Werner Herzog

I'm Jesse Thorn. This is The Turner Rap. The show where I ask interviewers about interviewing. It's a partnership between Maximum Fun and Columbia Journalism Review. Today, the film director Werner Herzog. You might know Werner Herzog's reputation, even if you've never seen one of his films. He's known for both fictional and non-fictional films that stretch the boundaries of humanity, that push men and women to the absolute edges. It doesn't matter if it's people living in the Arctic or the Antarctic or people pushing a boat through the Amazon. He wants to know who we are when we are at our limits. He isn't afraid to get a little bit of non-fiction into his fiction or a little bit of narrative into his non-fiction. I talk to him about his movie Little Dieter Needs to Fly and how he sort of pushed things, manipulated things, but in a way that drove at capital T truth. I do modify facts in such a way that they resemble truth more than reality. Some people say, "Oh, yeah, this is all manipulation and you're lying to us nonsense. No, it is not." Werner is in his mid-70s now and he is still tough as nails, still working as hard as he ever did. In fact, one time he literally got shot during an interview. This was not long ago. He got shot during a BBC interview and he kept doing the interview. He perforated my leather jacket in the catalog, in the pocket, in shirt and underwear and everything, but it hadn't penetrated into my intestines. So I was bleeding, but it was superficial and I said, "Well, this was an insignificant bullet which made its round in the internet." That's some genuine Werner Herzog stuff right there. Let's get right into it. Werner Herzog on the turnaround. Werner Herzog, thank you so much for talking to me. It was great to see you again. Thank you. When you're making a documentary that's about people, many of your documentaries are substantially about the natural world and you can go and point a camera at them and we hear you talk. But when you're making a documentary about people, are you always comfortable with the part of that that is basically bothering them? That you are imposing yourself upon their lives, that you're asking things of them. Sure, I do. And that's filmmaking. You see, I've heard it once in a while that documentary filmmakers should be just like the fly on the wall wrong. We are filmmakers. We are creators. We shape things and we shape movies. And I kept saying to those people, now we should be the hornets that go out in sting. And it's a wrong perspective. If you have, let's say, a security camera in a bank. And you wait for 15 years and not a single robber is even arriving. And even if a bank robbery occurs from a little camera on the wall, it would look totally boring. So we are creating. And of course, we are in a way invasive. And of course, we are showing certain angles and perspectives of human beings in front of your camera. And a good example is, for example, death row inmates. One of them, Michael Perry, who was executed only eight days after I filmed with him. And I said to him, "Your last appeal for clemency has a lot of elements in it, which I can sympathize." And of course, you had a very bad childhood. But it doesn't exonerate you. And then I said, "Point blank to him." All this does not necessarily mean that I have to like you. And for a moment, he freezes. And he says, "Okay, because nobody has ever spoken like this to him." A man who is going to die in eight days. And it does not necessarily mean that I have to like you. And he looks like a young kid. When you see the film into the abyss, I think it's on Netflix. So when you see this young man who committed his crimes when he was 18, 10 years later, 28, he still looks like a very nice kid, a real nice kid. At the same time when I see him approaching in this little cubicle behind bulletproof glass, there was this kind of gasp inside of me. I have never seen a man as dangerous as him. Never. And I have been in very dangerous situations. And I have met very, very dangerous people. Never anyone like him. And yet I'm completely fair and completely open with him. And they notice they sense it. Is that difficult? No, that's my nature. I know that he has his voice now. Of course, he knew that my film was not going to be his platform to prove his innocence. That happens sometimes in this type of movie. And he said, "Yes, fine. Let's talk about whatever is fascinating for you." What did you find fascinating about it? Well, it's a complex case with two perpetrators, three murder victims, four crime scenes, a shootout with police and so looking into a human abyss, so deep into a abyss that you get vertigo. Do you still get vertigo when you're looking into an abyss? It depends on what it is. If I look into the crater of a volcano, no, it doesn't give me vertigo, but looking into the deepest darkest recesses of a human soul. Yes, it gives me vertigo. I was on an airplane six or nine months ago. And I watched a little detour needs to fly. You're a film from, I guess it's with the mid 1990s? Yes. And it's a really remarkable film about German American Airmen who was in the US Air Force and was a prisoner of war in Laos during the secret war in Laos and Cambodia. And he survived an unfathomable prisoner of war experience. Or a deal of unspeakable proportions. John McCain, who is considered the real hero, didn't go through half of what did the thing go in? Exactly. It's absolutely mind-dependently astonishing what the man went through. And there's a scene early on in the movie where you're talking to him in his house in Mount Tamil Pious, in Marine County, in North of San Francisco. And it, in many ways, feels like just a normal conversation between a couple of guys, except when you realize that he is describing the fact that he is essentially maintained a horde of food in the baseboards of his house. Of his beautiful middle-class home. Yes, a stash of hundreds of pounds of rice. Because he can't sleep otherwise. Yes. Do you feel comfortable talking to someone in that situation when you are revealing something that's significant that is often closely held in personal? Well, that's my profession. I have to take an audience through my camera very deep into the heart of men or women. And that's what I do. And there's nothing uncomfortable because Dieter Dengler really wanted to show me what he had under his floorboards in his kitchen. And he was proud to show me. And sometimes you see things are stylized. The very first scene he comes in his 1949 Buick, a beautiful old car. And he steps out and opens and closes, adore, opens and closes. And he enters his home. But before he enters, opens, closes, opens, closes. Then he's inside. From inside, he even opens and closes. And then he sticks his head out. And he says, it may sound odd. It may look odd. that I'm opening and closing doors, but that means freedom for me that I can do that. And it was a stylized, a staged scene because when you come into his home and I show it briefly, there's a small entrance hall and there's seven or eight paintings, smaller paintings, canvases of open doors. And I said to him, "Deader, you have a lot of just open doors here, half open doors." And he said, "Really, really? Let me look." And I said, "Why did you buy it?" "Oh yeah, I bought it because it was a bargain. It was only ten bucks a piece." And so he didn't even know this. And then he said to me, "You know what? Maybe deep inside of me, I bought these images because freedom is being able to open and close a door." That's what it means for me. And I said, "Deader, let's just get out here and do a scene where you open and close doors." And he said to me, "Doesn't it look funny?" I said, "Even if it looks funny, we'll understand you." And in this case, of course, I do modify facts in such a way that they resemble truth more than reality. And some people say, "Oh yeah, this is all manipulation and you're lying to us nonsense." No, it is not. And my big example in art would be Michelangelo his pieta, the marble statue of the Virgin holding the dead body of Jesus. And when you look at the statue, Jesus is 33 year old, the man of sorrows, but his mother is 17. So did Michelangelo cheat us? Did he defraud us? Did he lie to us now? He just showed the essence of the man of sorrows and of the Virgin. It's a deeper truth about them. And he does not lie to us. How do you invoke that truth when you are talking to a real person like Peter Dengler standing right in front of you? And I told him exactly what I would like to do it. And he said, "He looked at me and pondered for a moment." And he said, "I got you. I got it. Let's go and do it." There's a scene in the movie that is, you know, much of this. So part of the film is interviews with him in the United States, reminiscing and so on and so forth. Part of the film is the two of you traveling through Laos, experiencing and visiting, and in some cases, reenacting the things that he went through. And there's a scene that I found very affecting where he is narrating a portion of his captivity where he was forcibly marched through the jungle. Yes. And as we do this, there are Lao guys there, our presumed Lao guys there. It was actually Thailand right at the border with Laos on Mekong River. There you go. Thank you. And he is bound and jogging through the forest as, you know, however old he was, 50-year-old man in the film. And we have a clip from it, so I want to listen to it. And for me, 30 years later when I was a pilot in Vietnam, I was a prisoner. I was tortured. And they wanted me to sign a piece of paper saying that I could dim the American action Vietnam. And I was strong enough not to not to do that. Many times, these springs came through my grandfather. I was flanking off him. And if he could do it, so could I do it? Oh, oh, this feels a little bit too close to home. Bye, bye! Of course, didn't knew it was only a film, but all the old terror returned as if it were real. I thought, you guys behind me with your camera can only see my back, but you can't know how my heart is thumping inside. I taught myself, okay, play along with them. Running like this might chase the demons away. Do you feel guilty about putting someone through that? No, of course not. And Dada says something very significant. Go along with it, it might chase the demons away, which it was healthy for him to be tied up in and running through the jungle with his captors. You have to know with whom you are dealing and you have to see what kind of inner stability they have. And with Dada, you could do this. I wouldn't do it with someone else, for example. But in this case, yes, totally legitimate. And that's how you really dig very, very deep into the heart of someone who is on your screen. I mean, it's really astonishing that scene because you collapse so many conventions in that. You're filming, we see on screen a reenactment, but it's not a literal reenactment because we see the real man there. We see a 50 year old man there, not a 30 year old man there. And we hear you narrating, we hear him narrating. And we also hear the sound of him in that space. And it seems like all you care about is trying to get to this feeling that is something closer, as close as you can get to the capital T truth. Yes, but only with his consent. And of course, Dita, he's a man who knows how to defend himself. Right. He's not, he's not a wimp. In other words, if it wasn't with his consent, he could take you. And of course, he knew any moment in the film, he could just stop dead in his tracks and say, to this point, no further, he always knew that. Did you say that to him? It was always implicit. In the same thing, for example, with a film I did on a plane crash, in which I was almost involved, a young girl, 17 years at the time survived it. It is the only survivor out of 96. And she, the plane disintegrated, she comes down in the jungle and miraculously survives. It took me a year to convince her, let's do it again, but I said to her, film making is not, it's not just vanilla ice cream, happy feelings. So you went through something that nobody else has gone through you. And if we do that, we go straight to the site of the crash because we have found some fragments of the plane in the jungle. Are you prepared to go there? And are you prepared to fly on the same seat in a commercial plane? Number 19, F, a window seat. Are you prepared to do that? And she said, give me, give me time to think about it. And a few weeks later, she said, you know what? I understand that we have to go into these very essential locations and essential situations and prepare to do it, but can I take my husband along? And I said, sure, take him along, he's wonderful, and he understands the jungle very well, much better that you bring your husband along. So yes, you do it, but with, in a considerate way. Stick around, we'll be back with more of my conversation with Werner Herzog. But first, let's hear about some of the other great shows that we make at MaximumFun.org. I'm Riley Smirl. I'm Sydney McAroy, and I'm Taylor Smirl. And together, we host a podcast called Still Buffering, where we answer questions like, why should I not follow sleep first at a slumber party? How do I be free? Is it okay to break up with someone using emojis? And sometimes we talk about buzz. No, we don't. No. Find out the answers to these important questions and many more on Still Buffering, a sister's guide to teens through the ages. I am a teenager, and I was to buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz. Hi everybody, I'm Justin McAroy. And I'm Dr. Sydney McAroy. Every week we release a medical history podcast called Saubones. We go over the history of the dumbest, grossest, weirdest stuff humans have been doing to each other since the dawn of mankind. But it's a funny show. But it's also so disgusting and stomach-turning, you won't believe it. But it's also like, funny, it's funny. It is the wildest, grossest, nasty stuff you can imagine. - It's a real hoot. It's called. solvones, and we release it every week on iTunes, wherever podcasts are sold, and right here on MaximumFun.org. I'm Jesse Thorne. I'm talking with Werner Herzog on the turn around. Let's get back into it. What about in a situation where you don't have the time or the leisure to have one subject that you can stretch out with over a long time? I'm thinking of a watch the movie of yours recently that was set in the most forbidding parts of Russia in the taiga, and you are traveling to a community of people who look there's probably a couple Werner Herzog fans there, but it's not like you have an advanced party blowing, tooting your horn when you get there, right? Because I did not shoot the film, it's a chain of coincidences I saw at a friend's place who my visited, and he just wanted to switch off his remote control because on his plasma screen there was something, and I said no, no, no, hold it, hold it, this looks very, very interesting, and I spent four hours in watching four films made by a young Russian filmmaker Dimitri Vasokov, and he made over a whole year for seasons four different one hour films, and I have to say there was absolutely fascinating footage there. The commentary was completely garalous and not right for us, the music sounded like the worst elevator music, and I said to my friend, you know what somebody should condense and re-edit the film and make something completely new out of this, and show it to other audience and to Russian audiences, and he said to me, why don't you do that? Why not you? And I said, wow, wow, let's get in touch with a Russian filmmaker, and he knew about me, and I said to him after a few conversations, I said to him, you know what I would like to make a one and a half hour film out of it, completely newly shaped. My voice doing a new commentary, I have a wonderful composer who will do music for it. I will narrate it in a completely new and different form. And I said to him, if I do that, I wouldn't like you looking over my shoulder and breathing in my neck all the time, can I do it all alone? And he said, would be an honor for me if you did that. And now he's very happy with what we have out there, and it's happy people a year in the tiger, and it's a real fine film, but of course it's basically the film of a Russian filmmaker to meet me, Vasokov. And I shaped it into a real different new form, and everybody said to me, you have to have a co-director credit, and reluctantly, reluctantly I agreed. The Russian filmmaker said, yes, you must accept being my co-director in this. Okay, so here's my question. When you walk up to somebody and say, can I talk to you on camera? In whatever the particular context is, how do you do it? I rely on my experience in life, and I can read the heart. I do understand the heart of men, and I would be capable to do a conversation completely unprepared. I'm not a journalist with, let's say, a catalog of questions. You throw me anywhere with anyone, and I can make a meaningful conversation. Why do you think that is? Because I do read a lot, much more than watching films, so my ability of storytelling, my ability of poetry, my ability of conceptual thinking is very keen. What do you think you're most interested in other people? We're looking deep into the soul of someone else, but not of everyone. That's what I was going to say. I wonder, are you interested in looking deep into the soul of a man who owns a delicatessen? He does a great job and he's got two nice kids. Yes, I do. I do, it depends on just a few days ago, I was in the mountains in northwestern Spain, and I run into a shepherd, and we had the finest two-hour deep conversation, which I enjoyed tremendously, and I think the man also enjoyed it. So a deep exchange of man meeting another one, and it was just complete joy, and it was good that there was no camera, quite often there shouldn't be a camera. It seems like one of the things that helps you in these situations is that your interest is sincere, and it reads is sincere. Like you really want to know the answers to the questions that you're asking. And sometimes you can't get them, and I know it in advance, for example, in low-end behold, the internet film, I'm asking, as I call it, the Closivitz question. Closivitz, a war theoretician, Napoleonic times oppression, and he wrote one of the finest books on warfare. And he strangely and famously once said, "Sometimes war dreams of itself." It's a stunning statement, and I extended the question, and I said, "This was what Closivitz said about the war, thus the internet dream of itself." And of course, it's a stunning question, and you know whoever is in front of you a scientist or a neurologist or whatever, they wouldn't give you a full answer. Nobody knows. What do you do when you ask a question like that? Because you are concerned with these kinds of questions. Of course I am. Now a lot of people who are on camera in a Werner Herzog film, they know that Werner, they know that Werner Herzog is going to ask them a real big question like that. And they know that they're just going to try and answer it as best they can, right? Yes. That's a lot of people who are there must be people though who are faced with a question like that, and they go, "I don't know, whatever, fuck you Werner Herzog." No, I wouldn't ask this question to someone who appears to be shallow. I ask the question to the right people and I know who the ones would be. Do you often get responses that you're not expecting? Of course, and that's a beauty of real deep conversation. Are there questions that you're afraid to ask? And I don't mean that you won't ask, but. No, I quite often I wouldn't ask certain questions if somebody's deeply hurt because of certain events in his or her life. I would not poke into that if something of that comes to light fine, but I would not try to squeeze it out of anyone. Are there questions that you do feel like you need to ask, but that you nonetheless have a hard time asking? I mean, there's plenty of things that aren't a matter of me squeezing something where my personal politeness or my sense of social moors or whatever makes me nervous or afraid to ask them. And I wonder if you're so profoundly direct and you've done it so many times that you no longer have that concern or if it's something that you constantly overcome. Of course, I have this concern and I have some sort of an ethical borderline and I would not step beyond it and I think I have grown good at that and I haven't made a real major mistake in that respect in my life. Of course, I'm very curious and this intensity of curiosity and exchange with someone whom you've just met and on camera entices people quite often to say very, very good profound things that they never expected to tell anyone else. And in particular, you see when I travel on foot, I want to hot down. my contain is empty, no water anywhere. I had to knock it at a farmhouse, and the farmer's wife startled and I said to her, "I'm very thirsty. Can I use your tap and fill my contain?" And the farmer comes and is kind of thinking, "I'm a burglar." And he says, "Why do you come from?" And I said, "I come from Munich." And he says, "By car?" Now I said, "No, I'm on foot." And he says, "But that's a thousand miles away from here. You came on foot." And I said, "Yes, sir." And from then on, there's no small talk anymore. He would, I would stay six hours with him. They would cook for me, give me a place in the hey to sleep. They would tell me, the man would tell me stories he had not told to anyone for 40 years. But of course there is no camera, and there shouldn't be a camera. Okay, two questions that were suggested to me that I found really interesting and wanted to ask you. The first was, "Do you watch any sitcoms?" No, I barely know what it is. But I think it's people sitting on couches and talking sometimes when I zap through channels, I see people talking in their kitchen, in their living room. Now I really know very little about it. What's your favorite, like, unimportant thing to do? That's a much deeper question. I like to watch baseball, Werner. What I like about baseball is I have a very sophisticated understanding of it, and there is a sophisticated understanding of it to be had. But it was also a little bit boring, and it does not matter at all. Like, I care about it a lot. Yes, but I have a favorite team. You played it yourself. That's true. I tried to watch it and understand the basic rules. No, I do understand the basic rules, and I do understand the basic suspens in it that there's one guy with a bat, and the entire field is against him, and they try to get him out as fast as it gets. Yeah, of course, every single pitch at him is a certain form of suspense. I do understand that part. For me, it would be watching soccer because I played it myself, fifth division or so. I mean, at a fairly low level. And I like to watch games where I see players that can read the game, and that's something very unique, very special, very few players in the world have this ability to read spatial movements and read what's coming at them. Yeah, that's something that a special football quarterback has that is awe-inspiring to me. The ability to instantaneously understand this huge tablo in front of you and synthesize it and create something out of that. Yes, it's similar. Yes, the quarterback has to read the situation. Of course, the situation is organized, and he knows there are two wide receivers out, and they will run a specific pattern, and all of a sudden both of them are covered. Right. So you just don't throw it them, and in something else is happening. All of a sudden, the quarterback runs himself, he runs the ball, and understanding that and seeing the gap because everybody is focused on the receivers, and the defense of the opponent is unaware that they left the gap, and he sees it. I like that part of American football. The other question is, what happened the time that you got shot on camera? I've watched it, and I'm still not sure what happened. Well, because you haven't seen or heard the preceding ten or fifteen minutes, when they set up, it was a BBC interview. When they set up a camera, there was from across the street, somebody raving and ranting, a little bit like road rage, always these movie stars, and the cameras, and fuck you, and get out of here. And so, and we started the conversation on camera, and all of a sudden, I heard some sort of an explosion, on the tape, it's like a minor sort of shot, but it sounded like an explosion, and I thought the camera had exploded, because something glowing hot, like a three pound glowing hot piece of metal hit me in the area of my belt. And I looked at the camera, and I see it was hadn't exploded, and I said, what was that? And I see a man ducking at the veranda on the other side of the street. And I wanted to at least finish my sentence and finish the thought. I knew I was hit, and by then the the sound guy already had hit the ground, and the camera fled. So, of course, and then we looked at the situation, and I saw that the bullet, minor sort of bullet, had perforated my leather jacket, and the catalog, and the pocket, and shirt, and underwear, and everything, but it hadn't penetrated into my intestines, so I was bleeding, but it was superficial, and I said, well, this was an insignificant bullet, which made its round in the internet. That was a pretty great thing to say. No, it was insignificant, so I said the right thing, I made a correct assessment of the situation. Well, I think the point that's amazing about it is, that you made a correct assessment of the situation. That in and of itself is remarkable. Well, and it's not the first time I've been shot at. I've been shot at much more dangerously with much bigger guns, and you can never get acquainted to it, but I think once Winston Churchill, the young Winston Churchill once famously said, it's one of the most exhilarating moments in a man's life, to be shot at unsuccessfully. And of course, we finished the interview then at my home, and it was quite okay. Well, Verna, I've taken so much of your time, and I'm so grateful to get to see you again and talk to you again. Thank you again. Thank you, Israel, thank you. The great Verna Herzog, we check out his films, well, wherever films are available. I really love a movie of his that I really love that I think is under scene, is a movie called The Cave of Forgotten Dreams. It's about ancient cave paintings in France. If you can see it in 3D, please do because it's one of the only 3D movies that I've ever really been awed by the 3D-ness of, but it's absolutely worth watching in 2D as well. It is, like all of Verna's movies, it starts off as being about the particular subject. It's incredible that they got the 3D cameras into these caves, where the cave paintings are, but it immediately spins off into his considerations about the nature of art and how it relates to our collective humanity. And it's very beautiful. And then at the end, for some reason, there's an albino alligator. It's great. I love it. The cave of Forgotten Dreams. That's my tip to you. If you've been enjoying the turnaround, I'm going to be hosting a Reddit AMA about what I've learned from making the show on Friday, August 11th at Noon Pacific. It's in honor of the very last episode of the turnaround. So come ask me whatever you want, and I will answer it at ima.reddit.com on Friday, August 11th at noon. Please do show up because I don't know if anyone cares. You've been listening to the turnaround. If you like this show, tell a friend, subscribe. Leave us a review and Apple podcasts. Share one of our interviews on social media. Send somebody an email to tell them that you liked it. Send someone a handwritten note, like a perfumed handwritten note that says they should listen to this interview podcast, where an interviewer or interviewer is about interviews. Maybe they'll subscribe. That's our whole marketing budget, folks. You can always visit maximumfund.org to listen to our shows or grab them in your favorite pod catcher. There are also text versions of our interviews on the Columbia Journalism Reviews website at CJR.org. They've got edited transcripts of everything for easy sharing. CJR is a co-presenter of this show. Their mission is to encourage excellence in journalism in the service of a free society. Amazing organization. They do amazing work. You can find it all at CJR.org, including their podcast, which is called The Kicker. All of the turnaround's music is provided to us by Mobius Van Chaukstra. You can check him out at chopsmusic.com. The creator of the turnaround is me, Jesse Thorn. Our producers are Kerry. a heart and nickel-yow, our senior producer here at Maximum Fund is Laura Swisher, our managing director, Bikram Chatterjee. Special thanks to Kyle Pope, Emily Erskine, and Darryl Frost for making this show a reality. We'll catch you next time on Turn Around.