Difference between revisions of "3: Werner Herzog"

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Hello. You've 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's led a life that even though he makes movies that are fictional, I would say that his actual nonfiction life is more interesting than any movie he's ever made.  

'''Eric Weinstein:''' This is a person who has been shot on camera. A person who has stolen, who has forged and who's taught other filmmakers to steal and to forge. 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.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' 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. And 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 storyline.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' This led me to a fascination with a 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 film maker. The idea that I could not shake was, is 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.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Now, I've often asked myself this question, what is it the 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? 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, is that these people would make movies.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' The following interview was recorded in front of a live audience. We joined the conversation in progress.  

'''Eric Weinstein:''' May I just ask, first of all, before I try any theories of the kindness, do you see any clear organizing principle that unifies your output that is sort of subtle and non-obvious to your audience?

'''Werner Herzog:''' 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 is 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.

'''Werner Herzog:''' And it looks perplexing at first sight. But I do understand, although I don't like to look back at my films too often, I do understand that there's some sort of an architecture of concepts. And that's... You would immediately understand there is a common worldview. Very much is about a worldview and you could probably spot it very, very quickly, if you walked into a room and a TV was playing and there was a film within and you didn't see any credits, probably within two minutes you would understand, this must have been my film. People see it, they understand it, how they do it. I don't know. And how I do create this common world view, I don't know either, but it doesn't really matter.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' 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 and these undertakings involve tremendous seeming danger, 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 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 wellbeing. Am I getting that wrong?

'''Werner Herzog:''' 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, 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 demented crazed a conquistador, 1560s in the Peruvian Amazon, people quite often are misled to point out Herzog must have these qualities obsessive in demented and borderline paranoia. And so no day they are, I understand them, but they are not my qualities. They are inventions.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' 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? And then you actually have the...

'''Werner Herzog:''' No, 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 a screen.

'''Werner Herzog:''' So, but 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 garbled messages would come in.

'''Werner Herzog:''' "Plane is down." And we desperately tried, was it nearby? Could we send out a search party or what, who was on board, what had happened? And we had it happen in our camp, sometimes on days where we would start 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.  

'''Werner Herzog:''' This morning, by coincident Kinski was the last hut, and I heard it from, from 150 yards away, screaming out. I mean the complete, not just a tantrum. 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.

'''Werner Herzog:''' I could not calm him down. I could not get him away. I tried to tell him, there's a plane down. You have to keep quiet. 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 into - he could shatter a glass, a wine glass. 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 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. 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. So, but, problem is that quite often, qualities of the characters in my films have been super imposed on my own character, or, for example, I've acted in some Hollywood films and some independent films, check Reacher, for example. And I'm playing the real, real dangerous badass bad guy. And I'm 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.

'''Werner Herzog:''' I did it so well that my reviews were much better than the reviews for Tom Cruise. (audience laughter)  No, it's true, I am not exaggerating. I was good, but it's not that I can say this kind of vile, 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 learned that when we teach Fitzcarraldo in the first round of shooting, there was Mick Jagger as a sidekick of the leading character, and Jagger spent some 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 Jaggers 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. And, what is strange about, this recasting and 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.

'''Werner Herzog:''' He took me once a backstage when they were recording, and I was there and he was arguing with somebody about some totally trivial things. Completely and utterly trivial things, and also an 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."

'''Werner Herzog:''' And he looked 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. From a trivial, trivial little bickering, mediocre kind of character, his steps in front and he is a demon. And in that, in a way, I learned that from him.

'''Werner Herzog:''' And, I didn't prepare myself. I, when I stepped in front of the camera, I knew there was only one thing, be calm and be frightening and I can do it. Yeah. 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... Maybe I am, but unbeknownst to me.  

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, okay. It feels to me like I was just watching a video of you being interviewed by the BBC and improbably you're shot in the abdomen while being interviewed. And you seem to be somewhat irritated that the interviewer is treating this as a big deal, and like, otherwise, how would I know that you wear Paisley underwear? 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... It's not that big of a bullet. That was your attitude.

'''Werner Herzog:''' No, actually I said something more beautiful. I said, this is an insignificant bullet.  

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah, that's true.  

'''Werner Herzog:''' So, and I knew it had not perforated everything. It went through my, jacket in the catalog in the pocket and everything, but didn't perforate into my intestines. So that was insignificant, but they immediately hit the ground, the camera fled and I had the feeling, "Stay, let's finish at least the sentence."

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Cause it was great video. 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 you are the unreliable narrator. You are actually....  

'''Werner Herzog:''' No, no, no. I made sense. No, no, no. I am the one who makes sense. I am the one who puts order into a chaotic situation.  

'''Eric Weinstein:''' That's what you did. But when I'm, well, what I'm saying is, is that when your autonomic nervous system is triggered. It barely registers. You've been shot in the abdomen.  

'''Werner Herzog:''' It registered, it hurt. It hurt a year because when I was laughing hard, it was still hurting. Yes, but there's a sense of duty...

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Which I very much appreciate, but that's very unusual. These are real...

'''Werner Herzog:''' Yes, but it's part of being a good soldier of cinema that I tried to be, a sense of duty, a sense of, you have to be reliable. You have to hold an outpost that others have given up. It's loyalty,, and it's loyalty to the entire crew that was there. However, they argued that we should call the police right away. And they said, let's not do it because do you want to spend the next six hours in a police station to file charges and do you want to see helicopter 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? My answer is no, but it's okay, let's move out of the danger zone. Because the man with a rifle was still somewhere hiding on a terrace, and hiding now inside the building. Get out of there, but let's continue. Let's continue this all your team has come from the UK and you have to return tomorrow. Let's get over with it. So it's a sense of duty.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I appreciate that very much, but I mean, what you're talking about is the highest levels of discipline and military style leadership. I mean, this goes far beyond...

'''Werner Herzog:''' Yes, but you should be careful about confusing it with military discipline where there's some sort of blind adherence to given orders. I do think, I do think what I'm doing, and I do not ask anyone to do blindly something in front of the camera, but there is a safety margin. Whenever things are difficult in then, let's say borderline dangerous, I would always do it myself first for the actor. I would go through the rapids with a small raft to see, does a rafter 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 board and a Navy pilot who is shot down, 40 minutes in his first mission over Vietnam or Laos, he actually was the only American POW who managed to escape from Viet Cong captivity, an incredible story. And Christian Bale who plays a part of him and they're starving to death, almost starving to death, and they get some food that is infested by hundreds and hundreds of wriggling maggots. And we used maggots that native people would eat, but they would roast them, not alive and still wriggling.

'''Werner Herzog:''' So, and I said to Christian, that was what Dieter Dengler, the real character, told me they had to do, there are nutrients that lot of nutrients in these maggots. I ate it. And I said to Christian, you know what? Give me the plate and give me a spoon. I'm going to eat a few spoonfuls, which I did. And he said, oh, come on, stop it. Stop it. I, let's roll the camera. I'm going to get over it quickly. So he did. And that was one of the very, very few, moments of controversy between the two of us because I told him and he didn't hear it. Apparently I told him, Christian, you know what, you stop eating when you really have, when you had it.

'''Werner Herzog:''' And he keeps eating, eating, eating until the plate is empty. And then I say, cut. And he said, why didn't you say cut before? Why? What happened? And I said, Chris, you are the one who should have cut, set cuts. But he didn't hear it. And he was kind of miffed, but those, those moments say they do happen, and the unexpected on a set. That's movies.  

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah, right. I guess those moments do happen. 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, which is called follow me, where they take the highest value person on the team that the general or the Colonel, and he goes into danger first because the morale of the troops is so much heightened when you see a leader saying, I will actually take that kind of a risk. That seems to be a  part of how you get fanatical loyalty.

'''Werner Herzog:''' It's a very long tradition. Alexander the Great, for example, always on foot with his soldiers. He would not ride on his horse. He would be on foot thousands of miles.

'''Werner Herzog:''' He would be the first to climb the ramparts on a ladder. He would be the one who when they were thirsty and almost dying from thirst. One soldier collected a helmet full of water, bit by bit, drop by drop and when the thirst was at its worst, this footman comes and steps in front of Alexander and says: "I saved this for you, drink this."

'''Werner Herzog:''' And Alexander looks at it in, spills it away, and he says too much for one, too little for all and marches on. So that's leadership. Well, Hannibal who crossed the Alps on elephants, he would sleep with his soldiers at the outpost wrapped in his coat. And he would lose an eye crossing an ice cold river south of the Alps, 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 greatest situations of risk and harm is...  

'''Werner Herzog:''' No. You avoid harm if possible.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, of course, but...

'''Werner Herzog:''' You eliminate harm before it even appears. You see, you have to be prudent, and in any kind of business, including the business of warfare, you have to evaluate a situation and you have to try to avoid the danger for anyone.

'''Werner Herzog:''' The leader and the troop, you better stay out of it. And you use all sorts of military tricked trickery, deceit, you use ambushes. You use the so called cowardly things. And before you really put anyone into very grave danger. Eliminate whatever you can. Sometimes you can't eliminate everything but cheat...  

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Of course, of course, and lie...  

'''Werner Herzog:''' Lie and trick. I liked, by the way, it comes to main Jesse Ventura, who used to be a bodyguard of the rolling stones, by the way, and he used to be a a studio wrestler, who played the bad guy, by the way, in the ring. Completely stylized. And he became governor of Minnesota. 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. It's just one of these WrestleMania people. And he said win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat. So I really like him for that.  

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah. So this is one of the things that I found most enduring about your approach is that you teach film in this completely different fashion. It's,  let's be honest, you're an outlaw before you're a film maker and you say to your students, you have to be prepared to steal, to forge, to pick locks, to do whatever it takes.  

'''Werner Herzog:''' Forge documents, but still, you see, I wouldn't say steal. I have stolen once in a while, but more expropriation than stealing, than theft, like my first camera was expropriated from an institution, but do anything that's outside of the legal norms. As long as it as it does not hurt anyone. And foraging, a shooting permit in a country that has a military dictatorship is something fine and you should do it. 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. All right, so you break into countries on a student visa that might severely punish you if they found out that you were filming. You did this in China.  

'''Werner Herzog:''' No, not, well, yes, I did in China filming in the Western most part, near Kashgar, where there was an extremely high military and police presence, and I was filming with Michael Shannon, but we had no shooting permit, no working permit. We just went out to a local market. A very traditional market of weak word tribesmen a cattle market. And there was - the real obvious thing was that we had a contraption built on 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 turn around and look after him. I wanted this effect. Everybody staring at him once he's moving through a crowd and he said to me, I'm going to do it as long as you're around next to me, because if I get arrested, you should be arrested as well.

'''Werner Herzog:''' And I said, fine, let's do it. And because it was so brazen, it was so brazen that nobody actually stopped us. There was a lot of police, and when you have one or two police people, then it's dangerous because they would arrest you or they would stop you at least in check you out. But if you have 17, 18, 20 of them.

'''Werner Herzog:''' There's a strange psychological reflex. Everybody thinks the other one will stop you and you walk straight through the middle whether, and I keep saying where the enemy comes it at its thickest, walk straight through there and I look into some sort of a vague distance as if I had spotted a friend 50 yards away, and I'd walk with this gaze upon them, and while I pass, I may say something in my variant dialect, I say "Hast du einen Hartig gesehen?", have you seen my friend Hartig? And they step aside and I'm out. So you have to understand the heart of men, and you have to 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 were working without any permits at all.  

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah. Now in our time, there's this mania for truth and authenticity, and for acknowledging that it is always the group and never the individual that matters. Th the so-called great man theory of history is certainly at its cultural low. And yet here you are talking to us about the need to deceive, to break the law, and to affirm the violent act of creation in a very strong leadership context in which you're taking on all of this additional risk just to in part inspire and protect your people even. You seem to be a man completely out of time with the current era and it seems to suit you fine, is that wrong?

'''Werner Herzog:''' Not really, there are few of us, but I wish there were more. But of course, what we are doing in filmmaking is not always based on boardroom decision. The way we shape the dialogue today in the Hollywood industry is determined by boardroom decisions. And that's why movie-making has become so stale and so uninteresting and so predictable.

'''Werner Herzog:''' So if you do the most - the wildest of the stories and that's always what counts. You see, I do not step outside the boundaries of legality. It has to do with a caliber of your quest, with the depth of your story, with the vision that you are pursuing. If that has real, real depth and you know, it as enduring depth, then you have the task and the duty to do the things that are necessary. As long, as I said, as you do not damage or hurt anyone.  

'''Eric Weinstein:''' You are taking a fair amount of responsibility. We had Jim Watson come to this office and he's the co-discoverer of the three dimensional structure of DNA, of Watson and...

'''Werner Herzog:''' Oh yeah..

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah. But he said something which was, you know, I found very disturbing, but also very sensible. He said, you're given about five opportunities to really level up in your life. This was how he saw it. And he said, you have to take each one of those, even though sometimes each of them comes with an opportunity where somebody may be put at risk or hurt.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And I was curious. You have a very strong relationship with risk where you're both putting people at risk and trying to make sure you put them at risk as little as possible. If both of those are true, do you believe that, let's say Watson was correct, that you have to take these opportunities even if they do put others 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 seen a hundred times, these moments, and risk-taking per se, has no great value. It depends on what you're doing and what kind of purpose it serves. 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 circumspect, and well-organized is that in over 70 films, not a single one of my actors ever was hurt. Not one. I was hurt sometimes. Sometimes it has happened that some very close collaborator physically next to me, like a cinematographer with a 20 kilo, a handheld camera at that time heavy, flies through the air on the deck of a ship that bangs into a rock. And we were flying some 10 meters, and he bangs with his hand on the deck, and the camera split his hand apart. So yes, it happens in, he didn't mind, by the way.  

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, he volunteered. Am I right that he...  

'''Werner Herzog:''' Of course he did, every single one..  

'''Eric Weinstein:''' You said, who's coming with me? Nobody has to.  

'''Werner Herzog:''' Yeah, sure. And actually in this case, when we went with cameras through the rapids, that - and we had shot the sequence with cameras on the, there's no real shores, but in the rocks on either sides of these rapids. I was even pushed by some collaborators. We should have a camera on board. I said, really? Yes, of course. I see that, but we do not know what's going to happen. It may sink. What happens then? The ship probably is not going to sink because we established it with a lot of very, very solid air chambers in there. 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. Assume that you were trying to make Fitzcarraldo, in which you drag this steamer over a mountain and it's not the year 1982, but it's some year, maybe around now, maybe a few years in the future where it's possible to do this completely with computer generated imagery so that you could do it in CGI. Now my question would be this. Would, if it produced the same visual effect as you did in Fitzcarraldo, 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. And even the five year old, six year old viewers know it, this was a digital effect and you will always know it.

'''Werner Herzog:''' I don't think that digital effects will ever create some sort of an equal experience, maybe to some degree visually. But, you see, moving a ship over a mountain means you're exposing yourself to things that are unthinkable and unexpected. You incorporate, in your approach, the totally unknown and the totally unknown invades you and the unexpected and the unthinkable invades you every hour, and your create something, an authenticity of story. Not only visual effect, you create an authenticity of event that is unparalleled. And it's unparalleled by anyone who is sitting on a computer and creates a steam belt moving up on a hill. 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. It can be substituted. It can be somehow paralleled in a way by an artificial world, by digital effects. Until today, I would still insist I should, if it's me who does it, I should move the ship. 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. I mean, you mentioned professional wrestling and Jesse Ventura and, you know, there is a theory amongst our group that maybe professional wrestling is a lot more real than anyone really wants to believe, that it's commonly thought to be fake. One interpretation of your works sir, is that you are making many more documentaries than you claim to be because in fact, in something like Fitzcarraldo, it's a fictional story about a man moving a ship over a mountain made by a real man who moved a real ship over a real mountain. And I remember when it came out in 1982, I was in college, we were electrified by this concept that - if it had been done in CGI and we had known that it had been in CGI, we would not have been that interested in the story. But it was the fact that there was an insane man moving a ship over a mountain in reality...  

'''Werner Herzog:''' Clinically sane man towing a ship over a mountain.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Sorry, I don't want to... You want to cast to the aspersions, but functionally, sir, it is a crazy quest. 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. It's not a crazy quest, it was doable. And I do the doable, you see, you do not go out and try to, let's say, go to Mars and spend there half a year on Mars in covering... in getting footage. You will fail.

'''Werner Herzog:''' It's not going to work. And we will see the technological utopia is coming to an end in our very century, like we saw social utopias coming to an inevitable end in the last century. Communism paradise on earth. Nazism, a master race, dominating the planet and on. So we will see...

'''Werner Herzog:''' So do the doable. Do the doable, and I knew it was doable because I had figured out how 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 movie and I ended up at night when it was already dark at Carnac. It's 4,000 menhirs, these slabs of stone erected in parallel lines. Hill, uphill, downhill, uphill, down. It's, it's stunning. In what I saw in the headlights was stunning. And I slept in the car, and next morning I see there's a little kiosk. They sold brochures, and in the brochure, it's written that this 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. It could have been only alien astronauts, and I thought, bullshit, I can let... I will not move from this place until I as a niolithic person could do it. So what I would do is, let's assume I have the rock already, 300-400 tons. I would need disciplined men to build a ramp, but maybe one kilometer ramp, which has hardly any inclination, which is almost flat.

'''Werner Herzog:''' At the end. It would end up in a 10 meter high hill and I would take a crater hole into the Hill and then I would move. Then I would move the stone on oak trunks, on hardened oak trunks, and it's very easy 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 it erect with a heavier part up, and then you would remove the hill until, let's say, it was sticking only into two meters of grounded, harden the ground, so you would have it erected. And I kept puzzling about one, a menhir, the heaviest ever, 1100 tons heavy, near the coastal place Locmariaquer, not too far from Carnac. And this stone, this slab, was broken into four pieces. In the major, the biggest of all pieces, at least 600-700 tons heavy, was aligned in one direction, and a little bit further out, the rest of the fragmentation was perfectly aligned in one line.

'''Werner Herzog:''' So why does this happen, if that stone falls and breaks, it will align the fragments, but it didn't. So I think what has happened is that they moved the stone, dropped it into a hole, and it broke. It broke at the rim, and the smaller fragments aligned, and thousands of years later due to erosion, some of these menhirs, fall over, topple over, and it toppled over in a different, in the wrong direction. So an accident, a neolithic accident, which must have happened, spoke to my - as if it was proof of my way, how I would do it. And that's how I moved the ship over the mountain.  

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Wow.

'''Werner Herzog:''' So, and I knew it was doable. If it was doable for neolithic people 7,000 years ago, I can do the same thing as well. I have no doubt whatsoever. And in an ideal case, you would, according to primitive laws of physics, you could have one single child pulling it over the mountain. 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 child could pull it over a mountain. So you have to think - you have to think, the bold ideas, but also those that are outside the common trend. It can only have been the alien astronauts that I showed you because I'm very proud of it.

'''Werner Herzog:''' You should try to get hold of it because it's very interesting. It's called the Vanishing Area Paradox. I keep it in my agenda all the time, and it was published in the Scientific American. And it's very strange, you have a configuration of elements of pieces, and when you rearrange the configuration of these, all of a sudden there's an empty space of something that has filled out the entire space without a millimeter in between. And I kept thinking about it because it defies all my experience with reality. So within my reality, it is unthinkable, it is impossible. So, and I kept thinking about it and I was misled.

'''Werner Herzog:''' The whole thing is a hoax. It turns out it's a hoax, it's fraudulent, and it gives it a certain veracity because it was posed this Vanishing Area Paradox. The question is posed in the scientific American, you do not believe that they are cheating you, and they cheat you. And what is happening is when you look at it very precisely, the area where all of a sudden in the middle there is an empty space, has been artificially made slightly larger by giving slight, slight more angles in the straight lines, and 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 it defies my sense of reality, and the sense of reality of everyone around me. Something is wrong. What could be wrong. What could be wrong. And I started to check, and one of the questions I asked myself, could it be that this is a hoax, that this is a fraud, and if it's a fraud, how do they cheat you? How do they cheat your senses? Senses of observation in this case.  

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, that touches on something that fascinated me. There's a quote of yours where apparently you are facing a booing audience. 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, I don't know, arbitrary levels of negativity to problems that other people think are insoluble, where they have to invoke ancient aliens. There's something so disagreeable about your personality that you're capable of shepherding an idea through that much negativity. What trait is that?  

'''Werner Herzog:''' Well, it was a specific case when I was filming the fires in Kuwait in the first Gulf war when Saddam Hussein's retreating armies set every single oil well on fire. And I filmed it in a way that it looks as if it was shot on a, like a science fiction film.

'''Werner Herzog:''' It cannot be our planet. And yet we know it must have been filmed on our planet. And, so it's highly aesthetic, highly stylized, and in the immediate outcry was a steady sizing of the horror. But it wasn't really horror, it was not horror for any human being. Nobody got burnt. Of course, it was a crime against creation itself, obscuring the sky for a wide, wide area, and something that should not happen. 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 through the central island. That somehow reinforced my resolve, and I stepped up and I said Dante in his Inferno has done exactly the same. Hieronymus Bosch has done exactly the same in his hellish visions 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. So do we have to burn the book, the divine comedy now, do we have to? Of course we don't. So indeed, there's an amount of certainty in me that - and it's not really anything that I can say was bold. It was totally natural to say that.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah. I mean to me, it sort of strikes me as, we need people to inspire us by showing us that it's not only possible, that it's necessary to stand up to large numbers of people inside of a crowd. 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 probably was an amount of well-wishers and there must have been also some applause, but it was overwhelming. It was so overwhelming that some very credible reviewers like Amos Vogel, who wrote for The Village Voice, describes the scene. He described it. So it's not a figment of my fantasy.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' You know that there's this very strange story with the reviewer, Joe Morgenstern. When he first saw Bonnie and Clyde, he gave it a terrible review because the violence was so disturbing and it was set to uptempo, happy music. And he said, well, this is an abomination. And then strangely, a week or two later, he said, I have to review this film again. I was totally wrong. The film is a masterpiece because it took a while to just understand that that wasn't an error, but it was actually a brilliant artistic choice. 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 guts and the caliber to declare himself wrong and taking a new fresh look at it. So, you hardly see it at all.

 

 

 

 

'''Werner Herzog:''' But read, read, read, read, read, read. If you're don't read, you will be a filmmaker, but mediocre at best. If you really want to become somebody of significance, and everyone who is around at this time of significance is reading, they're all reading, everyone. And you are not, and it's not only for filmmaking, it's probably in your profession, the same thing.

 

'''Werner Herzog:''' You cannot lose yourself in algorithms, and in a software questions, and in articulating of things, without conceptually being up to a very high standard of evolution, of not only technology, but civilization per se. We have a very, very deep task. And reading, in my opinion, is the thing that is absolutely needed.

 

 

 

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Fantastic advice. Let's see if we can, anybody can follow it and I would love to open it up to questions. What questions do we have for Werner Herzog?

 

'''Audience:''' If there was one book or two books you would wish for this generation to read, what would it be?

 

 

'''Werner Herzog:''' Very specific. And it's a great, wonderful book. What else? Well, there are many, but I have a list of mandatory books for my rogue film school, and some guerilla-style antithesis to film schools, and there's five or six books. What comes to mind is Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Discovery 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 some diaries and reminiscences. He writes down an incredible story, incredibly rich in details and insight into the, into the heart of men. Anything else? Read the Russians, read Hölderlin and Kleist, the Germans, Büchner, also a German.

 

'''Werner Herzog:''' Read Hemingway, read Joseph Conrad, the short stories in particular. So - but don't believe that this would make you into a different person. It's, it's the permanence of reading, the insistence of reading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

'''Werner Herzog:''' Bolt cutters you have to take metaphorically, I have a whole list of things. Does anyone have the book A Guide for the Perplexed here, because I see it here on the - can you give it to me please? Thank you. A Guide for the Perplexed, and we spoke about before, the title is so beautiful, I had to steal it from Maimonides, the great Jewish philosopher, middle age Spain, I think Seville or Córdoba, I don't even remember, but anyway. And here on the back end, by the way, it's a real bear, it's no Photoshop. My wife, who sits back there, did this photo.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

'''Werner Herzog:''' Yeah. It's an old philosophical question and a physical question of how deep do you insert your camera or your position as an observer? Does it change the reality that's out there?

 

'''Werner Herzog:''' Hopefully it does because I'm a creator. I'm not an observation camera in the bank, that waits for 15 years and no bank robber ever shows up. So we are not, we are not the fly on the wall. I want to insert myself. I want to create, I want to mold, I want to influence my story, even the documentaries.

 

'''Werner Herzog:''' And I do change facts. And I'm quoting now, André Gide, the French writer who said: "I change facts to such a degree that they resemble truth more than reality." And it's a wonderful way to say it. And, you'll see you are too. If you are seriously asking the question with an indignant undertone, it means that you are very much fact oriented, which I don't believe in your case, but many people are too fact oriented and cinema does not have to be.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

'''Eric Weinstein:''' All right. A huge hand for Werner Herzog people.