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