Written by Jason Newman
Translator: Issac
Proofreading: Easy two three
Source: Rolling Stone (December 9, 2020)
Werner Herzog's documentary, which focuses on adventures to remote areas and interviews with passionate outsiders, seems like a curse to him that strict segregation seems like a curse. But the 78-year-old director, screenwriter and occasional actor is always busy, including more than 70 feature films and documentaries.
"I'm writing poetry and prose, it doesn't cost a lot of money, and I can write in a secluded environment." Speaking through Zoom from his home in Los Angeles, he said, "If I had enough money, I could start making six feature films."
Werner Herzog
In Herzog's latest film, Fireball: A Visitor from the Dark World, he, along with volcanologist and co-director Clive Oppenheimer, delved into the scientific, poetic, and spiritual impacts of meteorites. The fascinating documentary — in which the duo travels from Norway to Antarctica to a remote island near Australia, talking to scientists and other experts — captures Herzog's insatiable curiosity and a clever blend of history, science and sociology.
Fireball: Visitors from the Dark World
But for now, Herzog has taken "extremely strict measures" against the outbreak. "I'm not a fatalist," he said. "I'm responsibly doing what needs to be done. I'm in the trenches. In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine's Last Word series, Herzog looks back on his career, talking about memory, politics, heroes, and ignoring all the advice.
Reporter: What is the most important criterion in your life?
Herzog: It's curiosity, and I've always had curiosity. There is also self-discipline, because we are in an unusual period, and you can only fight back with responsibility and self-discipline. Isolate yourself from others as much as possible and only come into contact with them with precautions. We have to let these bastard viruses starve, and that's what we can do; extremely disciplined approach can overcome the pandemic.
Reporter: What is the best advice you've ever received?
Herzog: I can't even say. I try to ignore the advice of others when managing my own life.
Reporter: Maybe it's better to ask the best advice that you've overlooked.
Herzog: Ignore the advice, stick to your culture, stick to your vision, stick to your dreams. If necessary, cross the mountains by boat. Men and women are supposed to cross the mountains in boats. Let it go, because sometimes we have to touch something more important than ourselves. It touches on the collective vision that many of us have a deep slumber in our hearts. This is the role of poetry. That's what music does.
"Overland Boat"
Reporter: Did you have any favorite books when you were a child that you never forgot?
Herzog: Winnie the Pooh. My mother would read to her children, and I grew up in a remote valley in the Bavarian Alps. There are almost no schools there. No one can read. Everyone is the son of a farmer. They would all huddle in our small kitchen, and my mom would read stories. Every night we hear a chapter of Winnie the Pooh and we all cry with joy.
Reporter: What influenced you about this book?
Herzog: Its beauty. It's fantasy. You like Winnie. You like piggy. You love Yi'er. They are always part of my soul. The child's soul can be explained in this book.
Reporter: Do you have any advice for your younger self?
Herzog: No. Let it go, just like me. Accept all errors. I made a lot of mistakes when making movies. They all stutter, limp or squint their eyes. Almost no one noticed, but I did. Go ahead and make mistakes. If you trespass you will be arrested. yes. Just do it. There's nothing wrong with spending a night or two in jail. That's what I did. Don't be afraid of the grizzly bear behind you. Go hiking. Go read a book. I haven't seen that many movies, but I read a lot of books. Young filmmakers asked me for advice; read, read, read, read, read, read, read! Only then can you become a really good filmmaker. Otherwise, even if you become a filmmaker, you are a mediocre person at best. All the good filmmakers—Coppola, Errol Morris, Terrence Malik—are hungry readers.
Do you think that the advent of social media and scrolling screens has reduced literacy and reading ability?
Herzog: Not only that. For more than half a century, the literacy rate has been declining. Even young students who studied ancient Greek rarely read. This is a catastrophic evolution. Don't blame Twitter. Twitter is just monosyllabic discourse in internet chat rooms, now filled with emojis. A tweet won't induce you to think conceptually. They are just the end of evolution that has lasted for decades, and I don't welcome it.
For example, when you watch TV, if there are wise people commenting on political scenes or events, you can always see the bookshelf behind them. They are people who read books. If you walk into the brownstone houses on New York's Upper West Side, you'll find very wealthy people there, people who are "successful" in life. Since there are no curtains, you can look in through their windows, and you won't find a brownstone house without bookshelves. It is only when you read a book that you will understand the grander narrative, and you will understand the poetry hidden between the lines.
Reporter: How does memory work? I've found that my memory is getting worse and worse, in part because I know I can look up something online.
Herzog: We've talked about the digital dark ages. No one writes letters now. In the 18th and 19th centuries, we learned about the intimate thoughts of writers and thinkers, about our great-great-great-grandmother, because of the letters she wrote to her great-great-great-grandfather... I don't have a smartphone. I don't want to absorb reality through the internet or apps on my smartphone.
That's why I don't want to entrust a lot of things to phone photos or USB sticks. That's why, for example, when I witness the birth of my child, I would never go in with a camera and treat it as a memory, a little movie. You go there as a man and you see amazing violence when a child is born. You are there, watching in awe. You will never delegate it to someone else and never forget it. The mass and sculpture of our memories are carved by ourselves, not by facts. That's the beauty of it.
Reporter: Is having a camera on every phone good or bad for filmmaking?
Herzog: It won't have much of an impact on filmmaking. We now have three hundred and fifty million photographers, and they carry cameras every day, but that doesn't improve the level of photography or film art. But a wonderful side effect is that a barefoot, no-money, poor person can make a believable, professional feature film somewhere in the third world, provided they have the ability to express something big.
Reporter: Who is your hero?
Herzog: In my childhood, in this isolated village, there were lumberjacks and some cattle farmers. We had no running water, no toilets, almost no electricity, and had been hungry since childhood, but there was a young lumberjack who openly rebelled against the police, and as soon as the war was over, he began smuggling coffee from Austria.
He avoided the police and played them, blowing a trumpet on the top of a hill, and then the police would rush up and arrest him, and he sneaked into the valley and blew his trumpet on the top of the hill on the other side. He persisted for two weeks and was not arrested. He was so strong; his muscles were like a bodybuilder, for he often lifted heavy logs.
A milk truck rushed out of the bridge and into the river. Sure, it needs a crane to get it out, but everyone is called Siegel Hans! Siegel Hans will come! He came, took off his shirt, and with his bulging muscles, tried to lift the truck out of the stream. Of course, a man can't lift something weighing 15 tons, but he tried anyway. For us, he was a hero.
Reporter: What about art?
Herzog: Heroes are those who find out that they are ignored and ridiculed. The Dutch painter Hauclus Segels left almost nothing, but his prints were incredibly four centuries ahead of his time, and he was considered a lunatic.
Or, for example, musicians like the 16th-century composer Carlo Jessúaldo (the protagonist of Herzog's 1995 film The Five Sounds of Death); it's crazy. He composed music that we didn't hear from Stravinsky until hundreds of years later. Jesú Aldo was notorious for murdering his young wife and then escaping to the castle of a young nobleman in Naples, where they were later captured together. He and his followers, almost single-handedly, cut down the entire forest surrounding the castle. We don't know why. He began to flogg himself, letting the young man whip him, almost to the point of death. Wild, wild, wild man. Its heroic part transcends the boundaries of his time and is ignored and ridiculed.
The Five Voices of Death
Reporter: What about the definition of "failure"?
Herzog: Oh, that's obvious. You can turn a failure into a healthy thing, into something you'll never do again. It can improve your workflow. It can improve your quality. I've had real setbacks. You may recall (during the filming of Overland Boat) that I was accused of violating the human rights of the local population. There was an open court against me. I know it looks like a failure, but it won't be a failure, because the general public will know that I'm not violating human rights, it's just the turn of the moment. That's it. This was a form of political propaganda at the time. But I survived and learned something from it, and I made my film anyway.
Reporter: Do you consider yourself an optimistic person?
Herzog: I don't think there's an optimistic or pessimistic classification. I look forward, no matter what I encounter, I have to deal with it, and I am not afraid of what is coming at me. I've never been afraid. I follow my vision, whether optimistic or pessimistic. If you throw something at me, I'll deal with it too.
Reporter: At the end of Fireball, we see a man describing the meteorite as a vessel for the soul of the deceased, who said, "Death is not so much a big event as the beginning of a new journey." Do you feel this way too?
Herzog: Yes. Its poetry, I understand and accept. The tribal people of the Torres Channel Islands, especially on this island (Mare Island), believe that the souls of the dead traveled to Hades on meteorites. It's a beautiful idea with a beautiful poem in it. I accepted it completely and completely because I didn't have a better idea of my own. [Laughs]
As a political observer, what do you think about what happened in the weeks after Election Day?
Herzog: I can't run in the election because I'm not a citizen, but I want me to be able to participate. Because I'm a guest of your country, sometimes I have an outsider's perspective halfway through, and I look at things in clearer outlines. Everyone knows it well — more clearly than in previous elections — that there is a large percentage of people in the American heartland who have had different American experiences, who are ignored and disenfranchised, for example, and they don't appear in the movies.
The United States must acknowledge that its heartland requires attention. Attention is needed. I keep telling a friend who works in the film industry, "You live in Los Angeles, but I know you're from Lansing, Michigan. All your high school classmates are there. When was the last time you spoke to them?" "Oh, I didn't talk to them after high school." I said, "Tell them." Ask them how they are doing. Ask them about the problems they are experiencing. They're not overpasses."
The word "overpass," which I've heard from the elite of the East and West Coasts, is a dirty word. Twenty years ago, I told my friend, "How can you use such a word? It's rude, it's going to hit back." In fact, for a long, long time — decades — the heartland has been neglected.
You told us three years ago, "It's mysterious how Trump can get away with everything." I'm strangely fascinated by this." Has that changed since then?
Herzog: Fascinated, you have to be very careful. I do really like a movie character like Achill in Achille, Wrath of God, in which case I'm talking about the movie, he's a villain. Suddenly, there was a man who didn't speak political language, and it seemed to me that this person was right on some basic things, like he was the first meaningless president to talk openly about the American war. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, whatever you say. No one dares to say that.
Achille, The Wrath of God
Whether you like him or not, whether you like his acting attitude or his vulgarity, you have to approve of him. You have to look further. You'd better look at the America he represents. That's the last thing left today. Presidents come and go. You love reading his tweets. It was my impression that he had turned these tweets into a literary form, almost like a Japanese haiku. (Laughs) I said with a smile. But he must be taken seriously because part of America's systemic performance must be taken seriously.
Reporter: Are you surprised that wearing a mask has become a political statement?
Herzog: No, because in america you often see a certain degree of contempt for science and scientific advice, and it's because the Western world was created by men and their ground troops, who sat in ordinary carriages, rode horses, conquered a huge continent, and they also knew how to use shovels and ploughs. It is a feeling that we decide our destiny with the rifle in our hands, with the right conviction and the plough. Many of the things we do today are sometimes scientifically based and justified, but this is not yet deeply rooted in the Hearts of Americans. This has to do with the history of the United States.
Do you want Fireball to play a role in promoting science and alleviating this contempt?
Herzog: Yes, of course. I said to Clive, "If a kid sees this and says, 'I want to do something like this too.' I want to go into science, and we'll do it right."
In this film, Simon Schaever, a professor of philosophy of science, quotes a quote that says meteorites are an organism that talks to us. He said, "Meteorites are meaningful, and the task of human beings is to interpret the meaning of meteorites." What does meteorite mean to your research and filming process?
Herzog: I should be cautious about what it means, but I can tell you that there's always a sense of awe in filmmaking and my films. It was amazing when I saw what we were harvesting. Science has the same attitude. When you zoom it in 3,000 times, the smallest speck of dust that you can barely see with the naked eye is the most awesome and beautiful sculpture.
Reporter: In a sense, you think of meteors, comets, and so on as both science and art.
Herzog: Yes, but they're not just works of art. The force of amazing heat, friction, and speed shapes them into something, but if you look closely, they are embedded with the building blocks of life. amino acid. Some of them contain sugar. The question immediately arises, will life be brought to our planet from outer space? I think it's unlikely, but the next question is, is there life in the universe? This is quite possible. It wouldn't be surprising if we could soon find real elements of life there, such as algae or microbes.
We have the same history as the entire universe. We have the same chemistry with the universe, and we have the same physical reaction with the universe. I wouldn't be at all surprised if we had evidence of extraterrestrial life. Unfortunately, this life may not be like in the movies. No evil civilization destroys us.
Reporter: At 78 years old, you were still working on multiple projects at the same time. Have you thought about your legacy?
Herzog: My brother stabilized my job a lot, he took care of all my finances and organization, did high-resolution scans of all my films, collected all my articles. For a long time, he had urged me to start a nonprofit foundation to put together the copyrights to all my films so that no one could influence the copyright of one of the works. The situation will be complicated after I die because I have been married to two women before and now I have married for the third time. I have children, and in this case you will fight endlessly, for decades.
Look at Hitchcock or Kubrick. I was advised to put things in a legally binding bastion. My brother was the owner of the house, and he sat me at the dinner table, and all he said was, "You're going to start this foundation."
Reporter: It's not a problem; it's an order.
Herzog: Yes, he has that power. He was the only successful man in our family. He argues, "Your films don't belong to you. They belong to people on the outside. You'd better start building your foundation now."
Reporter: Donald Sutherland once said, "Actors don't retire; they just die." Do you feel the same way about the director?
Herzog: I don't know when it's going to end. I couldn't keep up with all the projects at hand, they were coming too intensely. I couldn't hide in any trenches.