Difference between revisions of "3: Werner Herzog"

00:00:03Hello, you found the portal. I'm your host Eric Weinstein, and this will be our second interview episode to be released. I think we have something really remarkable for you today because we have a human being who has led a life that even though he makes movies that are fictional I would say that his actual non-fiction life is more interesting than any movie he's ever made. This is a person who has been shot on camera, a person who has stolen, who has forged, and who has taught other filmmakers to steal and to forge.

00:00:32 The person I'm talking about is Werner Herzog. Now I first became aware of Werner Herzog when I was 16 and just entering the University of Pennsylvania and a friend of mine said you've got to see this movie ''Fitzcarraldo''. I said, what is ''Fitzcarraldo''? He says if nothing else it's a story about a man so possessed by an idée fixe that he drags a boat over a mountain in the jungle in order to somehow build an opera house. The whole thing sounded incredibly mad. And in fact, what was so interesting about this film was that the director actually had to do in real life what the crazy fictional character did inside of the story.

00:01:14 This led me to a fascination with today's interview subject Werner Herzog. This is a man who has lived so richly and so profoundly that I actually started to get a different idea about what he was doing as a filmmaker. The idea that I could not shake was that Werner Herzog needed to live so deeply and so profoundly that he had to make movies simply to justify what it meant to be Werner Herzog. I've often asked myself this question: What is it that great generals do between wars. It's hard to imagine, let's say, a Patton or a MacArthur in normal times. Do they just sit around and open dry cleaners? Do they write essays for their local newspaper? What does a Winston Churchill do if there is no World War II to win?

00:02:03 In such a situation, I think it's very hard to come up with an answer. But I think that the best answer that I have is that these people would make movies.

00:02:16 The following interview was recorded in front of a live audience. We join the conversation in progress.

00:02:22

Eric Weinstein (EW): May I just asked first of all before I try any theories of the kind do you see any clear organizing principle that unifies your output that is sort of subtle and non-obvious to your audience?

Werner Herzog (WH): Yes, I do believe so. People are quite often puzzled about the range of the subjects that have attracted me. There's a world champion ski flyer from Switzerland, and there's a Paleolithic cave, and there's a man who moves a ship over a mountain in the Peruvian jungle, and there's a film on the internet, and there's a film... you just name it. So it looks perplexing at first sight, but I do understand although I don't like to look back at my films often I do understand that there's some sort of an architecture

00:03:22 of concepts in that you would immediately understand there's a common worldview. Very much it's about the worldview, and you could probably spot it very very quickly if you walked into a room and the TV was playing and there was a film within and you didn't see any credits. Probably within 2 minutes, you would understand this must have been my film.

00:03:54 People see, they understand it. How they do it? I don't know. And how I do create this common worldview? I don't know either but it doesn't really matter.  

EW: Now one of the things that I've been very struck by which is what we all get wrong about Werner Herzog and because many of the stories that come out of these films in these undertakings involve tremendous seeming danger of physical risk, chaos, madness, all the things that are usually associated. I was trying to figure out what it was that those stories might cover up as if sort of cheap icing on a very rich cake and one of the things that I saw was what - and correct me if I'm wrong - It seems like you have tremendous concern for the people that you bring out onto these crazy projects for their safety and well-being. Am I getting that wrong?

00:04:54 WH: No, We shouldn't waste any time of what some people get wrong about me doesn't really matter let them be wrong. But one of the things that comes up quite often seems to be an identification of the creator of a story, a creator of a character, namely me me with the qualities that the creator automatically has to have. In other words, If I do a film like ''Aguirre, the Wrath of God'' about a demented, crazed conquistador 1560s in the Peruvian Amazon people quite often are mislead to point out Herzog must have these qualities: obsessive and demented and borderline paranoia. And no I understand them, but they are not my qualities, they are inventions.

00:05:54 EW: But you picked an actor in Klaus Kinski who might I mean I would venture to say did have some of those qualities. is that wrong?

WH: Of course he had it. A part of being an actor who was really under the grace of creation to make things that we have not seen before or after on the screen. So otherwise he was the mildest I could express would be he was the ultimate pestilence. But he was also destructive. He would destroy a set, he would when we had a we actually had two plane crashes on ''Fitzcarraldo'', small aircraft and we didn't know what had happened. We had a very sketchy shortwave radio connection with Iquitos about 1,100 kilometers away. And garbage messages would come in.

00:06:55 "Plane is down." And we desperately tried, was it nearby, could we send out a search party, or what who was a part of what had happened. And we had it happen in our camp. Sometimes some days my route starts in the afternoon and shoot into the night. Breakfast would be served from hut to hut to hut. And so the last hut would have cold coffee. This morning by conincidence, Kinski was the last hut and I heard it from from 150 yards away screaming out. I mean at the complete, not just a tantrum. It was it was just an outburst of rage because his coffee was lukewarm and he stormed at the place where we were checking on the radio and trying to figure out and he kept screaming and screaming I could not calm him down. I could not get him away. I try to tell him there's a plane down you have to keep quiet.

00:07:55 We must listen to what has happened. It wouldn't help at all. He would scream and he would scream he could scream a glass, he could shatter a glass, a wine glass. Really, I mean it, I do not exaggerate. And so the only way I could after an hour and a half when he had already froth, hardened froth at his mouth. I went to my hut, and I had a little piece of Swiss chocolate left, which people would murder for such a treasure in our camp. And I stepped in front of him and ate this chocolate, and that silenced him. That was something which was stunning.

EW: And you knew, you intuited that this would have that effect.  

WH: I should have intuition after 5 minutes. It took over an hour.

00:08:55 So, but the problem is that qualities of the characters in my films have been super imposed on my own character. For example, I have acted in some Hollywood films and some independent films, Jack Reacher, for example. And I'm playing the real real dangerous badass bad guy and I am very very dangerous and I had to and I'm unarmed and I have no fingers left, and I am blind on one eye, and yet I had to spread terror from the screen, and I did it so well, I did it so well that my reviews were much better than the reviews for Tom Cruise.

00:09:44 WH: No it's true. I'm not exaggerating. I was good, but not that I can say this kind of vile, dangerous character is really in me.

00:09:58 EW: Really?  

WH: And it came very easy. I did it unprepared you see, and I have learned that when we did Fitzgerald in the first round of shooting there was Mick Jagger as the sidekick of the leading character and Jagger spent six weeks with us in the jungle. We shot half the film, had to stop because the leading character became ill. We had to send him to the States and the doctors wouldn't allow him to return to the jungle. So I knew I had to start all over again. And on Jagger's contract, there was not time enough left for doing the whole film all over. I shot the film actually one and a half times.

00:10:40 What is strange about this recasting and in restarting the whole thing? I knew if I did not find an actor quickly, in such a case, I had no alternative but playing the part myself because I would have been credible, and I would have been good, not as good as let's say Mick Jagger and Jason Robards, or Kinski. And I learned one thing from from Mick Jagger which astonished me. He took me once backstage when they were recording.

00:11:23 And I was there and he was arguing with somebody about some totally trivial things, completely and utterly trivial things. And also on my set he was arguing about the mineral water, or about the per diem, or something and I said to him "Mick the camera is rolling" and he looks at me and he sees we are already doing it and he steps three steps in front of the camera and within three steps, he becomes a demon.

00:12:00 From a trivial trivial little bickering mediocre kind of character he steps in front and he's a demon. And that in a way, I learned that from him and I didn't prepare myself. When I stepped in front of the camera, I knew there was only one thing.

00:12:24 Be calm and be frightening. And I can do it. And I would accept it only because I knew I could do it.  

EW: So you're really not the ultimate badass.

00:12:37 WH: Uh.

EW: Because I-

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

00:21:03 You see you have to be prudent, And in any kind of business including the business of warfare, you have to evaluate the situation and you have to try to avoid the danger for anyone the leader and the troop. You better stay out of it and you use all sorts of military trickery, deceit. You use and bushes you use the so-called cowardly things into before you really put anyone into very grave danger eliminate, whatever you can sometimes you can't eliminate everything but sheet shorts. Of course, I buy a Jesse Ventura used to be a bodyguard of the