be sheer hell a vast merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger so much of a hell that during evolution some species including man crawled fled on to some small continents of solid land where the lessons of darkness continued thank you very much ladies ladies and gentlemen I've never had a majority on my side only made throughout my life I wish you to adopt this as a Minnesota declaration by acclamation [Applause] I have asked the Walker Art Center who was kind enough to invite me with this kind of stuff to distribute the text to you because some of it as a souvenir as a souvenir to this evening which I enjoy a lot already the I have a question to ask you about the declaration but I will wait until it is handed out you now say something first the first time I met you was in 1967 at the New York Film Festival and I had been a movie critic at that time for six months and you showed a film the signs of life at that festival and we were invited to the home of Robert Shaye who founded New Line Cinema but at that time as you remember was a very poor young man who lived in a very small apartment in a critic village and I said at yourfeet where I have been seated ever since and we were both 25 years old and I knew at that moment that I sensed in a way that as long as I would be a film critic I would be interested in what you did because you burned with a special flame with an intensity and with a joy and it has been true and now all of these years later I know every time I see one of your new films that I am going to be inspired by it and I remember in particular and I wrote about it in a note for the walker a time when we set at the Martinez hotel in can and you told me that we are starving for images starving for images and I said that I went out and I looked at a movie and it had people running around and then people in cars and then people smoking cigarettes and diners and then they got back in their cars on the telephone yeah and they're on the telephone and I thought it's true it's true we cannot look at infinite variations of these four shots and call it the cinema and when you use the word ecstasy here yeah ecstatic ecstatic truth yeah I think that that may be the very key to what you're getting at yeah it's not easy to get this across but what does it mean ecstatic truth and what constitutes just mere fact which is that the truth of accountants even though one has to we shouldn't dismiss the the power effects because as one of the lesson says fact create norms and they create norms including ethical norms when you see for example footage shot in concentration camps right after they were liberated is it is fact fact fact in nothing but that and it has such an immense power that it creates norms of moral behavior so we should not dismiss that but it's it's not the end of it it's not it's not what can be reached in cinema there's there are deeper strata of truth and you have to be inventive and you have to fabricate and you have to stylize and and you have to to catch and try to find this elusive magic of images and if we don't have these images if we don't develop an adequate language of images an adequate grammar of images our civilization will be sort of maybe even died out like the dinosaurs I have the feeling that we must develop adequate images and they are limping behind they're lagging behind there have been such dramatic evolutions in the last past decades and when you look at on television or at much of what Hollywood does there is something very unsatisfying and there is a deep gap between what is us and what these images are and so that's where we have to we have to look out for that you wrote or spoke once of your belief that the ordinary person has with him enormous poetry that is not liberated and you talked about hypnotizing people and asking and telling them that they were looking at a giant sapphire which was such a hard stone that a poet the greatest poets on morality and their world members he had spent his lifetime engraving appointment to this yeah and then you asked them to read the poem and what and every people maybe you could tell that story because it shows that there is a a poetry inside of us that were not always willing to actually yeah it it refers to to work on a film which I did many years ago it's called heart of glass all day all the actors in the film acted under hypnosis it was not a circus gimmick it had to do with a story where a village collectively lapses into trance were like sleep walkers walk into a farcical disaster so first I'll I sit for the state of stylization people were hypnotized and they opened their eyes under hypnosis without waking up Americans by the way hated the film because it's so slow and people speak so strangely anyway the Scandinavians loved it yeah the Americans were anyway and in in choosing a cast I invited potential actors for it and I explained to them that they would act under hypnosis and I would have 20 25 people each week assembled and would put them under hypnosis and I was curious to find out what is intensified under hypnosis for example memory works very well under hypnosis people would line their would learn their lines by heart much faster under hypnosis then without the effect of hypnosis and I did what what I sensed some sort of a poetic sort of language inside of them deeply buried inside of them and and when I it depends also on the quality of suggestion you can't I can't put you under hypnosis and say Roger you are you're a Hemingway now you are Shakespeare now write me a poem you wouldn't do it but you have to suggest something very evocative a cliff of emerald and the holy monk was like the poet who has spent all his life to engrave a poem a poem and there was one man who took care of of horses for a police squadron on horseback and he just cleaned the stable and took care of the horses and I put my hand on his shoulder and he opened I said you will open your eyes when I put my hand on your shoulder and he opens his eyes and I said can you see the power missus yeah as kind of seed blurt but I don't have my glasses yes I said put your glasses on then you will you will focus and you will see it very clearly and he looked with the glasses on sees it all of a sudden and he reads with a very strange beautiful voice he read why can't we drink the moon why is there no vessel to hold it I don't remember fully but it was very very beautiful same thing happens with audiences who watch cinema under hypnosis I would hypnotize an audience of like like this years and 300 or so people and in show films like fata morgana some of Aguirre and it is very strange because it's mysterious we do not know much about how vision functions and how we elevate things and how for example some of the people felt they were circling around Kinski like a helicopter and see him from behind and really scared and by him and it was very very strange and very mysterious and still mysterious and I'm trying to to discover more in trying to articulate that we have one one excerpt which yes we have an excerpt that we want to start with from distance of nervousness dark images they film about well I shouldn't say what it's about because it takes place on another planet okay can we see that please and it's a very beginning of the film lessons of darkness number one this quote the collapse or the Cataclysm of the stellar universe will occur like creation in grandiose splendor philosophers or people who know about philosophy asked me I've tried to find it in Pascal's works isn't is it impulse is it in his thoughts or where is it and I kept evading the question and I kept saying yeah I had this this critical edition of him and it was in some appendix truth is truth is it's all made up I made it up myself but why yes it's it sounds funny but it it has a very particular reason s audience on before the film even begins you you have you are sensible eyes and you are elevated to to a very high level and I do not allow the audience to step down from that ever during the film everybody of course knows it's about quite it pretends to be a science fiction film the next image that you see is a I show mountain ranges valleys and in the landscape in shrouded in mist the mountain the mountain range is actually where less than a foot tall it was some tracks of of trucks in the sand in Kuwait and I shot it closed up and panned and it was all because it was so hot and so overheated it was kind of steaming or smoking but for me it looked like a strange landscape and it's it is it is a fabricated it's an imaginary landscape it's an ecstatic landscape not a real landscape in the first creature that we encountered on this planet is not is not just an extraterrestrial he was just one of the firefighters who wanted to have the the water flowing in a house being cut off or something because he tramples only three points and does things and I kind of liked him I like this man and I him into a extraterrestrial and and that constitutes something that is that is deeper that is beyond the facts fact is that what you see the landscape in the mountain ranges that you see are just tracks in the in the sand and no more but but in our imagination and with our with with a with a kind of music in their text that you have read before it constitutes a deeper deeper strange deeper ecstatic truth you know it does I saw it at the Telluride Film Festival for the first time this film and you know critics sometimes make ridiculous statements such as I laugh so hard that I fell out of my seat and had to have artificial respiration and given oxygen and so I try never to make statements like that ever but I will tell you something that because I never make statements like that I'm telling you it's literally true sometimes when I'm watching a film I will feel an electrical charge go through my body a tingle whoo and I get that so frequently with your films a moment when it's like when the star-spangled banner is when you sing it before the baseball game I don't know of any of you feel like that I do even though I may think it's a pretty bad song I think we could have a better song for our national anthem but when I saw this film I was sitting in my seat and I had been transported to this place that had to do with man's with the fires of hell and with you knew the story of the war but also you saw the sights that we're going to see in the next clip and then several months later I saw a very bad film on the same subject that was shot for IMAX yeah they had a second story screen and then I 180 speakers and it was counted in true true yeah and some narrator saying yeah 193 fires burned out of control for more than six weeks and I'm thinking Vanna didn't use any narrator - he let us feel yeah it was the feeling and feeling more than just as the vent that was the feeling of the of the symbolism of it yeah and maybe we should look at the next clip because it shows the the approach and with the music and with the slowness of the ramp instead of cutting down into a documentary rhythm we look at this and that you you have the immense yeah all of you probably have seen the fires of Kuwait and on CNN know in the evening news day after day after day always in these 15 seconds clips and always this this sonar voice over it that Saddam was bad or something like this yeah you know seven million gallons of oil a second yeah so and here we have we have an event that is unique in in human history and it it is singular it is kind of singular and it will remain singular because it technically it cannot happen in the future anymore and and it has a great significance and I thought I will go with a camera out there because it it must be it must be recorded for the memory of humankind there is something deeper about it something more significant than than just pollution of this in the invasion by a dictator in the end and and a guy whose name is Saddam and who is bad so maybe we can see this clip this excerpt I says a problem with routing it's quickly to that point it's as if the television news has made us think that everything has to be told in 60 seconds or 45 seconds and it's all can be explained sure yeah the way to cover this story would have been just to put the cameras out there in the fields for an hour and let you look at it burn right yeah or do or to show your film yeah it was also aiya here it comes it's it's okay we will eventually get lesson number seven I think and a smoke arouse like a smoke from a novice [Music] now we have to stop let let's lit show it it's okay whatever comes I I think that what we should do is go ahead and look at the clip of query since that's the one we have whatever is coming along let's let's just go white we'll just we'll just look at this coming at that clip and we we were going to get to it next anyway so here we are okay I actually am just finishing but the speedboat people thought it was a helicopter shot but it's a speed versus a speedboat and the real tough thing is to slow it down and not create a wake so I was good at that because when they when the camera comes around you don't see the way yeah well you'll notice if you know to the left you'll see some wake but you don't know where to do it that way [Music] Wow okay and that is that is man man's pride and his ego and we are all on the stream with a query with big plans this film was the film that really I think made you famous all over the world and it was but it took quite a while it took many many years until anyone wanted to see it was really a film which is inconceivable to me oh no it it happened the film was finished and it was shown at the Carson Daly elicit earn income where it had some attention but from then it was lost nobody wanted to see the film and in Germany at that time we had some sort of a rating system it was a panel of a jury which decided whether the film was culturally valuable or even particularly valuable totally ridiculous system but it was helpful because cinemas would get tax reduction if they showed one of those films so in there were they were very very Clement in very benign sort of panel who who would toss this at every singie film almost every single film that year got got this label value of a particularly valuable out of 62 films or so only three films didn't get it two of them were too hardcore pornos which didn't get it in the third one was unique because it was Aguirre and in cases where the panel decided unanimously in this case five to zero votes not to grant any sort of labor to it they have to do it in writing and it's a wonderful document it says that the firm was was so unbelievably bad that panel members needed to vomit but that that in particular Klaus Kinski's performance was of such deep stupidity and embarrassment that the panel could not help but decide unanimously to deny any sort of evaluation for this film so out of 63 films this was the only one that really made them feel anything apparently yes this is incredible to me because when I see this film it is one of the great epics of the period of time when I've been a film critic i yeah i think the come film festival didn't want to accept it it was shown to the to the festival president and he said this I don't take such bad films so I ended up in a side event which was a Kazan but it is really a great film yes I saw these Roger go back to 19th century right and talk to these guys just speak to them and make it clear to them it actually took some four years until the tiniest imaginable distributor in France took it for no money at all they exhibited in into little theaters with hundred 10 and 90 seats respectively and all of a sudden it was sold out for two and a half years and I saw I saw people in the afternoon lining up in the rain around the entire block so I was totally stunned what the hell is going on there so and I'm still puzzled about it you know the the folly of the expedition of these people and armor and they're carrying their women in bearer carriages yeah and they have their clothes and their priests and their rituals and their allegiance to the king was thousand miles away and they are in the middle of this jungle that is sublimely indifferent yeah and it's such a wonderful example of the way that we can convince ourselves how important we are when the when nature is so indifferent to us I mean I can't understand why why the jury or the the people in Germany on the panel wouldn't I had this difficulties quite often in my own country the last the last big thing lessons of darkness which showed that the Berlin Film Festival at the forum international forum and there was something like 1,100 peoples and they they howled in disgust and shouted me down inspect at me and it was just stunning and I thought it was a good film and I stood there and I said you're all wrong this film is good and there was shouts that I glorified the horror and I said yeah well mr. Dante Alighieri did the same in the inferno and have only moustache did it in his paintings and coati did in his paintings so what so and then that Craig or the festival director he told me can't we get out here backstage I said now I'm gonna walk down all this island and I walked down of course I had I had even agitated them more and they spat at me and threw things at me and how eleven hundred people in howling disgust you know and it's a very fun no it's truly a fine film I swear to God just shown yet yeah I'm reminded of when Salvador Dali made in Chien Andalou and he they showed it in Paris and he loaded the pockets of his coat with rocks so that he could throw them back at the audience yeah but he expected it but I did it but you didn't I didn't I thought it was a fine film and they would like people go to see the most miserable trash and they walk out and you ask them how did you like the film oh it was fine it is a tribute if people have a strong reaction if you reach them now they have a reaction that seems to be stupid but obviously the film assaulted them in some way that yeah I was important to them but Roger you see I really do not spend any sleepless nights over that and it and it's fine and it's honorable to have many a foe out there so fine good but you know there is one one moment in the Kuwait film that I'm sure you know the one I'm referring to when they fight and battle and struggle for covered with oil and with dirt in exhaustion to put out this fire yeah and then the man smiles at your camera and he lights it again yeah in the text says that some some of those pilgrims are there like like on the pilgrims they it's about life without fire his life without fire become unbearable for them and now they they reignite it and now they're happy again now they are content again and they grin at the camera and smoke a cigarette and there in true bliss and when I filmed this I I just made a joke behind the camera and I said don't you laugh and they they just couldn't hold from from just somehow grinning in inwardly and I made this text and then you see other see the text says others seized by madness follow suit and you see two other guys who throw a torch at this gushing oil and it relights it was actually needed for technical purposes because the fires would spread out into lakes and the whole lake of oil would catch fire and they would have had a much larger problem if the lake had expanded to other oil wells so they read it on purpose but I transformed it into into some sort of people who cannot live without fires anymore and this is what we're talking about in a manifesto because the 60 minutes approach would be they reignite the well so that it won't spread to the lake and start other fires yeah what you give us and that's nothing that is is it no what you give us is a vision of of Dante and proportions what what I would call the poetic way ecstatic truth that can be inherent in in in pictures and they can be organized you have to find them you have to organize them you have to fabricate them and in many of my documentaries like little data needs to fly I the same part of the narration of dieter six seven times over because he what he would tell me the story how he fled along a path with his friend and they couldn't walk anymore and crawling along and in his friend in a very crazed and tragic incident was beheaded by villagers and Dida not knowing why he does so totally exhausted and delirious in fever grabs the only soul of a tennis shoe that they found and tied with rattan to the f2f to one of their feet they would alternate it grabs it and then runs and Dida told me this story on camera in a way that that was totally exceptional and I said Dida we have to do it again you forgot the detail about the soul that you ripped away from your dying friend so he told me the story again and again he forgot well he would give me the detail but but spent endless time in totally useless details he had no concept of of the density of narration so I would shoot it six times over like a future film and I would I would guide him and I would say DITA do it like this forget about the details I'm not interested behind how many rocks you hit and that there was a round rock and and this and that it's it's not interesting we need to focus on the few things that are essential in the essentials all of a sudden in in in combination with with with the man with what's in him makes something very very special you know so many of your films involve an element that is not only beyond your control but threatens your life Stanley Kaufman said that your films are about risking death in many cases when you think of going into the into the jungles of Peru and going into this nuts at risk and any idiot can do it without being harmed it is not a risk except that people were killed by arrows that when your group was attacked no nobody was actually killed one man was shot with a very huge error through the throat and I I just met him a few months ago he can he can even sing by now he was very proud well you see that as you can say that would qualify as a risk to me yeah well when another person of his wife was shot by three arrows there were seven feet tall arrows with arrow heads it that long and in razor-sharp made out of bamboo and and she was shot into the abdomen in the one arrow broke at the inside of her pelvis and one was deflected from her pelvis in the third one very narrow it went to the other went to through her body just above the kidneys and we had to operate on our kitchen table in the cab because they we couldn't transport them anymore they would have died so for eight hours we operated on them and I assisted with a torch light lighting the the the abdominal cavities and with the other hand I would spray the mosquitoes away so we it there are tough moments you have to go through them what you see I want to know that your kids if I can continue my point a little bit because the the Tarzan movies were shot in Burbank and you you have spoken to me in the past of the Voodoo of location of the notion that the film has to take place in the right place for the film for example you use some of the locations of Murnau's Nosferatu for your Nosferatu you went onto the top of a volcano that was scheduled to explode and if it had done so well we would have been gone you would have been killed you were once on top of it many were suffered with snow but but Roger this thing about the volcano is is more singular event because it was kind of stupid and blind Lottery and we know we knew that if it would explode with the force of a couple of atomic bombs Hiroshima size we would be airborne that's what I told the cinematographer he was scared and he he said but Werner what's gonna happen if if it if it's blast I said we will be airborne so and I asked him are you still with us and he said yes I'm gonna be with you so but that was the only stupid blind gambler's well but what I'm is that frequently you seek out a story in which there are elements in the story that involve the kind of courage or risk or effort that leads for example when you use bruno s he is a person who is not controllable in the way that a hollywood actor is although he may be more intelligent than a house in in film after film you welcome in Fitzcarraldo you decide having already told us that you you fictionalized some things in documentaries doesn't make a fiction film which literally is showing us the truth you are actually moving the boat across the land even though any other director in the world would have done it with models the so called lastic solution which was offered to me by the way by Hollywood people who were interested in it but it's like this is it like a spiritual quest each film is like a test or a a situation in which the the the filmmaking itself not just the film but the filmmaking is part of the test that you set yourself no it's it doesn't really count what what the challenge was during the making of a film the only thing that's that counts is what you see on the screen that's the only thing that remains maybe what you see on the screen is enhanced by what the actors and the crew are really doing maybe maybe this ends your sense something that that is that is more than than just shooting in in a studio when you see a carry-on on this raft with 450 monkeys and they bit like hell I got bitten 50 times there were only the cinematographer and me on onboard that raft and I did the sound so I was defenseless because both hands were were somehow occupied with the the the microphone and in the Nagre and I got bitten all the time in your chest are not allowed to scream you just try to shake them off your the sound man in the sound work but I think as an audience you sense there's something that that is going on there which is I know you're just different but what I have to say one important thing about the so called plastic solution a little model plastic ship over a Studio Hill in Burbank or so pulling the ship 360 tons of a real mountain in the middle of nowhere next town was 1,400 kilometers away where you could make a phone call about by a torchlight battery pulling this real ship of a real mountain in one single piece was not done for the sake of realism when you look at the film the moments where the ship goes over the mountain looks transformed into an operatic event it looks unreal and that's a strange thing a very strange twist that something extremely factual extremely naturalistic realistic transforms into into a great scene of opera a great event of opera and to achieve that is a very strange procedure on the other hand Roger a new pulling a ship over a mountain which was has no precedent in technical history so you have no no one who to help you in his real life they took the ship apart all showed their day they would they would transport ships over across Peru and put it together and Lake Titicaca high up in the mountains but but disassembled in hundreds of pieces and some engineers would put it together any idiot can do that so but the strange thing is and I knew it beforehand I knew that doing this in for real what create things that not the most fertile imagination could could ever envision and things happened are for example just the sound of the of the hull croaking and screaming and farting and and and yelling out is something no sound men on earth would ever have invented and in little details and and incidents happened that became part of the film which all of a sudden is very rich in life it's very much alive and it comes because we didn't choose to shoot studio and it's not that I am looking out for the dangerous and for the adventure stuff I hate adventure and I can't stand the concept of adventurism it's it's just ridiculous I mean that that where it became really obviously ridiculous was was the time at the early time of the century when people tried to reach the pole South and North Pole's is the first ones in in history how totally stupid and ridiculous that was and and it signaled the end of some some sort of a deeper quest of something maybe evil or more ancient a quest where where you went into the unknown and you would find a vision and you would fulfill something and you would come back richer you are not richer any richer by by by setting your trample on some some piece of ice and and you establish AHA this is the North Pole so but I what I think and it might get us into our next clip is when the ropes are around the giant pulleys to pull the ship and we know you don't know it from the film but we know it from other sources that the Brazilian engineers told you that the ropes would break and whip around and cut everyone and to and they left they like the engineer the engineer didn't want to be there when it happened because you wouldn't listen to well when Kinski is looking at the road yeah and we're hearing the groan of the Timbers and the clang of the rope and we see his face no actor no conceivable actor could stand in front of a blue screen or stand in front of a prop rope and how would he look yeah you know all you have to do is film him standing there yeah and his whole body is responding to the fact that he knows that this rope and others like it are holding in the ship and by the same token in kaspar hauser which is our next film if we have a man who has lived in captivity and been beaten in a cellar all of his life and we cast an actor however extraordinary an actor he might be we will never get the performance we get from Bruno s who whose life was not exactly like that but it wasn't that different in a way in that he was held away from nature and happiness yeah by the circumstances of his life and then the people around him the other actors in the scene when they look at him and talk to him relate to him in a way that no actor could since Laura Mia I think so yeah but Roger I want to say one thing about the risks and the dangers that I put other people in of course engineer lifts but at that moment I halted the entire production for a fortnight and I only resumed shooting of the film after I had mounted a dead post which was so solid that it would have taken ten times weight of the ship so and there was no physical risk for anyone any more and had the ship broken loose and come down backwards slip down and on the mountain there was nobody behind the ship so I would categorically for forbid it to anyone so there were precautions taken that were adequate well I'm not accusing you of putting anyone danger what I'm suggesting is that although it is true that the post could hold ten times the weight of the ship if I'm Klaus Kinski standing there I'm thinking to sigh and to to give sounds very unhealthy it sounds unhealthy and when it snaps there's so much pressure inside that the cable is glowing red inside and when you see something like that you you really respect the cable and you really respect the kind of stuff that it's pulling that is the kind of feeling that I so often get in your films that we are being treated to an intensity that you are able to create or to allow that could not be done in a more conventional way and I think that my way should be the convincement way Hawaii and I wouldn't be happier as a critic if I saw more films by you yes and like yours yeah the next clip is the mystery of kaspar hauser and maybe you want to say something about Bruno when Bruno was Casper houses is a is a person historical figure who was locked away all his life in a dark dungeon in the cell not knowing what daylight was but how other people looked like he thought he was the only one didn't know what's human speech was and had no concept of the world and was later murdered after he was pushed out of this dungeon cuz you know s who plays the part we wanted to remain anonymous so his name is only Bruno s and doctor and he had a similar life he was the illegitimate child of a prostitute who didn't want their child beat him from tiny on and when he was three she beat him so bad that he lost speech and she put him away into a home for and insane children and he grew up like this it started to escape was captured put into more and more severe institutions in correctional later a minor criminal record and he spent 23 years of his first 26 years locked away and he is a leading character and I think he's unique and wonderful and better than any Oscar winner of the last 20 years let's look at it where those images come from the Caucasian the Caucasus here that's a strange thing and that's also one of those transformations of images I'll tell you what what what it is in a moment that I would like to to point out first the image is set up by a certain climate that is set for it not only in how Casper tells about his dream it's also set up by music and an image all of a sudden transforms it actually was some eight millimeter footage that my younger brother who now is my producer shot in Burma was just not even super 16 it was regular 16 millimeter footage and he showed me some stuff that he shot on a long voyage that he did in Asia and I and he said other suspect unsteady shot which I which I hated and I looked at it and SAT and lookee this is this is such a great image it's such a wonderful thing it only can occur in dreams let me do something let me make something with it and what I did is I projected it from very close distance onto a screen only from that distance on a semi-transparent screen so it would shine through on the other side and I filmed it with a 35-millimeter camera from the other side changing the structure of the screen some sort of a strange texture in it and not taking care of the different speed of projector and camera and that's why it flick us out into dark and twee into more light and it it is a it's one of the the real wonderful images that that I have somehow stolen a thief without loot that that I have that I've gotten it which has fallen into my lap and I think as a filmmaker you have to develop an eye for what what is the truth in the most truth that is a power of an image and to put it in the right context and create a climate for that will create something special and and it's also it doesn't say this is Burma of course it was somewhere in Burma and and there are hundreds of temples in this valley very very strange and mysterious but for Kasbah in fact the audience this is the Caucasus period as something else which strikes me hear the story of Casper house is the story of an adolescent estimates ranged from 15 to 18 years of age when he pushed out into a street not being able to speak with the exception of one sentence that he could speak like a parrot without knowing what language was and in an anonymous letter in his hand so the real kaspar hauser in 1828 or so was a relatively young man an adolescent and Bruno in this film looks like like an adolescent he looks very young fact is that at the time of shooting he was already 41 and you have to be able to to transform someone into into something very hard to explain how it's being done to to make him sublime to make him credible all of a sudden from in deep inside to be an adolescent and when you create that inside of him you would create an image that make him look an adolescent and in Bruno was very intensively into it he would for example not take off his costume at night and he would sleep in it and he would not sleep in the bed because he was always accustomed to to be on the run and flee from police so I found him in one morning he overslept and I and knocked at the door he didn't answer so I 50 me when he didn't answer I pushed the door open which was not locked and he was sleeping on the ground right next to the and I push the door at him and he bolted he shot bolt upright and he said yes mana what is it and it was so frightening for me to see that he was still in this fear of being captured and being taken away by police and being locked away again and and so I I said Bruno we don't have to hurry you overslept but but now we are gonna have some coffee first and the crew is going to wait so and he got nervous as I run off but but all what is in inside this man inside of this totally tragic and catastrophic life that he led there is something that can be made visible and perceivable on on the screen and is stupid as it may sound that's my profession that's what I have to do and you did you used him again in stroszek and in both cases there was a texture to the performance a originality looking for example when he says I dreamed and you know him yeah this and he says if you can put it into words but I know that that a professional actor and actually it sounds as if I'm saying professional actor should all quit and that's not what I'm saying because that's not what I believe but that he was able to give you an aura a an unspoken quality that would be very difficult to to create if it weren't there and nobody nobody wanted to accept him that there was a participation of TV station in it and they said you will under no circumstances hire men like him and I had I did something that I never did before after in my life I did some test shooting which was terribly it looked so bad that I felt so ashamed I turned purple and sank in my in my in my chair and there were 30 people who had worked with me in some of the of the finance years of the film and in this from the network jumps up and he says who else is against Bruno all the hands shoot up and I look around and all of a sudden right next to me I see the cinematographer Schmidt guideline it there look in his eyes and I say yuck is your hand up or not and it shakes his head I see his hand is down and I stood up and I said now it is thirty thirty two voices thirty two hands up against two hands down the hands down have won the ballot so and I said I said to the network you say executive get out of the production right now because within 30 minutes I have to find a replacement for this amount of money to fill the gap and he stayed on all of a sudden so it was very strange how these things sometimes happen and and it happens I learned from medieval monks who had a who did not do the accountants sort of balloting not like we do it counting the the ballots were yes and and now if if some monks were feverishly with utmost fervor and conviction for a reform or innovation in monastic life they would declare themselves as a male you apart is the better part the part who feverishly ecstatically knew and the other monks would accept that even though they were far outnumbered by those who were lazy and didn't want to have the innovation and I thought this was a very fine principle and and when when you when you make films you are not allowed to be democratic in the sense that we know nowadays do you want to introduce the next film that also has Bruno in it we have yes rossik was a film that I had to do for Bruno because I made a contract with him to do Wojtek with him after the drama fragment of Georg büchner the probably the finest writer who died at the age of 22 in the early eighteen hundreds and all of a sudden when everything was prepared I realized oh my god that's a mistake Kinski must play this part and actually Kinski did white Zac later and I called Bruno and he worked in a steel factory doing driving a forklift and I said Bruno it's terrible but I have to tell you I cannot do this film with you and there was long silence and he said but when I have already taken my vacations plus three unpaid weeks of vacation to do this film and I I sensed it was terrible so I said to to Bruno today's Tuesday you know what I'm gonna write a screenplay quick and I invented a title I will call it sounding a little bit like voice sex Rorschach I said it will be it will be called straw shaken by Saturday you will have the screenplay in Berlin and we do something else so I sat down in two and a half days I wrote this screenplay and we did this film together thanks God and we might if we might mention that when you sat down to write a film it was based on it on a visit you had made a year or so earlier to Plainfield Wisconsin right yeah but you might want to I describe ya Plainfield Wisconsin is one of my favorite places in the United States like like Wall Street Stock Exchange are saying Quentin prison well Las Vegas one of the focal points of of the United States here it's a focal point of of horror and anguish it's a place where five people became mass murderers within a very few years including it gained and my friend Errol Morris was planning to write a big book on Plainfield had spent months there and he was pondering over the question why had a teen not only murdered people but also excavated freshly buried bodies at the cemetery and had made a throne seat out of the flesh and preserved things I mean really horrifying things and Aaron was the one after speaking to the sheriff's in speaking to it Dino was in Vaasa penitentiary and to all the people here found out that there was a perfect circle of graves that Dean had excavated and the very center was was a grave of his mother and he wandered over the question has he also excavated his own mother and I said to him just casually you would know if you dig if you dig into the grave if the if the coffin is empty of course he has taken out if the coffin is still there with a body in it or the bones in it he has not so we decided we would we would dig secretly at night and I was filming in Alaska and and I was coming back and I said on September 15 plus I'll be there and I was there but the man had chickened out so he wasn't there and I immediately liked Plainfield in my car I had broken down and I nobody could repair it but there was a record yard where there was a some guy who knew about mechanics and he helped me and I liked him a lot in his one of the leading actors in snow shake in fact apart from the three German actors that you brought with you all the actors are from playing field isn't that true or almost yes sir yeah and there was one night if Indian young man a chubby 19 years old men and and it's Lipinski who ran this records yard didn't remember him at all and it turned out that he had hired him this very morning when I met him and fired in the same night and it's completely forgotten and we we tracked him down and he's also in the film now and I love playing field and I love the gloom and I love the something very special yeah your sense that that from from this part of the country and that includes South Dakota Wisconsin Minnesota all the best people of America come not only the mass murderers this is a base I think I think this is a place of where the real talents come from there's one other exception and that's a deep south there's some very fine riders like Flannery O'Connor or Faulkner others came from but the real good people normally come from this part of the country and that kind of like I truly like I truly like this part I do not now Minnesota well but I I know Wisconsin much better but it's it's all quite similar I don't know what what what are you showing we have a scene from stroszek and it's just to set it up a little bit the three people in Germany there's a prostitute yeah and she is a friend of Bruno s and also of the old Crooked Man sites right and the pimps yeah around and beat them up and humiliate you know yeah they decide enough of this they're going to move to America yeah and do we see the pimps in this no no we're going to hips were for real and one of them was very dangerous he was an ex prizefighter and and was in jail quite often and the other pimp was was a law student who a fortnight before he did his final exams committed a bank robbery and got five years for it and became a famous writer actor and director and they really looked dangerous they do and they looked for real yeah yeah leaves three and right after that these three innocents go off to Plainfield and rent a mobile home that is 70 feet long and 14 feet wide and fill it up with all sorts of things they buy on time payment and are living here the this very unlikely family these three people and then you will see what happens because Bruno insists if I recall the film correctly Bruno insists to the other two that they are going to have to make payments that the bank didn't just give them the money and the other two basically reject that argument but it turns out that Bruno is right I may be simplifying it but it turns out that the trailer is repossessed and the that shot of the trailer yeah leaving the frame and he looks out at the barren landscape that is there goes the American dream exit right somehow yes and you of course made a documentary later about auctioneers called how much wood would a woodchuck chuck yeah because you became fascinated by the speech pattern and I love the fact this auctioneer says I can't understand a word yeah this this livestock auctioneers have always created a deep sensation and fascination within me and I made a film on the world championship of livestock auctioneers in the auctioneer here his name is Colonel Ralph white who was an ex-world champion of livestock auctioneers and I liked him so much that I tracked him down somewhere in Wyoming and brought him over there and he did the auction and I I do believe that each civilization has created its own poetry and in the rise of raw capitalism has created the the last poetry to which it was capable and those are these auctioneers there's something very beautiful about them something very tender something very even though when you watch an auction day they auction off millions of dollars of livestock within half an hour it just goes rattles away and in this there's something real happening real money exchanging ownership exchanging hands and yet these these men who who do the auctions have developed a very strange very bizarre poetry it's not required that's the thing that we we are so accustomed to auctioneer yeah that we don't stop to think how odd it is that somebody should talk like this just because they're selling something they can say how much will anyone pay for this trailer mrs. Smith pays she bids $4,000 they don't have to talk and they have created an art form that is absolutely irrelevant to what they're doing an ecstatic ritual yes it is and I like it a lot so that that has always been in my thoughts and that was why why this scene was in it now the young man who's standing next to him was a big tie yeah was a plays the banker and yeah and he is so he has that beautiful scene he he is so polite yeah he's trying to explain to them but really family also yes but he's got all of the little learned phrases yeah the bank is trying to work with you here yes you know in making your payments because you haven't paid us anything and it's a it's a it's a wonderful film I am so pleased by the way that a company I was going to say right here in Minnesota but I gather they're partially here and partially in Detroit is bringing out your films on DVD because here we saw some disintegration great many films shot in the 70s he had degradation of color because the film that they used to replace Technicolor didn't have any shelf life and so they'll be able to restore it that the film actually has not aged even though you saw all in pink and no the film has not aged only only the cars have aged otherwise the film is very fresh yeah we're running just a little behind schedule so perhaps we should move on to Nosferatu which came out of 1978 in which you you made as a as a as a not as a homage to Murnau but in as a colleague of Murnau's no it wasn't what women to connect to the great culture of German cinema of the 20s as we as we were father a fatherless generation without without great masters from of a father generation from whom we could learn so we were orphans and connecting to to to our grandfathers was very important for me which gave me some sort of a culturally speaking a basis in some sort of solid ground under my feet and it is I didn't want to use that word because it is also a work in its own right of course but I know that you deliberately shot on some of the same locations that he used yes in doback yeah and of course you're the makeup and the presentation of Kinski is very much inspired by the original film which was the first Dracula film I gather I'm probably right and and and I really believe those things I don't even know I read in the New York Times today in an article about Disney's Tarzan that Tarzan is number two in terms of character who's had films devoted to him and way out in number one just contracted but I think there was never a vampire like Kinski all the others are boring and insignificant compared to him let's have a look okay okay it's a and of course when he's looking at her we're reminded of the line earlier in the film he looks at her photograph and tells her husband what a beautiful throat this is a man that you hated and loved schinsky yeah it's true and I actually did my very last film on him which will be shown in a few days at the Cannes Film Festival it's entitled my Best Fiend we loved each other and we respected each other but at the same time both of us independently and unbeknownst to each other plotted to murder each other I mean seriously I know I know that it was very serious plans and some odd circumstances which prevented it ultimately and when I was in in Peru last August September to shoot about this film I met one of the native Indian chief who they hated Kinski because he was screaming and causing scandals and in their culture there is only very very you never speak loud you never speak loud to them always softly you're white until it's your term they never touch you grab your hand or so they would touch you very very tenderly softly and Kinski was some sort of anathema for them it was they couldn't take it and they would huddle together and and then whisper in falls I landed at the end one of the Chiefs told me that I was that I evidently saw that they were afraid and he said don't you believe that we were afraid of this screaming madman they were afraid of me because I was so silent and towards the end of shooting this chief came to me and and he is very seriously proposed shall we murder him shall we kill him for you and I I looked at him and I saw it was serious and for a moment is elated in and I I realized I realized that I still needed Kinski for the last couple of days of shooting to complete the film but the instant I rejected this idea I regretted it already so and this this being torn between between liking him and regretting that he was not murdered somehow still within me and yet I I can take it much easier now you see I have a much more relaxed attitude about all this and and I truly do miss him once in a while not always but sometimes I do miss I I remember once that you told me that you saw him when you were very young and you knew that it was your destiny to work with him to direct him in a film and that when you sent him the script of AG weary he was very famous for only wanting to make films on locations that were pleasant for him yeah he used to boast that he never saw any of the films he was in and he didn't care about any of the films he made and it he was only chose his films on the basis of where we wanted where we could get a good hotel and you wanted him to go a thousand miles upriver in the rainforest and he asked you why in the rough and live on a raft and with the mosquitoes and he said why in god's name should i do this and you said because it is your destiny and apparently he listened to that nodded and agreed he I may have simplified the story beyond recognition it was a little bit more complicated because when I sent him the screenplay two days later the phone rang between three and four and for the first half hour I couldn't figure out what it was because there were articulate screams just raging and screaming and and it after half an hour realized that was Kinski and and he kept on screaming I mean totally unarticulated it was just screams and shrieks and yells and it turned out that he had liked the screenplay so much so but at the same time he didn't want to go because because it meant he would rot away in moldy costume and and he would live on a raft and all these things I I left no doubt that it was not gonna be an easy sort of thing to do and besides we only had three hundred sixty thousand dollars or three hundred seventy thousand dollars to make the film so it was kind of hard thing and and of course I said to him yesterday is destiny and and and we are we can't even if we try we will not be able to escape that this is what is upon us and I knew what was expecting me because by a chain of coincidences I lived with him in the same apartment when I was a school boy of 12 of 13 years age I lived with my mother in one room and with my two other brothers so we we were very poor lived in one single room and it was a boarding house and an elderly lady who had a heart for artists one day picked up Kinski from the street he was somehow getting notorious in some minor tiny little theatre roles and she picked him up from literally from the street or rather from an attic where he stylized himself as a starving poet and in dostoevsky's idiot that was one of his stylizations of his earlier life and it would live there stark naked and filled the whole attic don't not not with furniture only with rustling dry leaves and when the mailman knocked and rang he would he would come through the rustling leaves stark-naked saying something and close the door again and this this lady Clara picked him picked him up from the street and gave him a little room for free fed him and did his laundry and from the first moment on he entered this apartment he wrought havoc on everyone he he didn't waste a minute in and I remember that in the first 48 minutes as hours in an unabated non-stop tantrum and rage fit of raging anger he locked himself into the only bathroom for all the parties there for 48 hours and kept destroying and smashing everything into smithereens into such small smithereens that washbasin toilet bells bathtub all made of china could be saved through a sieve afterwards and and he would do an unbelievable things I mean and he would do unbelievable things oh yes much milder stuff much even much right while the stuff that that I witnessed and and after three months he was found actually my own mother threw him out after after a wild wild incident and of course I knew what was going to expect me if I had to work with him and he had cost so many scandals and so many had broken so many contracts and I knew exactly and that somehow I make me think about the the unthinkable the utmost so when when he threatened to leave location ten days before the end of shooting in the film was by far not completed yet and he was not allowed to do that because I told him the film is more important than than our private feelings in our personal lives and I had months or even years to consider what would I do in in the worst case scenarios all the scenarios were played through and I told him I mean not concealed ìbut even two seconds and and I told him I would shoot him right here and now he would reach possibly the next bend of the river and he would have eight bullets through his head I was actually unharmed and the press made some stupid things out of it this is if I had directed him with with a with a gun from behind the camera for the next 10 days but Kinski had instincts he had real instincts and he he immediately sensed this was not a joke and and within less than 15 seconds there would be two dead bodies on the side and he screamed for help and he screamed for police in the next police post was was more than four hundred miles away and they would have testified me any sort of hunting accident anyway for only twenty bucks but they imagine they know he was he he backed down and he was very docile and very good and we oh we oh the performance with a monkey to to this facility and the discipline I I discipline discipline this wild beast somehow and organized him for the screen he made something like a hundred and eighty three films and your films are the ones that have made him immortal really I wish it was like that I do not believe in immortality but longevity there yes he and Kinski when you see him as a vampire he's very much alive and he's he actually died how many years eight years ago or so and he's totally present totally physically there and it's wonderful to thought of something like movies here's autobiography which was recently printed it was originally published in this country and withdrawn because they hadn't taken out libel insurance and then it was released within the last two years as I recall and Verna was telling me a dinner that most of it is made up in fact he helped him it's very the dictionary for this fictitious of course particularly his childhood but but Kinski page after page starts to to rent against me and insult me and there's page after page you were suggesting words yes I found some good ones in the dictionary and supplied it for him here let's go a hundred look at him again in Fitzcarraldo now this was a film where you began shooting with Jason Robards and Mick Jagger and then Robards developed a meemic dysentery yeah and was too ill to continue and you then had to take the entire production and move it several hundred miles away because of a border war yeah that burnt down my Kempf eleven hundred people and then you started again with Kinski inviting him to come back into the jungle that he hated and he did come back well he always claims that he loves mother nature but it's it's all fake and phony but anyway that was one of his stylization let's let's look at crawl though which is another great film that is such an eerie moment when it gets close enough so that you can see that it's an umbrella yeah because there shouldn't be anyone further upriver than they are with an umbrella sorry it's a great image yeah it was a spontaneous invention but I I knew it was kind of belong to the film and it was a good good scene this man wants to build an opera house he feels that if he can create a shipping company or have a boat on another river system he will make enough money to build an opera house and bring Caruso to the jungle and oddly enough someone did that I mean Caruso actually did sing and believe I think in Brazil and the film actually starts at the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus on the middle course of the Amazon and it was built something like in 1905 and at that time the city of Manaus didn't exist it was the time of the rubber boom and only a few overnight billionaires built palaces in the middle of the channel and all the rest was shanty towns and they built this lavish unbelievable of dreamlike Opera House in the middle of the journey and it's such a fantastic idea and image I always liked that a lot and I started the film there and I have become involved in doing errands yeah I never had seen an opera before in my life when I did this film so on colleague of mine vanish Berta whom I liked a lot did the opening sequence inside the theatre he staged the stage performance there because I had no idea what it was all about and I started to like it so much that now I'm doing work in staging operas once in a while and I truly like that but it's also strange about the scene in the screenplay Fitzcarraldo is playing according to the text of the screenplay Fitzcarraldo is playing Varla he's playing Valkyria into the journey and now something very odd happens looking at the jungle and playing vogner does not fit together and for reasons that nobody can explain it's very very mysterious it it bites it's it each other like cat and dog it doesn't fit together but the moment you go into Italian opera Verdi or Bellini it fits perfectly why is a deep mystery to me and as assertive delirious exuberance as a inherent quality in the jungle some sort of fever dreams almost like a human innermost quality and that's why the jungle is never some sort of a scenic backdrop it's always like like a human a human quality there and strangely enough it only fits together with Italian opera and why that is so is a mystery thanks God I discovered it in time and changed the entire music and the recordings in the dialogue accordingly one of your operas Titian Gura is has just been released on video which is yeah some of them have been resized and we are like blue and green which I did in bicoid that is the mecca of Marc lovers very strange place and I did some some other places in La Scala in Milan but it's very good and healthy for me too to work and breathe and live with music very intensively for a few weeks I remember your documentary the backstage documentary of the stagehand singing along with the yeah but this transformation the world into music yes we are running a little bit late and we have one clip we still want to get to and I think that this is a very important clip to or even maybe show two clips from little dieter needs to fly because I think this film fits into your document declaration in a very interesting way this is a film that is completely true but it may not be completely factual yes and it says it's very big and I I love this film and I think should we just start with this yeah okay let's yes we have a scene where he comes into his house at this point in the film we know nothing really it's very early we know very little about him now yeah that's not entirely absolutely 100% factual yes and I have confessed to more educated audiences and I will do so again I was intrigued by titãs house that when you enter the house there are seven or eight oil paintings of open doors and I asked him Dida why do we have that sort of images and he couldn't really answer it and he said yeah I kind of like that and open doors and I like to have a an open view and I realized that it was a very very deep metaphor for him in this unbelievable drama of his captivity and the ordeal he has gone through liberty meant to be able to open and close a door and I invented and I asked him did you use your Bangura card or two or three times and open and close the door a couple of times for us for the camera and you kind of see that that he is a little bit shy about it and and he becomes very sympathetic through that you know even though you have no idea of the film you started to laugh and you laughs in appreciation you immediately have a warm feeling about him and and it's totally invented totally staged and yet with a background of the pictures that he has right inside the door open doors looks into an open free space is an essence of what constitutes data and that's exactly what I mean by factually it even that the the accountants would even tell me yes this is fake this is a lie yes it is a lie it is a fabrication but for it is forgery but for the sake of a much deeper truth so it is it is it is false why it's fake and it's fabrication and yet it is a deep paretic truth about him and that's what what I what I try to defend and that's why I am against cinema Verity and that's why I'm against the superficial sort of stuff that you see day after day after day on television it I just get sick and tired of it and we have to find means to to find this that the deeper truth that is possible on on film there is something that we should work on and and that's why the gauntlet is thrown down and that's why I go into such wild rambling statements like like the the we ought to be grateful that the universe out there knows no smile so it and it's it has nothing to do with with truth in fact in cinema and yet it is connected because that is a poetic truth and that's against all the all the political correctness of those who who who are the lovers of these these phony lovers of Mother Nature and and eat the vitamin pills pound after pound and into yes I'm against them and team a Whistler as much as you want I like to have you as my enemy out there and we can meet later in the men's room and sort things out but I but I think we have to voice somehow I needed to voice my my concern and I needed to to state certain things that have been in turmoil inside of me in this the manifesto I think is something that they should stay in in your hands as a souvenir of this of this evening and I gladly hand it over to you and and and bite on these nuts as much as you as you want and and and disagree with is it as much as you want that's fine I'm not a biblical prophet out there I'm I'm just struggling to to do something for the sake of cinema and for the sake of audiences and for the sake of illumination that is possible in in when when you sit in front of a screen and you do hopefully I don't know I sometimes I I am doubts but whatever I had some more questions but what you have just said seems like a summation a dramatic kind of apology ah forget that word apologia or justification because it's true if you had a shot of him opening the door going inside and closing it you would have a shot of him opening the door going inside and closing it what we have here is a shot of dieter soul yes and we know him and me that they liked him he saw dieter thought yeah my friends will will will dislike me and I said no no no no no they will like you even better they will love you they will love you for this they will love you for your hesitation they will love for your clumsiness they will love you for for all this indeed is true people like him for that people are always sending me letters oh this movie wasn't true to the novel or it's not true that things are like that in Fargo or people don't really talk like or whatever and I think the answer is the responsibility of the director is to the film the responsibility of the director is to make the best film he can and that's what you always do do we have the the clip of lessons of darkness lesson number seven do we have that clear that we didn't have at the beginning do we have that's ready because can can we have and if Bruce can hear me do we have time for a few questions because I know that yes or I don't I don't hear Bruce a ensure oh we will just take over we don't really have this is this clip not available of lessons of darkness so we'll end on this contact with the booth okay if you don't have you don't you don't really think we'd better take any questions because we run over is that oh no question of course it's it's your turn we can have a few questions yeah we cannot see you proper area okay oh there you are yeah this this gentleman was the first one I saw I do not know much of them but but I like your statement because I'm and I think I am after something very similar sometimes I believe that the images that I have created nothing sensational nothing futuristic or avant-garde istic it is something that is deeply inside of a storm and inside of us and I'm the one who can awaken these images and it's your images actually and it's like a brother or sister unknown unbeknownst to you who all of a sudden comes to life and you realize you have got a brother and this is wonderful if I can create that and in all of a sudden all of a sudden in rare moments it happens when you hear great music or when you see a great movie very rarely it happens that that you have moments of deep illumination in moments where where you know that you are not alone anymore and that's the ultimate I can reach if there's anyone out there who who after seeing let's say squash ik has a feeling I'm not alone anymore then I've achieved everything I wanted to achieve in my life there's yes I'm moving more into that it has become more difficult because nobody wants to finance my stuff but there are three four or five feature film projects now lining up and I'm working very hard and very fast at the moment this year I did two films I shot a third film I acted in a film and I staged two operas and we are only 14 was her weeks into the year self really worked a lot and I'm pushing very hard a project which is going to be called invincible I have another project and this is on a strong man in the 20s and then I have a project about the last Japanese soldier who fought on 30 years beyond the end of the Second World War yaho another whom I met and whom I liked very much and here's refused to hand over the rights of his life story and of his book that he wrote for reasons that are too complicated to explain but he said he kept saying you are the only one who should do it and and he said but I am sorry I cannot hand it over for all the complicated political reasons when I came back from Peru after doing wings of help in my Best Fiend I found effects in my fax machine by hero or not and he wants to give me the rights now and I said to him in 77 years and I said to him you are not immortal you will die so sooner or later and somebody has to do the story and and I'm the one who would be competent and he here realizes that I am what that I would be let's put it this way and there's a couple of other stories that I got a couple of very good ones too to tell let's take one more question now wait a minute oh yeah oh here make sure that the yeah let's show less than seven and then take one more question it wasn't seven and then one more I hope it's the right it's a right lesson it's just something about ecstatic images no that's not number seven okay let's let's stop it that's lesson number two uh so can can we stop it that's not the right one anyway so let's take one more question please well there was somebody there yes I wouldn't like to quote and go into the thin blue line because there are other films that make it much more evident that he is a comrade in spirit somehow who is not of course he is also fabricating but he is very deeply in stylizing into stylizations of great enormity and in this film about the four people it's fast cheap and out of control there are wonderful stylizations about old movies about this lion-tamer were one of the stars in the early 50s in childhood reminiscences and i would like to point your attention to one film that I really love dearly and that is Vernon Florida which in my opinion is one of the greatest quote-unquote documentaries in the American film history and in the indeed the the enormity of his will to stylize creates a depth in this film that is unprecedented I have no nothing to to compare with it's a wonderful film and you must see Vernon Florida it has some sense something very deep and beautiful Vernon Florida is a town where Errol Morris discovered that a large number of people were missing limbs because they were cutting them off to collect the insurance and in fact so many people had done this that Vernon Florida was known locally as stump city enough nup city comes up city yeah but when he went there to film a film about these people he found that they were prepared to kill him right so he decided to talk stages my turkey hunters and ya know he's a very very watch watch his stuff in that a couple of others out there internationally this is French very very fine what is his name anyway they say I could name a lot of people who are doing quite different but they are trying some things something similar to deviate to depart from the accountants truth and go somewhere else and and whoever is out there is welcome let me just say that not only are many of course you had an opportunity many of you to see a lot of Venice films here at the Walker some of you didn't see all of them may have seen films tonight that you want to see in their entirety many of them are available on new yorker tape and can be rented not only locally but if you can't find them locally you can rent them through the mail from fascist multimedia home Film Festival and so forth even better news is that Anchor Bay is bringing out a large number of his films on DVD of which the first title knows about the future what's the first part was already out and these are the films that make it worth going to the movies for we just can't we cannot survive on Adam Sandler and Pauly Shore we just can't I'm not and not implicating you I'm making that as my own statement we need films that that put us in touch with the full spectrum of what it is to be alive and to think and to fear and to dare and when I see your films I feel that my decision to spend my life reviewing films has been vindicated because if they were all junked than I would have wasted my life and when I see your film I say if I can get a few more people to share these films or to know that these films exist to know how films can enter into our minds and give us these visions and dreams then it's all worth worthwhile so thank you thank you very much thank you but yes we're yes Hey we could have done for another hour [Applause]

Channel: Walker Art Center

Views: 25,535

Rating: 4.9365077 out of 5

Keywords: Walker Art Center, Werner Herzog, Dialogue, Filmmaker, Interview, Director, MN Declaration, Documentary

Id: HQj3XuRkx-s

Length: 102min 33sec (6153 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 28 2020