AI transcript
0:00:04 Support for this show comes from Constant Contact.
0:00:07 If you struggle just to get your customers to notice you,
0:00:10 Constant Contact has what you need to grab their attention.
0:00:15 Constant Contact’s award-winning marketing platform offers all the automation,
0:00:20 integration, and reporting tools that get your marketing running seamlessly,
0:00:23 all backed by their expert live customer support.
0:00:27 It’s time to get going and growing with Constant Contact today.
0:00:30 Ready? Set. Grow.
0:00:34 Go to ConstantContact.ca and start your free trial today.
0:00:38 Go to ConstantContact.ca for your free trial.
0:00:41 ConstantContact.ca.
0:00:50 When it comes to smart water alkaline 9.5+ pH with antioxidant, there’s nothing to overthink.
0:00:55 So, while you may be performing mental gymnastics over whether the post-work gym crowd is worth it,
0:00:58 if you’ll be able to find a spot for your yoga mat,
0:01:03 or if that spin instructor will make you late for dinner again,
0:01:05 don’t overthink how you hydrate.
0:01:07 Life’s full of choices.
0:01:09 Smart water alkaline is a simple one.
0:01:17 What’s the role of the poet in our society?
0:01:23 Do we look to poetry for deep truths about our world,
0:01:26 or do we look to poetry for something different?
0:01:30 And if poetry is just, or even mostly, about truth,
0:01:35 then what distinguishes it from philosophy or science?
0:01:42 These are very old questions.
0:01:47 The kinds of questions you find Plato pondering over more than two centuries ago.
0:01:52 But they will always be worth asking, especially in this moment,
0:01:56 when our relationship with truth feels as fluid as it’s ever been.
0:02:02 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Grey Area.
0:02:16 Today’s guest, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, is the one and only,
0:02:18 Werner Herzog.
0:02:26 He’s a filmmaker, a poet, an author of the book “Every Man for Himself and God Against All.”
0:02:32 Herzog is known for his films like “Grizzly Man” and “Fitz Corraldo,” among many others.
0:02:36 But he thinks of himself as a poet and a writer more than he does a filmmaker,
0:02:41 and you can certainly hear that side of him in his films.
0:02:48 We only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences
0:02:54 out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel.
0:03:07 And we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication,
0:03:12 overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order.
0:03:17 Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess.
0:03:25 I think it’s fair to say that Herzog is one of our greatest living filmmakers.
0:03:28 He’s on my personal Mount Rushmore, for sure.
0:03:34 What I’ve always loved about his work, and you can hear it a little bit in that clip,
0:03:40 is that it has this dual quality of being both realistic and poetic at the same time.
0:03:45 That is hard to pull off, and no one does it better than Herzog.
0:03:50 Which is why I was delighted to see that he released a memoir.
0:03:56 It’s not really an autobiography, it’s about his approach to life and what he’s after in his art.
0:04:00 And he’s after something he calls ecstatic truth.
0:04:03 I explore that with him in this conversation.
0:04:08 We also talk about a few other things, like whether humanity is destroying itself,
0:04:13 and why he wants to go to Mars, just for a few days.
0:04:17 Hi, good morning. This is Van der Herzog.
0:04:20 This is Sean Elling. Pleasure to meet you.
0:04:27 I’ll try to be concise enough so that you don’t collect too much garbage.
0:04:32 Trust me, my editors and producers are used to getting lots of garbage from me,
0:04:35 and they’re experts at cleaning it up.
0:04:39 A lot of people know you as a filmmaker, obviously.
0:04:43 But you’re really a writer, you’ve always been a writer.
0:04:47 And this memoir is great, and I’m not just saying that because you’re here.
0:04:50 It really is, and it’s also quite distinctive.
0:04:54 But it’s not really a biography, it’s something else.
0:04:56 How would you describe this book?
0:05:00 Well, some of it is, of course, furious storytelling,
0:05:06 and much of it is origins of ideas, not so much the events.
0:05:11 If you look for event, event, you shouldn’t read the book.
0:05:17 For example, all of a sudden, interspersed there are five ballads of the little soldier.
0:05:25 I was with an elite commando unit of mostly child soldiers, between 8 and 11,
0:05:29 and some ballads pop up out of nowhere.
0:05:33 But, of course, they’re an integral part of what I’m writing.
0:05:41 It is probably very much the style as well because my experience in the real world
0:05:46 was unique or different from what other filmmakers have gone through.
0:05:49 It was different. I’m fairly certain about that.
0:05:53 And because of that, my writing, my style is different.
0:05:58 And I think you’re correct saying that I’m a filmmaker as well.
0:06:04 At the moment, it seems to be more a distraction because since about more than four decades
0:06:08 I keep preaching to deaf ears, look at my writing.
0:06:11 It will probably outlive my films.
0:06:16 So it’s at the moment the focus of what I’m doing.
0:06:20 It’s still weird to hear one of the greatest, I think, living filmmakers
0:06:22 describe film as a distraction.
0:06:24 At the moment, yes, it is here.
0:06:29 You have always described in interviews the universe as a place of overwhelming chaos
0:06:33 and you write a good bit about your childhood, which is also a bit chaotic.
0:06:39 Was your worldview, was that worldview in particular shaped pretty early in your life?
0:06:44 It is obvious when you look at the universe that it’s hostile out there, not made for us.
0:06:49 We cannot survive easily in the cosmos anywhere else.
0:06:51 We haven’t found a place yet.
0:06:56 Mars is possibly reachable, but we shouldn’t settle there.
0:07:02 It would be obscene to leave our planet behind and not keep it inhabitable
0:07:08 and try to make a foreign planet habitable for us.
0:07:14 So of course, and you look out into the universe, you don’t even need to have a telescope.
0:07:18 You don’t need to be an astronomer to know it is chaotic.
0:07:20 It is hostile.
0:07:24 It is against life, not against all life.
0:07:30 We can assume that there is life out there, some forms of life, maybe microbic life,
0:07:39 little creatures or like as much life as there is the snot in the nose of your toddler.
0:07:41 Actually, it’s biological.
0:07:46 So that may happen when we encounter the aliens out there.
0:07:50 We can assume there’s life out there among the trillions of stars
0:07:55 because we share the same physics with the cosmos.
0:07:59 We share the same chemistry and we share the same history.
0:08:05 So let’s assume there’s some forms of life not reachable for us right now.
0:08:08 And we don’t need to reach it.
0:08:14 I’ve always found that people really want to believe that there’s a certain order to the universe
0:08:16 because it makes the world feel more coherent.
0:08:19 And in that sense, maybe a little more hospitable.
0:08:25 But I’m not sure anything is more obvious than the fact that the universe is totally indifferent to us.
0:08:31 The harmony of the spheres, a very old idea, of course, there’s no harmony of spheres.
0:08:35 It’s a figment of our fantasy, of our thinking.
0:08:44 But it makes our existence more tolerable in a way believing that there’s some sort of harmony out there.
0:08:52 Otherwise, the universe is completely and utterly indifferent vis-à-vis what’s going on here on our planet
0:08:57 and what we are doing in our toils and our daily struggles.
0:09:01 It’s monumentally indifferent and we have to face that.
0:09:03 And it’s quite okay. Why not?
0:09:08 And the second thing I wanted to say, my childhood was not chaotic.
0:09:16 It was chaotic in the first 14 days of my life because I was born in the city of Munich.
0:09:19 It was carpet bombed several times.
0:09:28 When I was only two weeks old, everything around us where we lived was destroyed in ruins.
0:09:35 So she fled, she fled into the most remote part of the Bavarian mountains.
0:09:41 And then from there on, after I was two weeks old, it was a wonderful childhood.
0:09:46 It couldn’t have been better as a refugee or displaced by war.
0:09:59 I grew up in a wonderful, really beautiful valley in the mountains and as a wild child almost in anarchy
0:10:06 because there was an absence of fathers, no drill sergeant to tell us what to do and how to behave.
0:10:10 So it was just really, really good.
0:10:18 What do you think is behind that? Is it the simplicity of that, the sense of purpose and shared mission that comes with that kind of strife?
0:10:21 Why is there such beauty in such hardship?
0:10:25 It’s not simplicity because life was harsh.
0:10:28 We all grew up in real poverty.
0:10:31 In my case, we didn’t have running water.
0:10:40 You had to go to the well with a bucket, hardly an electricity, not enough to eat.
0:10:42 That was the only harsh thing.
0:10:47 Didn’t have enough to eat for up to two and a half years and I was always hungry.
0:10:52 And that’s why I mind when I see that people are throwing too much food away.
0:11:02 I don’t like to see that. I don’t raise my voice, but it’s a kind of consumerism that I can tolerate.
0:11:05 It’s people who do not have my experience.
0:11:09 But otherwise, it was a wonderful time.
0:11:11 You had to invent your own toys.
0:11:15 You had to invent your own games.
0:11:18 You had to fabricate your tools.
0:11:25 You had to start learning by trial and error.
0:11:27 You see, there was not much guidance.
0:11:32 In fact, our mother didn’t educate us that much.
0:11:35 We reeducated her as boys.
0:11:39 And only a few things that stick in my mind.
0:11:44 She was a very principled woman, smoking all her life, a heavy smoker.
0:11:51 And when my older brother and I were something like 19, 18, 19, 20 or so,
0:11:55 we had a motorcycle and it was a time of no helmets and so on.
0:11:59 We had some minor injuries on a weekly basis.
0:12:03 Sliding somehow into a ditch or whatever.
0:12:09 And my mother said to us, “I do not want to be in a position to bury one of my sons.”
0:12:14 And she said it once or twice and we didn’t pay attention.
0:12:21 And one day she’s at dinner table and she smokes and she stubs out her cigarette after two puffs.
0:12:27 And she says, “Boys, I think you’re going to sell your motorcycle.
0:12:30 It’s not healthy. It’s not good.”
0:12:33 And this, by the way, was my last cigarette.
0:12:40 She never, ever smoked a cigarette again and we sold our motorcycle within a week.
0:12:44 So it’s that kind of education.
0:12:49 And is it true that you didn’t even know that cinema existed until you were 11?
0:12:54 I did not because there was hardly any electricity.
0:12:56 There were no telephones.
0:13:00 I made my first phone call when I was 17.
0:13:05 Probably kids who are five years old or 10 years old cannot believe that.
0:13:09 But until today I don’t even have a cell phone.
0:13:13 Making a phone call is something strange and foreign for me.
0:13:17 But of course there was no theater or no cinema.
0:13:22 And a traveling projectionist came to this schoolhouse.
0:13:26 It was one classroom for first till fourth grade.
0:13:29 We were something like 25 kids.
0:13:33 The older ones would teach us the alphabet and help the teacher.
0:13:38 So school was also a very intense and beautiful experience.
0:13:42 And a projectionist came and showed two films.
0:13:46 The first time I ever learned that there was such a thing like cinema.
0:13:50 And it didn’t impress me at all. It was just lousy, lousy stuff.
0:13:52 When did you realize you were going to be a filmmaker?
0:13:54 I think you used the word destiny at some point.
0:13:56 You realized you were destined to make films.
0:14:01 But that came at a time when there was a very intense moment
0:14:05 or a few weeks of very intense insights.
0:14:10 And I call it now, you better touch it with a pair of pliers
0:14:12 because it sounds pathetic.
0:14:16 I had some sort of insight or illumination
0:14:20 or I became known to my own destiny.
0:14:25 And that was a time when I started a very dramatic religious phase.
0:14:30 When I started to travel on foot and where I knew I was a poet
0:14:32 and I had to be a poet.
0:14:34 And it was some sort of duty.
0:14:41 Destiny was meant for me to accept what was out there for me.
0:14:44 Why do you think destiny exists in this universe?
0:14:48 In a universe that does seem so indifferent.
0:14:55 There are certain laws out in the universe that proceed
0:15:01 and we are in this mill grinding us but calling it destiny.
0:15:05 I don’t know, it would be pretentious.
0:15:11 It’s more human thought, probably the universe functions in a different way.
0:15:16 Nature functions in a different way than our interpretation of it.
0:15:20 Things just happen and we’re storytelling creatures, right?
0:15:26 No, no, we have something like free will
0:15:31 which of course is determined by lots of borderlines
0:15:35 and lots of obstacles and lots of restrictions.
0:15:38 But yet we do have choices.
0:15:45 And do we have a choice against the plowing on of destiny?
0:15:47 I don’t know.
0:15:51 But the way you talk about being a poet and being a filmmaker and being a writer
0:15:55 it’s as though you didn’t really have a choice, it chose you.
0:16:00 Yes, there was something out that I had to accept.
0:16:07 I understood my destiny and I keep saying touch this term only with a pair of pliers.
0:16:09 It sounds pretentious.
0:16:18 In fact, I understood my duties, my task out there, my destiny in a way.
0:16:21 What do I have to do with my life?
0:16:26 Why am I and a sense of responsibility and duty in it?
0:16:30 The part of the book where you write about truth
0:16:35 and not having much interest in making, in your words, purely factual films
0:16:39 was a joy to read for me for lots of reasons.
0:16:44 What is it about factual filmmaking that you find too constraining
0:16:46 or too narrow or too small?
0:16:51 Let’s face it, all these films that are fact-based are legitimate.
0:16:55 Many of them are journalism, a form of journalism
0:16:57 and you better stick to the facts.
0:17:01 You don’t invent, you do not put out fake news.
0:17:04 And I adhere to it, but it depends on what I’m doing.
0:17:11 I made a film, for example, with Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union.
0:17:15 And you do not invent, you do not stylize.
0:17:19 It’s just a very clear task that you have in front of you.
0:17:26 Otherwise, I try to depart from the mere facts because I do not illuminate you.
0:17:31 The phone directory does not illuminate you, although everything is correct in there.
0:17:34 But it doesn’t give you insight.
0:17:39 It does not inspire anything in you.
0:17:45 So I have done things where I always make it clear I’m inventing now
0:17:51 or later I make it clear to the audience here there is invention.
0:17:59 But I do in documentaries, for example, things that you would normally do only in feature films.
0:18:06 Casting, rehearsing, repeating a scene or repeating some statement.
0:18:10 When it’s way too long, I ask, “Please, can we do it again?”
0:18:13 But concentrate to the essentials.
0:18:16 So I do all these things.
0:18:21 I do it in feature films as well, of course, much more inventive.
0:18:23 I do it in literature.
0:18:28 All my poetry is not really that much fact-based.
0:18:33 I sometimes run into these sorts of questions as a journalist,
0:18:37 thinking about not just the role of journalism, but also the limits of journalism,
0:18:39 the limits of just telling the facts.
0:18:43 The facts can tell us what happened, but it can’t tell us what it means.
0:18:47 To do that requires something different, something more.
0:18:50 As you were saying, if your films and books were just factual,
0:18:52 it would just be journalism, wouldn’t it?
0:18:55 And you’re not trying to be a journalist.
0:19:00 Read the phone directory instead.
0:19:03 But you say you’re after something called ecstatic truth.
0:19:04 What is that?
0:19:06 Well, I coined this term.
0:19:07 It’s a lovely phrase.
0:19:16 In a way, I try to find an expression or confronting or search
0:19:23 for something that is truthful in a way that forces us to step outside of ourselves.
0:19:30 Ecstasy in ancient Greek means outside, standing outside of our existence.
0:19:37 And it’s more an experience you would find with late medieval mystics, for example,
0:19:41 although I don’t want to compare myself to them.
0:19:48 It’s something which starts to invent and starts to dig into something deeper.
0:19:54 I say truth now with great caution, because philosophy has no consensus
0:19:58 what truth is all about, nor do mathematicians know.
0:20:01 Nor does the pope in Rome really know.
0:20:04 So we have to be cautious with that.
0:20:08 But in my opinion, truth is somewhere out there.
0:20:09 We sense it.
0:20:10 It’s a human thing.
0:20:11 We sense it.
0:20:12 We know it.
0:20:14 We yearn for it.
0:20:16 We want to find it.
0:20:19 And it’s like a dim light somewhere.
0:20:26 We know the direction and the quest to find it, approaching the voyage to it.
0:20:28 That’s what is important.
0:20:32 And that’s what I’m doing in my films, in my books.
0:20:37 And it gives a certain meaning to my life, our lives.
0:20:43 Does the way you think about truth and art and your responsibilities change at all
0:20:48 in this twisted era of misinformation and fake news and all of that?
0:20:51 Well, you have to become street smart.
0:20:57 And in particular now you have to become smart with the media and with the internet
0:20:59 and artificial intelligence.
0:21:06 So when it comes to media, let’s say mainstream or even outside of mainstream media,
0:21:09 the news, do not trust anyone.
0:21:10 Not one.
0:21:12 Do not trust anyone.
0:21:19 But try to corroborate important information by going to parallel sources.
0:21:27 When you read about, let’s say the Western interpretation about a big event,
0:21:31 just why don’t you switch over to Al Jazeera, for example.
0:21:33 All of a sudden it looks different.
0:21:39 And from there you move to the internet and read the full speech of a politician
0:21:43 or switch into Chinese sources.
0:21:45 Or you just name it.
0:21:46 Can be anything.
0:21:48 But do not trust anything or anyone.
0:21:51 Do not trust your emails anymore.
0:21:55 You see, it could be written by artificial intelligence.
0:22:00 Do not trust anything, but it does not mean we do have to hate the media.
0:22:03 We do not have to hate the internet.
0:22:06 We just have to learn to be cautious.
0:22:15 And I would like to compare it to, let’s say, early human being, prehistoric humans.
0:22:16 Neolithic people.
0:22:19 They were roaming the forests and the fields.
0:22:22 And they would pick berries and they would find mushrooms.
0:22:25 And they would now don’t eat this mushroom.
0:22:26 It must be poisonous.
0:22:29 But there is an automatic sort of caution.
0:22:32 Be careful with an unknown mushroom.
0:22:34 Be careful with this or that.
0:22:42 And I’m sure that Neolithic people, hunters and gatherers, did not hate nature.
0:22:45 They just had the right attitude.
0:22:49 Just be cautious and you roam around and you’ll find the right thing.
0:22:52 You can love nature without romanticizing it.
0:22:53 Exactly, yes.
0:23:00 And you can love the internet and artificial intelligence without romanticizing it
0:23:03 because it has phenomenal possibilities.
0:23:08 It’s extraordinary, but at the same time, be vigilant.
0:23:21 [Music]
0:23:25 We’ll be back with more from Werner Herzog after the break.
0:23:40 [Music]
0:23:42 This is an ad for better help.
0:23:43 Welcome to the world.
0:23:46 Please read your personal owner’s manual thoroughly.
0:23:50 In it, you’ll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings
0:23:53 and how to find happiness and peace of mind.
0:23:55 Thank you and have a nice life.
0:23:58 Unfortunately, life doesn’t come with an owner’s manual.
0:24:00 That’s why there’s BetterHelp Online Therapy.
0:24:04 Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video or online chat.
0:24:07 Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more.
0:24:09 That’s BetterHELP.com.
0:24:13 Support for the gray area comes from green light.
0:24:18 The school year is already underway and you’ve probably wrapped up all your back to school shopping.
0:24:24 Which means it’s time to kick back and pretend like you remember how to do algebra when your kid needs help with homework.
0:24:28 But if you weren’t your child to do more learning outside the classroom that will help later on,
0:24:30 then you might want to try green light.
0:24:36 It can help teach your kids about money and not just the adding and subtracting, but how to manage it.
0:24:39 Green light is a debit card and money app for families.
0:24:41 Parents can keep an eye on kids spending and money habits,
0:24:45 and kids learn how to save, invest and spend wisely.
0:24:50 And with a green light infinity plan, you get even more financial literacy resources
0:24:53 and teens can check in thanks to family location sharing.
0:24:59 My kid’s a bit too young for this, but I’ve got a colleague here at Vox who uses it with his two boys and he loves it.
0:25:04 You can join the millions of parents and kids who use green light to navigate life together.
0:25:09 You can sign up for green light today and get your first month free when you go to greenlight.com/grayarea.
0:25:13 That’s greenlight.com/grayarea to try green light for free.
0:25:16 Greenlight.com/grayarea
0:25:22 Support for where should we begin comes from Bombas.
0:25:27 It’s fall in New York, it’s gotten chilly, and we’re all evaluating our closets
0:25:30 and taking out the sweaters and the woolen socks.
0:25:32 That’s what I do with my Bombas.
0:25:40 Bombas offers incredibly comfortable essentials like socks, underwear and buttery smooth t-shirts that you may want to wear every day.
0:25:46 They just release some playful new colors for fall with plenty of soft socks for fireside reading
0:25:50 and sweat-weaking ones that can keep up with your next autumn run.
0:25:53 I just ordered some compression socks for myself.
0:25:59 When I was on tour in the last few months, every time I took a plane, I wished I had some compression socks,
0:26:01 so I can’t wait now to try these out.
0:26:08 Plus, for every item you purchase, Bombas donates one to someone experiencing housing insecurity.
0:26:14 So, ready to feel good and do good, you can head over to bombas.com/ester
0:26:18 and use code Esther for 20% of your first purchase.
0:26:25 That’s B-O-M-B-A-S.com/ester, code Esther at checkout.
0:26:38 [Music]
0:26:42 In a lot of ways, we’re kind of talking about the uses and the misuses of language,
0:26:47 and I am fascinated by your fascination with the limits of language.
0:26:49 Why does this interest you so much?
0:26:56 Because as a poet, you have to discover the outer margins of your language.
0:27:00 Where does it go? Where does language start to unravel?
0:27:04 Where do images become unclear?
0:27:10 I can give you an example when I traveled on foot from Munich to Paris in early winter
0:27:15 and I wrote a diary in the book which is called “Orph Walking in Ice”.
0:27:22 I did this because my mentor, an old Jewish woman who had fled Nazi Germany,
0:27:28 was dying at age 80 or so, and I said I will not allow her to die.
0:27:30 I’m going to travel on foot now.
0:27:36 I didn’t tell her and I came and I said to myself one million steps in defiance.
0:27:42 It’s like a pilgrimage and when I arrive she will be out of hospital, which she actually was.
0:27:47 At the end I walked non-stop 85 kilometres.
0:27:52 That’s awfully long and against snowstorms against you.
0:27:56 A whole day, a whole night and almost another whole day.
0:28:04 And I arrived and somehow the images or language came apart and I said a very odd thing to her.
0:28:13 I said to her together we shall cook a fire and we shall stop fish.
0:28:19 You see, you cook a meal but you do not cook a fire.
0:28:27 Language became somehow not correct anymore and we stopped the traffic but we do not stop fish.
0:28:37 And she looked at me in a fleeting moment of understanding and I said to her please open the window from these days or I can fly.
0:28:39 So it was as laconic as that.
0:28:44 But I noticed that my language was incorrect.
0:28:54 The metaphors were incorrect and it’s important I think for poets to understand where are the outer limits
0:28:58 of what you can pass on through language.
0:29:00 You’re a poet at heart.
0:29:01 I wish I was.
0:29:02 I’ve tried to write poetry.
0:29:08 I just, I don’t have it but you’re sort of speaking to the power of poetry, I think, right?
0:29:11 That it lives at this border between language and meaning.
0:29:18 That it uses language to express truths that we don’t have a language for exactly.
0:29:21 That is correct but we have approximations.
0:29:25 We have a quest out there and we pursue it.
0:29:39 And I describe, for example, in another book and I think even in my memoirs that sometimes there’s a vortex of words in me that I can’t get out of my mind.
0:29:48 It’s sometimes like you’re haunted by a melody, a silly melody and you can’t get it out of your mind for weeks and weeks.
0:29:55 You drive in a car and it comes back to you and for me sometimes like a vortex of words.
0:30:07 And all of a sudden at a moment where I name them and I write them down in a specific situation liberates me from this vortex.
0:30:14 So it’s very, very odd how language sometimes is playing its crazy games with me.
0:30:18 Do you think that certain truths can only be expressed in their native language?
0:30:22 That certain thoughts can only be thought in the language that conceives them?
0:30:37 Yes, yes, because there’s a deep world view always involved in language and this is one of the reasons why I have been most fascinated by the disappearance of languages.
0:30:53 We’re too much looking at the disappearance of, let’s say, mammals like whales or like the panda bear or the snow leopard or whatever species of amphibians, frogs that are very endangered.
0:31:02 And we overlook that some of the most precious things like languages, whole cultures disappear without a trace.
0:31:11 We have about 7,000 languages left roughly and every 10 days or 12 days we are losing one.
0:31:20 There are 14, 15 languages out right now where there’s only one single last speaker of that language left.
0:31:35 And while we are talking here, one of those may die right now and with him or her the last traces of a whole culture, of a world view, of a language, of song will disappear.
0:31:37 And I find this is catastrophic.
0:31:46 It goes faster than any extinction of species, disappearance, extinction of cultures and languages.
0:32:01 So of course it’s a deep thing for me and my wife has actually done an installation called Last Whispers, an oratorio that was composed of extinct languages.
0:32:12 Meaning only existing in tape recordings and voices in songs of critically endangered languages.
0:32:18 Meaning there’s only one single last speaker left or maybe two or three.
0:32:24 I get the sense that you think poets are really the glue of civilization.
0:32:29 I think you’re right even in the book at some point that only the poets can hold Germany together.
0:32:40 Well, I traveled on foot around the borders, all the simulations of the borders around Germany to hold it together like a belt before the reunification.
0:32:48 Politics had given up, or some part of politics, including the German Chancellor Willy Brandt, whom I liked.
0:33:01 But he declared the book of the German Unities closed, which a German Chancellor should not declare in an official declaration at the Bundestag, the parliament.
0:33:14 And I thought it’s only the poets in our culture that holds a country together and I traveled on foot along where I grew up, was right at the Austrian border and then up and down the mountains.
0:33:27 And along Austria, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Denmark, I never completed this whole round around Germany because I fell ill and was in hospital for a week or so.
0:33:35 And then all of a sudden the Berlin Wall fell and I knew this will lead to the unification which actually happened.
0:33:42 And I love that quote from Albert Camus that the job of the writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
0:33:44 Certainly I would include the poets.
0:33:47 That’s a good one. I did not know he said that.
0:34:02 I would like to quote the greatest of all German poets late 1700s, early 1800s, Hülderlinia, and he said what remains forever was always made by the poets.
0:34:06 Yeah, I read a good bit of Heidegger when I was in college and he turned me on to Hülderlinia.
0:34:14 I wish I could read German, but I cannot and I get the sense that there’s no way to understand what he was saying if you can’t read it in the original German.
0:34:20 Yeah, and well, Hülderlin, he became insane and his language unravels.
0:34:32 He was the one actually who went to the very outer limits of my language German and it comes apart and unravels.
0:34:37 And that’s very, very tragic and also very fascinating to see that.
0:34:43 And Heidegger, well, how can I say, I’ve never cracked the Heidegger code.
0:34:47 No one has. I’m not even sure he knew what he was saying at the time.
0:34:53 Whatever, I’m not an expert. You’re much more into philosophy than I am.
0:35:07 But I think he was a great philosopher, but up to a certain degree and what comes, what is beyond our comprehension is maybe dubious.
0:35:20 I was rewatching some of your documentaries when I was preparing for this and it struck me again how well you’re able to let people show themselves even when you’re directing them.
0:35:27 Is that a very deliberate thing for you paying attention to people in that way, seeing their true nature and pushing them to reveal it?
0:35:40 Of course, I do not have to push them. Most of the cases there’s no push, but you have to have such a fascination and radiated and awe and sympathy.
0:35:48 They open up and you have to have it in you. If you make films like that, you have to have it in you.
0:35:58 That’s a profession of a director and when you do a documentary, you have to be a director. You should not be the fly on the wall.
0:36:09 The fly on the wall would be the surveillance camera in the bank and for 15 years it records nothing because no bank robbery ever happens.
0:36:17 So wait another 15 years and still there wouldn’t be anything of significance, nothing worth recording.
0:36:31 So I interfere, I shape, I’m the hornet out there that stings and that’s what I think is filmmaking. We are creators.
0:36:43 I think your films have given me an appreciation for how much space there is for revelation in silence and often the only way to see someone is to just shut the hell up and get out of the way.
0:36:49 Which seems simple enough, but a lot of people don’t do it, but you do and I think it’s to your credit.
0:37:05 And many of them follow some sort of a journalistic approach. They come with a catalogue of questions. I never have a paper with a catalogue, I just listen and I start to follow leads and I dig very deep.
0:37:10 I want to look deep into the heart of men and also of course women.
0:37:19 So if you don’t have it in you as a director to see the heart of men, you should not be a director.
0:37:31 Well, you can be a journalist and it’s all what you see on television, day in, day out, totally legitimate, but not my kind of filmmaking, not my kind of writing.
0:37:41 We’ll be back with more from Werner Herzog after one more break.
0:38:14 Support for the gray area comes from Shopify. Every great business starts with a great idea or a kind of “meh” idea that’s so bizarre it becomes weirdly successful like that singing big mouth bass that’s been installed in a million garages.
0:38:23 But to make your business successful over time, you need more than an idea. You need a partner who can help you achieve sustainable growth, a partner like Shopify.
0:38:29 Shopify is an all-in-one digital commerce platform that may help your business sell better than ever before.
0:38:36 No matter where your customers spend their time, scrolling through your digital feed or strolling past your physical actual storefront,
0:38:41 Shopify may help you convert those browsers into buyers and to sell more over time.
0:38:49 There’s a reason companies like Allbirds turn to Shopify to sell more products to more customers, businesses that sell more sell with Shopify.
0:38:58 Want to upgrade your business and get the same checkout Allbirds uses? You can sign up for your $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/box.
0:39:05 You can go to Shopify.com/box to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com/box.
0:39:09 Support for the gray area comes from NetSuite.
0:39:15 Imagine running a magical business where you could see next quarter’s trends before they happen.
0:39:24 No more guessing if pumpkin spice kale smoothies will be the hit of the season or if it’s more of a pumpkin spice deep fried Oreos kind of vibe.
0:39:30 You would just consult your crystal ball and then order enough supplies to make a healthy or very unhealthy profit.
0:39:35 Sadly, that’s just not how things work in this corner of the wizardverse.
0:39:40 That’s why smart businesses get themselves future ready with NetSuite by Oracle.
0:39:49 NetSuite says they’re the go-to business management suite for almost 40,000 companies offering everything you need to stay on track, no matter what tomorrow brings.
0:39:54 Get ahead of the curve and stay focused on what’s coming next with NetSuite by Oracle.
0:39:59 And now I’ll finish this section of the ad by saying the word opportunity.
0:40:06 Speaking of opportunity, you can download the CFO’s guide to AI and machine learning at netsuite.com/grayarea.
0:40:15 The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/grayarea. That’s netsuite.com/grayarea.
0:40:22 Support for the show comes from Into the Mix, a Ben and Jerry’s podcast about joy and justice produced with Vox Creative.
0:40:30 In season three of this award-winning podcast, Into the Mix is covering stories on the ordinary people fighting for justice in their local communities.
0:40:40 Starting with the fight against the workhouse, a penitentiary in St. Louis known for its abject conditions, mold, and pest infestations, and its embrace of the cash bail system.
0:40:47 Host Ashley C. Ford interviews Ainez Bordeaux, who spent a month in the workhouse when she couldn’t afford her $25,000 bail.
0:41:06 Experiencing what I experienced and watching other women go through it and know that there were thousands before us and there were thousands after us who had experienced those same things, that’s where I was radicalized.
0:41:10 Eventually, her charge was vacated, but the experience changed her.
0:41:16 They’re starting a campaign to close the workhouse. Are you interested? And I was like, hell yeah. Hell yeah, I’m interested.
0:41:24 You can hear how she and other advocates fought to shut down the workhouse in one on the first episode of this special three-part series, Out Now.
0:41:27 Subscribe to Into the Mix, a Ben and Jerry’s podcast.
0:41:50 I think the chapter in the book about the projects you wanted to make but weren’t able to for whatever reason, it might be my favorite, certainly one of my favorites.
0:41:55 You wanted to make a film with Mike Tyson, you wanted to blow up an opera house in Sicily.
0:41:59 Well, an abandoned opera house that was built, probably mafia.
0:42:02 I should, yeah, to be clear, yes, there were no people in it.
0:42:15 Exactly, mafia, money, and in the city of a small obscure town, Shakka in southern Sicily built it, I think, mostly laundering mafia money.
0:42:23 And now it’s there. It has no administration, no opera ever was played in there, no technicians, no singer, no choir, nothing.
0:42:27 But I couldn’t do it, so that was the end of the project.
0:42:30 And of course, many other projects.
0:42:42 One of the projects I’m actually trying to pursue now a story about twins, young twin women who spoke in unison.
0:42:50 It’s phenomenal sometimes twins create a secretive language, but they exchange in this language.
0:42:55 But there were two twins, twin sisters who spoke in unison.
0:43:01 Even if you ask them a question, they could not expect, they would ask like a chorus.
0:43:06 And the project is called Bucking Faster.
0:43:10 Not the fucking bastard, but Bucking Faster.
0:43:15 They made the same slip of tongue in a court hearing.
0:43:20 They were testifying together and they shouted across the courtroom.
0:43:30 There were defendants and a truck driver tried to get a restraining order against them and they yell across the courtroom simultaneously.
0:43:34 He’s lying. Don’t you hear every word is a lie.
0:43:39 He’s lying under oath. The bucking faster is lying.
0:43:43 They make the same slip of tongue at the same moment.
0:43:49 How do you come upon these subjects, these stories? Do you just collide with them?
0:43:53 No, no, I find them. I don’t know. Sometimes they find me.
0:43:56 Is there some kind of gravitational pull that they just, they find you?
0:44:00 There’s something, something out there. They find me, I find them.
0:44:12 And I actually was very close in contact with them, let us met them, took them out in the restaurant, for example, which was a big deal for them.
0:44:16 Because they were very shy, they wouldn’t like to leave their apartment.
0:44:24 So I do find them and they, they, I stumble into them or they stumble into me as well.
0:44:33 If there was one project, if you had to pick one project that you never quite got off the ground but wish you did, which one would it be? Is it the opera house?
0:44:47 No, I am describing a dozen or so projects and, and of course there were projects that I couldn’t do, for example, the conquest of Mexico, but seen from the perspective of the Aztecs.
0:44:57 Aliens are landing. The ships are descending from clouds and they bring miraculous stags with them, I mean horses.
0:45:05 And, and they create thunder from barrels, I mean cannons and things. So a totally alien invasion for them.
0:45:26 And of course it would have been very, very expensive. You have to build pyramids and temples and recreate the capital city, Tenochtitlan, which is Mexico City today, canals like Venice today and thousands of extras and open battles and you just name it.
0:45:44 It was just too expensive. It would have required a huge Hollywood budget, but Hollywood would only finance it and side with me if my last film made, let’s say, $400 million box office domestic.
0:45:56 Then they would approach me and say, oh, let’s do that together. But I do not lose a sleepless night over this. It’s okay. And people said, ah, you have to pursue it. It’s so beautiful.
0:46:10 And why don’t you try on asset in 20 years? I’m not going to find the money either because there are some iron laws of the industry, which I thankfully understand them.
0:46:20 And I said, no, I plow on. There’s many other things in these in the last 20 years of this undone project. I’ve made 27 films.
0:46:29 Speaking of expensive, I read recently that you wanted to go to space and even applied with the Japanese company for an opportunity to do it.
0:46:30 I did.
0:46:33 They turned you down, which is outrageous, I should say.
0:46:52 No, they didn’t turn me down. They still, they didn’t respond to my application because there must have been thousands. It’s actually a Japanese billionaire who invites eight guests or something like that and flying out and flying around moon.
0:47:00 And I argued, you got to have a poet along with you. I send a daily poem down to earth in the short movie.
0:47:04 Is that why you wanted to go? Because I wanted to ask, why did you want to go in the first place?
0:47:22 Because it’s a perspective that is completely new for a filmmaker for a poet. I would also go to Mars, but let’s face it, I applied against the vigorous objections of my wife, which I understand, but I applied anyway.
0:47:27 And I was not turned down. I’d never got an answer. So I was not elected.
0:47:30 Well, that’s that’s equally outrageous, but I’ll let it go.
0:47:38 No, no, come on, come on. The other eight people who are instead of me there will enjoy it tremendously.
0:47:43 I’ve always been enamored with what astronauts call the overview effect.
0:47:57 Almost every person who goes to space and looks back down on earth describes the same kind of transformative experience where they can really feel how special this place is against the backdrop of space.
0:48:03 Do you suspect you’d feel the same way? Maybe it would give you a whole new appreciation for the for the chaos of the world.
0:48:11 I do have a lot of appreciation for our world, sometimes even against my better judgment.
0:48:17 But probably I would have a similar experience. I do not want to predict what would happen.
0:48:30 But what I find very, very significant is one of these voyage emissions that has left our solar system, I think, launched in the 70s, made photos back of planet Earth.
0:48:37 The last photo I think that we have is a tiniest speck of a star somewhere out there.
0:48:43 And that’s our planet Earth. So how insignificant we are. That’s really stunning.
0:48:49 But from our moon, planet Earth is very close from Mars.
0:48:58 It’s still fairly close. It’s not this really far out view of what we are and where we are.
0:49:03 But totally fascinating for me, I would instantly go.
0:49:11 While we’re on the subject of Earth, our home, do you think humanity is destroying itself?
0:49:18 That’s part of what is happening to us. But we have to face it biologically.
0:49:27 We are very vulnerable and we have it somehow in us that is self-destructive. That’s not healthy.
0:49:36 But I do not believe that we will have a permanent existence here on our planet.
0:49:44 So the way dinosaurs disappeared, I’m pretty certain we will disappear as well.
0:49:47 It doesn’t make me nervous, by the way.
0:49:51 I’m not sure I’ve ever thought of you as a pessimist.
0:49:56 But I do think of you as someone who’s very clear-eyed about the fragility of civilization, really.
0:50:03 Do you even think in these terms, does the language of pessimism and optimism mean anything to you at all?
0:50:05 Or is it just the wrong language?
0:50:11 No, I avoid it here. It’s too primitive to categorize a person as an optimist or pessimist.
0:50:18 I’m just looking at what’s out there. Who are we? How fragile is our own biology?
0:50:26 How fragile are societies? For example, if the Internet disappears from one moment to the next.
0:50:30 And it can if we have a massive, a real massive solar flare.
0:50:40 Or if we have, let’s say, a war event that will destroy all the servers and rout us, we would be without Internet.
0:50:54 And it would be like New York City, and I’m sitting here in New York City, downtown, when the hurricane hit all of a sudden below 32nd Street.
0:51:00 It was without electricity, without Internet, without cell phone coverage.
0:51:16 And my wife, who was here at exactly that time, says, “Tens of thousands of people were dazed and confused and moving north in Manhattan Island just in search of a toilet, of a flushable toilet.
0:51:26 Tens of thousands. And all of a sudden, within days, we are thrown back in a situation like hunters and gatherers.
0:51:38 And that doesn’t bode well for our species, because you can go up to Central Park and hunt the squirrels, but it will not feed you for long.
0:51:45 Not eight million inhabitants will eat long and survive long on a few squirrels in the park.
0:51:54 So it doesn’t look good. And a good survival would be, for example, for tribal hunters and gatherers like the Inuit.
0:52:03 They don’t need the Internet, or for the Amish, who are doing homestead farming without technology.
0:52:10 They don’t have electricity, or many of the fundamentalist Amish don’t have electricity.
0:52:17 They don’t have cars. They don’t have ridges. And they live very well. They would survive.
0:52:24 I loved your film, Low and Behold, as an exploration of the Internet and what it’s done, what it’s doing to us.
0:52:33 And I think it makes the point far better than I can, and I’ve certainly tried, about how these sorts of technological revolutions aren’t really planned.
0:52:40 And the people who give birth to these revolutions, these technologies, haven’t the faintest idea of what it will lead to.
0:52:49 But it’s interesting, and I guess not surprising, that the digital world and social media and that kind of thing, it doesn’t really exist for you.
0:52:54 You’re not on those things. Is that just a clear decision you made at some point to abstain?
0:53:04 No. I would say long live the digital world. And I’m using it. I’m using it for filming. I use it for editing.
0:53:16 I use it for communications. I do emails. My main tool of communication is email, but I do not need to be part of certain things that are out,
0:53:25 possibly in the Internet. I’m not on social networks. If you find me on Twitter or on Facebook, there are forgeries.
0:53:35 And there are many forgeries of voice imitators out there. I have lots of doppelgangers, lots of duplicates. Let them be out there.
0:53:45 I don’t mind, but if you listen to that, you know, it’s forgeries. And if you find me on Facebook, it’s a complete forgery then.
0:53:51 You asked people at the end of Lo and Behold, actually. I’m just thinking of it, if they thought the Internet dreams of itself.
0:54:00 And I love the question, and I didn’t quite understand it. I still don’t think I understand it. So I think I’m just going to ask you if you think the Internet dreams of itself.
0:54:13 Well, that’s the deepest of all questions, I think, and not really fully answerable. And I have to admit, it is just a projection of a statement by a war theoretician.
0:54:30 Napoleonic time, Prussian war theoretician von Klausiewicz. And apparently von Klausiewicz once in his study on war, which is still a revolutionary insight into warfare.
0:54:42 He said, “It seems that war sometimes dreams of itself.” It’s a stunning statement, and I extended it as an Internet dream of itself.
0:54:50 The strange thing now is that experts on von Klausiewicz told me von Klausiewicz never said that.
0:54:59 Maybe I invented it and talked myself over decades so much into it that I believe it was von Klausiewicz.
0:55:09 So it’s very odd how our memory is shifting and shaping its own world, shaping its own quotations from books.
0:55:15 But it’s the deepest of all questions. Does the Internet dream of itself?
0:55:26 And you can extend it. Does artificial intelligence dream of itself? And that’s why it gets interesting.
0:55:31 Yeah, it’s been a few years since I watched the film. I watched it again a few weeks ago, and the question just lingered with me.
0:55:37 It sort of runs over my head, I think, but I sense the depth of it. If you put it to me, I wouldn’t have an answer.
0:55:46 And there’s not a single scientist in the film who can answer it. They are puzzled. They are stunned that a filmmaker is asking this question.
0:55:53 But I’m not so much a filmmaker in that case. I’m a poet who asks them, and they sense it.
0:56:00 Do you think much about legacy? You talk about being a poet, and you talk about how you think your writing will survive longer than your films?
0:56:02 I think so, yes.
0:56:04 Why do you think that is?
0:56:27 I can’t really give you a clear answer. There’s a gut understanding and feeling that this will last, and that my prose and my poetry has an intensity that is beyond the illumination or the intensity of the films.
0:56:45 And people always are puzzled. How does he reconcile being a filmmaker and a poet? And I have a simple formula now that makes it very easily understood. Filmmaking is my voyage, but poetry, writing, is home.
0:56:54 So is the filmmaking more experimental and exploratory for you, whereas the writing feels more settled and secure, if that makes any sense at all?
0:56:59 Well, we shouldn’t try to analyze now this very simple dictum.
0:57:01 I have a nasty habit of doing that sometimes.
0:57:10 No, no, it’s self-explanatory. I couldn’t even explain any further. I’m glad that I have a simple formula.
0:57:23 It’s a bit simple then. I’ve read your books and watched most of your films, if not all, and I guess I didn’t have a full appreciation for the diversity and the adventurousness of your life until I read the book.
0:57:35 It really is a quite remarkable life, and the connection between your experiences, what you’ve actually done, the ways that you have collided with the world and other people is so essential to the work that you’ve done.
0:57:50 It’s true, yes, and it’s puzzling. It’s puzzling because there was an intensity of life as if it had been five lives in a row and things that you normally do not do as a writer, as a filmmaker.
0:58:01 And people immediately start to doubt, am I telling them wild stories? Did I really move a ship over a mountain? Yes, I did. It’s documented.
0:58:08 Did I put a whole cast of actors under hypnosis? Yes, I did. It’s documented.
0:58:22 Was I shot during a live interview for BBC? Yes, I was shot. I mean, it was not a very big wound that I had, but I was shot on tape. It’s caught on tape.
0:58:33 And on and on, and for example, New York Times, the writer is completely puzzled. Is this all invented or so? But you see, no stone was left unturned.
0:58:45 I gave the memoirs to my two brothers, verified. In some cases I had a different shade of experience, but that’s legitimate. That’s fine.
0:59:00 Well, for example, did I do a stunt at the opera house in Bologna, where I wanted to have a stage worker falling from the skies and through the stage, and there was not money enough for a stuntman.
0:59:09 So I tested it myself. Immediately doubted, but there’s a series of photos, and I have them where you see me flying through the air.
0:59:18 And of course, at the bottom, there was a huge air cushion. The same thing that Hollywood uses for stuntmen.
0:59:32 So things are documented and all the big things, of course, had dozens of witnesses or crew members or actors, extras. You just name it. You can’t make it up.
0:59:39 Werner, I have admired your work for many, many years, and it was an absolute pleasure to chat with you.
0:59:46 Once again, the book is called Every Man for Himself and God Against All. Thank you so much for coming in today.
0:59:48 And thank you and greetings to Mississippi.
0:59:50 Thank you. Come on down.
1:00:02 [Music]
1:00:09 This episode was produced by Katelyn Boguki. Patrick Boyd engineered this episode with help from Chris Shirtleff.
1:00:17 Alex Overington wrote our theme music. Serena Salen is our fact-checker, and A.M. Hall is the boss.
1:00:24 As always, let us know what you think of this episode. Drop us a line at thegrayarea@vox.com.
1:00:29 And please share it with your friends on all these socials.
1:00:35 New episodes of The Gray Area Drop on Mondays. Listen and subscribe.
1:00:40 This show is part of VOX. Support VOX’s journalism by joining our membership program today.
1:00:44 Go to vox.com/members to sign up.
1:00:50 [Music]
1:00:56 Support for the gray area comes from Mint Mobile. Sometimes a deal is too good to be true.
1:01:04 You know the feeling. You find that great deal on a rental car only to realize the lock is broken and the windows won’t roll up.
1:01:09 Well, Mint Mobile says with their deals there are no catches. What you see is what you get.
1:01:15 When you purchase a new three-month plan with Mint Mobile, you’ll pay just $15 a month. That’s it.
1:01:21 No hoops to jump through. No sneaky fine print that you can barely read. Just a great deal.
1:01:29 All Mint Mobile plans come with a high-speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation’s largest 5G network.
1:01:32 You can even keep your phone, your contacts, and your number.
1:01:41 You can get this new customer offer and a three-month premium wireless plan for just $15 a month by going to mintmobile.com/grayarea.
1:01:50 That’s mintmobile.com/grayarea. You can cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at mintmobile.com/grayarea.
1:01:58 $45 upfront payment required equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only.
1:02:04 Speed slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply.
1:02:06 See Mint Mobile for details.
1:02:09 (upbeat music)
0:00:07 If you struggle just to get your customers to notice you,
0:00:10 Constant Contact has what you need to grab their attention.
0:00:15 Constant Contact’s award-winning marketing platform offers all the automation,
0:00:20 integration, and reporting tools that get your marketing running seamlessly,
0:00:23 all backed by their expert live customer support.
0:00:27 It’s time to get going and growing with Constant Contact today.
0:00:30 Ready? Set. Grow.
0:00:34 Go to ConstantContact.ca and start your free trial today.
0:00:38 Go to ConstantContact.ca for your free trial.
0:00:41 ConstantContact.ca.
0:00:50 When it comes to smart water alkaline 9.5+ pH with antioxidant, there’s nothing to overthink.
0:00:55 So, while you may be performing mental gymnastics over whether the post-work gym crowd is worth it,
0:00:58 if you’ll be able to find a spot for your yoga mat,
0:01:03 or if that spin instructor will make you late for dinner again,
0:01:05 don’t overthink how you hydrate.
0:01:07 Life’s full of choices.
0:01:09 Smart water alkaline is a simple one.
0:01:17 What’s the role of the poet in our society?
0:01:23 Do we look to poetry for deep truths about our world,
0:01:26 or do we look to poetry for something different?
0:01:30 And if poetry is just, or even mostly, about truth,
0:01:35 then what distinguishes it from philosophy or science?
0:01:42 These are very old questions.
0:01:47 The kinds of questions you find Plato pondering over more than two centuries ago.
0:01:52 But they will always be worth asking, especially in this moment,
0:01:56 when our relationship with truth feels as fluid as it’s ever been.
0:02:02 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Grey Area.
0:02:16 Today’s guest, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, is the one and only,
0:02:18 Werner Herzog.
0:02:26 He’s a filmmaker, a poet, an author of the book “Every Man for Himself and God Against All.”
0:02:32 Herzog is known for his films like “Grizzly Man” and “Fitz Corraldo,” among many others.
0:02:36 But he thinks of himself as a poet and a writer more than he does a filmmaker,
0:02:41 and you can certainly hear that side of him in his films.
0:02:48 We only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences
0:02:54 out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel.
0:03:07 And we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication,
0:03:12 overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order.
0:03:17 Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess.
0:03:25 I think it’s fair to say that Herzog is one of our greatest living filmmakers.
0:03:28 He’s on my personal Mount Rushmore, for sure.
0:03:34 What I’ve always loved about his work, and you can hear it a little bit in that clip,
0:03:40 is that it has this dual quality of being both realistic and poetic at the same time.
0:03:45 That is hard to pull off, and no one does it better than Herzog.
0:03:50 Which is why I was delighted to see that he released a memoir.
0:03:56 It’s not really an autobiography, it’s about his approach to life and what he’s after in his art.
0:04:00 And he’s after something he calls ecstatic truth.
0:04:03 I explore that with him in this conversation.
0:04:08 We also talk about a few other things, like whether humanity is destroying itself,
0:04:13 and why he wants to go to Mars, just for a few days.
0:04:17 Hi, good morning. This is Van der Herzog.
0:04:20 This is Sean Elling. Pleasure to meet you.
0:04:27 I’ll try to be concise enough so that you don’t collect too much garbage.
0:04:32 Trust me, my editors and producers are used to getting lots of garbage from me,
0:04:35 and they’re experts at cleaning it up.
0:04:39 A lot of people know you as a filmmaker, obviously.
0:04:43 But you’re really a writer, you’ve always been a writer.
0:04:47 And this memoir is great, and I’m not just saying that because you’re here.
0:04:50 It really is, and it’s also quite distinctive.
0:04:54 But it’s not really a biography, it’s something else.
0:04:56 How would you describe this book?
0:05:00 Well, some of it is, of course, furious storytelling,
0:05:06 and much of it is origins of ideas, not so much the events.
0:05:11 If you look for event, event, you shouldn’t read the book.
0:05:17 For example, all of a sudden, interspersed there are five ballads of the little soldier.
0:05:25 I was with an elite commando unit of mostly child soldiers, between 8 and 11,
0:05:29 and some ballads pop up out of nowhere.
0:05:33 But, of course, they’re an integral part of what I’m writing.
0:05:41 It is probably very much the style as well because my experience in the real world
0:05:46 was unique or different from what other filmmakers have gone through.
0:05:49 It was different. I’m fairly certain about that.
0:05:53 And because of that, my writing, my style is different.
0:05:58 And I think you’re correct saying that I’m a filmmaker as well.
0:06:04 At the moment, it seems to be more a distraction because since about more than four decades
0:06:08 I keep preaching to deaf ears, look at my writing.
0:06:11 It will probably outlive my films.
0:06:16 So it’s at the moment the focus of what I’m doing.
0:06:20 It’s still weird to hear one of the greatest, I think, living filmmakers
0:06:22 describe film as a distraction.
0:06:24 At the moment, yes, it is here.
0:06:29 You have always described in interviews the universe as a place of overwhelming chaos
0:06:33 and you write a good bit about your childhood, which is also a bit chaotic.
0:06:39 Was your worldview, was that worldview in particular shaped pretty early in your life?
0:06:44 It is obvious when you look at the universe that it’s hostile out there, not made for us.
0:06:49 We cannot survive easily in the cosmos anywhere else.
0:06:51 We haven’t found a place yet.
0:06:56 Mars is possibly reachable, but we shouldn’t settle there.
0:07:02 It would be obscene to leave our planet behind and not keep it inhabitable
0:07:08 and try to make a foreign planet habitable for us.
0:07:14 So of course, and you look out into the universe, you don’t even need to have a telescope.
0:07:18 You don’t need to be an astronomer to know it is chaotic.
0:07:20 It is hostile.
0:07:24 It is against life, not against all life.
0:07:30 We can assume that there is life out there, some forms of life, maybe microbic life,
0:07:39 little creatures or like as much life as there is the snot in the nose of your toddler.
0:07:41 Actually, it’s biological.
0:07:46 So that may happen when we encounter the aliens out there.
0:07:50 We can assume there’s life out there among the trillions of stars
0:07:55 because we share the same physics with the cosmos.
0:07:59 We share the same chemistry and we share the same history.
0:08:05 So let’s assume there’s some forms of life not reachable for us right now.
0:08:08 And we don’t need to reach it.
0:08:14 I’ve always found that people really want to believe that there’s a certain order to the universe
0:08:16 because it makes the world feel more coherent.
0:08:19 And in that sense, maybe a little more hospitable.
0:08:25 But I’m not sure anything is more obvious than the fact that the universe is totally indifferent to us.
0:08:31 The harmony of the spheres, a very old idea, of course, there’s no harmony of spheres.
0:08:35 It’s a figment of our fantasy, of our thinking.
0:08:44 But it makes our existence more tolerable in a way believing that there’s some sort of harmony out there.
0:08:52 Otherwise, the universe is completely and utterly indifferent vis-à-vis what’s going on here on our planet
0:08:57 and what we are doing in our toils and our daily struggles.
0:09:01 It’s monumentally indifferent and we have to face that.
0:09:03 And it’s quite okay. Why not?
0:09:08 And the second thing I wanted to say, my childhood was not chaotic.
0:09:16 It was chaotic in the first 14 days of my life because I was born in the city of Munich.
0:09:19 It was carpet bombed several times.
0:09:28 When I was only two weeks old, everything around us where we lived was destroyed in ruins.
0:09:35 So she fled, she fled into the most remote part of the Bavarian mountains.
0:09:41 And then from there on, after I was two weeks old, it was a wonderful childhood.
0:09:46 It couldn’t have been better as a refugee or displaced by war.
0:09:59 I grew up in a wonderful, really beautiful valley in the mountains and as a wild child almost in anarchy
0:10:06 because there was an absence of fathers, no drill sergeant to tell us what to do and how to behave.
0:10:10 So it was just really, really good.
0:10:18 What do you think is behind that? Is it the simplicity of that, the sense of purpose and shared mission that comes with that kind of strife?
0:10:21 Why is there such beauty in such hardship?
0:10:25 It’s not simplicity because life was harsh.
0:10:28 We all grew up in real poverty.
0:10:31 In my case, we didn’t have running water.
0:10:40 You had to go to the well with a bucket, hardly an electricity, not enough to eat.
0:10:42 That was the only harsh thing.
0:10:47 Didn’t have enough to eat for up to two and a half years and I was always hungry.
0:10:52 And that’s why I mind when I see that people are throwing too much food away.
0:11:02 I don’t like to see that. I don’t raise my voice, but it’s a kind of consumerism that I can tolerate.
0:11:05 It’s people who do not have my experience.
0:11:09 But otherwise, it was a wonderful time.
0:11:11 You had to invent your own toys.
0:11:15 You had to invent your own games.
0:11:18 You had to fabricate your tools.
0:11:25 You had to start learning by trial and error.
0:11:27 You see, there was not much guidance.
0:11:32 In fact, our mother didn’t educate us that much.
0:11:35 We reeducated her as boys.
0:11:39 And only a few things that stick in my mind.
0:11:44 She was a very principled woman, smoking all her life, a heavy smoker.
0:11:51 And when my older brother and I were something like 19, 18, 19, 20 or so,
0:11:55 we had a motorcycle and it was a time of no helmets and so on.
0:11:59 We had some minor injuries on a weekly basis.
0:12:03 Sliding somehow into a ditch or whatever.
0:12:09 And my mother said to us, “I do not want to be in a position to bury one of my sons.”
0:12:14 And she said it once or twice and we didn’t pay attention.
0:12:21 And one day she’s at dinner table and she smokes and she stubs out her cigarette after two puffs.
0:12:27 And she says, “Boys, I think you’re going to sell your motorcycle.
0:12:30 It’s not healthy. It’s not good.”
0:12:33 And this, by the way, was my last cigarette.
0:12:40 She never, ever smoked a cigarette again and we sold our motorcycle within a week.
0:12:44 So it’s that kind of education.
0:12:49 And is it true that you didn’t even know that cinema existed until you were 11?
0:12:54 I did not because there was hardly any electricity.
0:12:56 There were no telephones.
0:13:00 I made my first phone call when I was 17.
0:13:05 Probably kids who are five years old or 10 years old cannot believe that.
0:13:09 But until today I don’t even have a cell phone.
0:13:13 Making a phone call is something strange and foreign for me.
0:13:17 But of course there was no theater or no cinema.
0:13:22 And a traveling projectionist came to this schoolhouse.
0:13:26 It was one classroom for first till fourth grade.
0:13:29 We were something like 25 kids.
0:13:33 The older ones would teach us the alphabet and help the teacher.
0:13:38 So school was also a very intense and beautiful experience.
0:13:42 And a projectionist came and showed two films.
0:13:46 The first time I ever learned that there was such a thing like cinema.
0:13:50 And it didn’t impress me at all. It was just lousy, lousy stuff.
0:13:52 When did you realize you were going to be a filmmaker?
0:13:54 I think you used the word destiny at some point.
0:13:56 You realized you were destined to make films.
0:14:01 But that came at a time when there was a very intense moment
0:14:05 or a few weeks of very intense insights.
0:14:10 And I call it now, you better touch it with a pair of pliers
0:14:12 because it sounds pathetic.
0:14:16 I had some sort of insight or illumination
0:14:20 or I became known to my own destiny.
0:14:25 And that was a time when I started a very dramatic religious phase.
0:14:30 When I started to travel on foot and where I knew I was a poet
0:14:32 and I had to be a poet.
0:14:34 And it was some sort of duty.
0:14:41 Destiny was meant for me to accept what was out there for me.
0:14:44 Why do you think destiny exists in this universe?
0:14:48 In a universe that does seem so indifferent.
0:14:55 There are certain laws out in the universe that proceed
0:15:01 and we are in this mill grinding us but calling it destiny.
0:15:05 I don’t know, it would be pretentious.
0:15:11 It’s more human thought, probably the universe functions in a different way.
0:15:16 Nature functions in a different way than our interpretation of it.
0:15:20 Things just happen and we’re storytelling creatures, right?
0:15:26 No, no, we have something like free will
0:15:31 which of course is determined by lots of borderlines
0:15:35 and lots of obstacles and lots of restrictions.
0:15:38 But yet we do have choices.
0:15:45 And do we have a choice against the plowing on of destiny?
0:15:47 I don’t know.
0:15:51 But the way you talk about being a poet and being a filmmaker and being a writer
0:15:55 it’s as though you didn’t really have a choice, it chose you.
0:16:00 Yes, there was something out that I had to accept.
0:16:07 I understood my destiny and I keep saying touch this term only with a pair of pliers.
0:16:09 It sounds pretentious.
0:16:18 In fact, I understood my duties, my task out there, my destiny in a way.
0:16:21 What do I have to do with my life?
0:16:26 Why am I and a sense of responsibility and duty in it?
0:16:30 The part of the book where you write about truth
0:16:35 and not having much interest in making, in your words, purely factual films
0:16:39 was a joy to read for me for lots of reasons.
0:16:44 What is it about factual filmmaking that you find too constraining
0:16:46 or too narrow or too small?
0:16:51 Let’s face it, all these films that are fact-based are legitimate.
0:16:55 Many of them are journalism, a form of journalism
0:16:57 and you better stick to the facts.
0:17:01 You don’t invent, you do not put out fake news.
0:17:04 And I adhere to it, but it depends on what I’m doing.
0:17:11 I made a film, for example, with Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union.
0:17:15 And you do not invent, you do not stylize.
0:17:19 It’s just a very clear task that you have in front of you.
0:17:26 Otherwise, I try to depart from the mere facts because I do not illuminate you.
0:17:31 The phone directory does not illuminate you, although everything is correct in there.
0:17:34 But it doesn’t give you insight.
0:17:39 It does not inspire anything in you.
0:17:45 So I have done things where I always make it clear I’m inventing now
0:17:51 or later I make it clear to the audience here there is invention.
0:17:59 But I do in documentaries, for example, things that you would normally do only in feature films.
0:18:06 Casting, rehearsing, repeating a scene or repeating some statement.
0:18:10 When it’s way too long, I ask, “Please, can we do it again?”
0:18:13 But concentrate to the essentials.
0:18:16 So I do all these things.
0:18:21 I do it in feature films as well, of course, much more inventive.
0:18:23 I do it in literature.
0:18:28 All my poetry is not really that much fact-based.
0:18:33 I sometimes run into these sorts of questions as a journalist,
0:18:37 thinking about not just the role of journalism, but also the limits of journalism,
0:18:39 the limits of just telling the facts.
0:18:43 The facts can tell us what happened, but it can’t tell us what it means.
0:18:47 To do that requires something different, something more.
0:18:50 As you were saying, if your films and books were just factual,
0:18:52 it would just be journalism, wouldn’t it?
0:18:55 And you’re not trying to be a journalist.
0:19:00 Read the phone directory instead.
0:19:03 But you say you’re after something called ecstatic truth.
0:19:04 What is that?
0:19:06 Well, I coined this term.
0:19:07 It’s a lovely phrase.
0:19:16 In a way, I try to find an expression or confronting or search
0:19:23 for something that is truthful in a way that forces us to step outside of ourselves.
0:19:30 Ecstasy in ancient Greek means outside, standing outside of our existence.
0:19:37 And it’s more an experience you would find with late medieval mystics, for example,
0:19:41 although I don’t want to compare myself to them.
0:19:48 It’s something which starts to invent and starts to dig into something deeper.
0:19:54 I say truth now with great caution, because philosophy has no consensus
0:19:58 what truth is all about, nor do mathematicians know.
0:20:01 Nor does the pope in Rome really know.
0:20:04 So we have to be cautious with that.
0:20:08 But in my opinion, truth is somewhere out there.
0:20:09 We sense it.
0:20:10 It’s a human thing.
0:20:11 We sense it.
0:20:12 We know it.
0:20:14 We yearn for it.
0:20:16 We want to find it.
0:20:19 And it’s like a dim light somewhere.
0:20:26 We know the direction and the quest to find it, approaching the voyage to it.
0:20:28 That’s what is important.
0:20:32 And that’s what I’m doing in my films, in my books.
0:20:37 And it gives a certain meaning to my life, our lives.
0:20:43 Does the way you think about truth and art and your responsibilities change at all
0:20:48 in this twisted era of misinformation and fake news and all of that?
0:20:51 Well, you have to become street smart.
0:20:57 And in particular now you have to become smart with the media and with the internet
0:20:59 and artificial intelligence.
0:21:06 So when it comes to media, let’s say mainstream or even outside of mainstream media,
0:21:09 the news, do not trust anyone.
0:21:10 Not one.
0:21:12 Do not trust anyone.
0:21:19 But try to corroborate important information by going to parallel sources.
0:21:27 When you read about, let’s say the Western interpretation about a big event,
0:21:31 just why don’t you switch over to Al Jazeera, for example.
0:21:33 All of a sudden it looks different.
0:21:39 And from there you move to the internet and read the full speech of a politician
0:21:43 or switch into Chinese sources.
0:21:45 Or you just name it.
0:21:46 Can be anything.
0:21:48 But do not trust anything or anyone.
0:21:51 Do not trust your emails anymore.
0:21:55 You see, it could be written by artificial intelligence.
0:22:00 Do not trust anything, but it does not mean we do have to hate the media.
0:22:03 We do not have to hate the internet.
0:22:06 We just have to learn to be cautious.
0:22:15 And I would like to compare it to, let’s say, early human being, prehistoric humans.
0:22:16 Neolithic people.
0:22:19 They were roaming the forests and the fields.
0:22:22 And they would pick berries and they would find mushrooms.
0:22:25 And they would now don’t eat this mushroom.
0:22:26 It must be poisonous.
0:22:29 But there is an automatic sort of caution.
0:22:32 Be careful with an unknown mushroom.
0:22:34 Be careful with this or that.
0:22:42 And I’m sure that Neolithic people, hunters and gatherers, did not hate nature.
0:22:45 They just had the right attitude.
0:22:49 Just be cautious and you roam around and you’ll find the right thing.
0:22:52 You can love nature without romanticizing it.
0:22:53 Exactly, yes.
0:23:00 And you can love the internet and artificial intelligence without romanticizing it
0:23:03 because it has phenomenal possibilities.
0:23:08 It’s extraordinary, but at the same time, be vigilant.
0:23:21 [Music]
0:23:25 We’ll be back with more from Werner Herzog after the break.
0:23:40 [Music]
0:23:42 This is an ad for better help.
0:23:43 Welcome to the world.
0:23:46 Please read your personal owner’s manual thoroughly.
0:23:50 In it, you’ll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings
0:23:53 and how to find happiness and peace of mind.
0:23:55 Thank you and have a nice life.
0:23:58 Unfortunately, life doesn’t come with an owner’s manual.
0:24:00 That’s why there’s BetterHelp Online Therapy.
0:24:04 Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video or online chat.
0:24:07 Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more.
0:24:09 That’s BetterHELP.com.
0:24:13 Support for the gray area comes from green light.
0:24:18 The school year is already underway and you’ve probably wrapped up all your back to school shopping.
0:24:24 Which means it’s time to kick back and pretend like you remember how to do algebra when your kid needs help with homework.
0:24:28 But if you weren’t your child to do more learning outside the classroom that will help later on,
0:24:30 then you might want to try green light.
0:24:36 It can help teach your kids about money and not just the adding and subtracting, but how to manage it.
0:24:39 Green light is a debit card and money app for families.
0:24:41 Parents can keep an eye on kids spending and money habits,
0:24:45 and kids learn how to save, invest and spend wisely.
0:24:50 And with a green light infinity plan, you get even more financial literacy resources
0:24:53 and teens can check in thanks to family location sharing.
0:24:59 My kid’s a bit too young for this, but I’ve got a colleague here at Vox who uses it with his two boys and he loves it.
0:25:04 You can join the millions of parents and kids who use green light to navigate life together.
0:25:09 You can sign up for green light today and get your first month free when you go to greenlight.com/grayarea.
0:25:13 That’s greenlight.com/grayarea to try green light for free.
0:25:16 Greenlight.com/grayarea
0:25:22 Support for where should we begin comes from Bombas.
0:25:27 It’s fall in New York, it’s gotten chilly, and we’re all evaluating our closets
0:25:30 and taking out the sweaters and the woolen socks.
0:25:32 That’s what I do with my Bombas.
0:25:40 Bombas offers incredibly comfortable essentials like socks, underwear and buttery smooth t-shirts that you may want to wear every day.
0:25:46 They just release some playful new colors for fall with plenty of soft socks for fireside reading
0:25:50 and sweat-weaking ones that can keep up with your next autumn run.
0:25:53 I just ordered some compression socks for myself.
0:25:59 When I was on tour in the last few months, every time I took a plane, I wished I had some compression socks,
0:26:01 so I can’t wait now to try these out.
0:26:08 Plus, for every item you purchase, Bombas donates one to someone experiencing housing insecurity.
0:26:14 So, ready to feel good and do good, you can head over to bombas.com/ester
0:26:18 and use code Esther for 20% of your first purchase.
0:26:25 That’s B-O-M-B-A-S.com/ester, code Esther at checkout.
0:26:38 [Music]
0:26:42 In a lot of ways, we’re kind of talking about the uses and the misuses of language,
0:26:47 and I am fascinated by your fascination with the limits of language.
0:26:49 Why does this interest you so much?
0:26:56 Because as a poet, you have to discover the outer margins of your language.
0:27:00 Where does it go? Where does language start to unravel?
0:27:04 Where do images become unclear?
0:27:10 I can give you an example when I traveled on foot from Munich to Paris in early winter
0:27:15 and I wrote a diary in the book which is called “Orph Walking in Ice”.
0:27:22 I did this because my mentor, an old Jewish woman who had fled Nazi Germany,
0:27:28 was dying at age 80 or so, and I said I will not allow her to die.
0:27:30 I’m going to travel on foot now.
0:27:36 I didn’t tell her and I came and I said to myself one million steps in defiance.
0:27:42 It’s like a pilgrimage and when I arrive she will be out of hospital, which she actually was.
0:27:47 At the end I walked non-stop 85 kilometres.
0:27:52 That’s awfully long and against snowstorms against you.
0:27:56 A whole day, a whole night and almost another whole day.
0:28:04 And I arrived and somehow the images or language came apart and I said a very odd thing to her.
0:28:13 I said to her together we shall cook a fire and we shall stop fish.
0:28:19 You see, you cook a meal but you do not cook a fire.
0:28:27 Language became somehow not correct anymore and we stopped the traffic but we do not stop fish.
0:28:37 And she looked at me in a fleeting moment of understanding and I said to her please open the window from these days or I can fly.
0:28:39 So it was as laconic as that.
0:28:44 But I noticed that my language was incorrect.
0:28:54 The metaphors were incorrect and it’s important I think for poets to understand where are the outer limits
0:28:58 of what you can pass on through language.
0:29:00 You’re a poet at heart.
0:29:01 I wish I was.
0:29:02 I’ve tried to write poetry.
0:29:08 I just, I don’t have it but you’re sort of speaking to the power of poetry, I think, right?
0:29:11 That it lives at this border between language and meaning.
0:29:18 That it uses language to express truths that we don’t have a language for exactly.
0:29:21 That is correct but we have approximations.
0:29:25 We have a quest out there and we pursue it.
0:29:39 And I describe, for example, in another book and I think even in my memoirs that sometimes there’s a vortex of words in me that I can’t get out of my mind.
0:29:48 It’s sometimes like you’re haunted by a melody, a silly melody and you can’t get it out of your mind for weeks and weeks.
0:29:55 You drive in a car and it comes back to you and for me sometimes like a vortex of words.
0:30:07 And all of a sudden at a moment where I name them and I write them down in a specific situation liberates me from this vortex.
0:30:14 So it’s very, very odd how language sometimes is playing its crazy games with me.
0:30:18 Do you think that certain truths can only be expressed in their native language?
0:30:22 That certain thoughts can only be thought in the language that conceives them?
0:30:37 Yes, yes, because there’s a deep world view always involved in language and this is one of the reasons why I have been most fascinated by the disappearance of languages.
0:30:53 We’re too much looking at the disappearance of, let’s say, mammals like whales or like the panda bear or the snow leopard or whatever species of amphibians, frogs that are very endangered.
0:31:02 And we overlook that some of the most precious things like languages, whole cultures disappear without a trace.
0:31:11 We have about 7,000 languages left roughly and every 10 days or 12 days we are losing one.
0:31:20 There are 14, 15 languages out right now where there’s only one single last speaker of that language left.
0:31:35 And while we are talking here, one of those may die right now and with him or her the last traces of a whole culture, of a world view, of a language, of song will disappear.
0:31:37 And I find this is catastrophic.
0:31:46 It goes faster than any extinction of species, disappearance, extinction of cultures and languages.
0:32:01 So of course it’s a deep thing for me and my wife has actually done an installation called Last Whispers, an oratorio that was composed of extinct languages.
0:32:12 Meaning only existing in tape recordings and voices in songs of critically endangered languages.
0:32:18 Meaning there’s only one single last speaker left or maybe two or three.
0:32:24 I get the sense that you think poets are really the glue of civilization.
0:32:29 I think you’re right even in the book at some point that only the poets can hold Germany together.
0:32:40 Well, I traveled on foot around the borders, all the simulations of the borders around Germany to hold it together like a belt before the reunification.
0:32:48 Politics had given up, or some part of politics, including the German Chancellor Willy Brandt, whom I liked.
0:33:01 But he declared the book of the German Unities closed, which a German Chancellor should not declare in an official declaration at the Bundestag, the parliament.
0:33:14 And I thought it’s only the poets in our culture that holds a country together and I traveled on foot along where I grew up, was right at the Austrian border and then up and down the mountains.
0:33:27 And along Austria, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Denmark, I never completed this whole round around Germany because I fell ill and was in hospital for a week or so.
0:33:35 And then all of a sudden the Berlin Wall fell and I knew this will lead to the unification which actually happened.
0:33:42 And I love that quote from Albert Camus that the job of the writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
0:33:44 Certainly I would include the poets.
0:33:47 That’s a good one. I did not know he said that.
0:34:02 I would like to quote the greatest of all German poets late 1700s, early 1800s, Hülderlinia, and he said what remains forever was always made by the poets.
0:34:06 Yeah, I read a good bit of Heidegger when I was in college and he turned me on to Hülderlinia.
0:34:14 I wish I could read German, but I cannot and I get the sense that there’s no way to understand what he was saying if you can’t read it in the original German.
0:34:20 Yeah, and well, Hülderlin, he became insane and his language unravels.
0:34:32 He was the one actually who went to the very outer limits of my language German and it comes apart and unravels.
0:34:37 And that’s very, very tragic and also very fascinating to see that.
0:34:43 And Heidegger, well, how can I say, I’ve never cracked the Heidegger code.
0:34:47 No one has. I’m not even sure he knew what he was saying at the time.
0:34:53 Whatever, I’m not an expert. You’re much more into philosophy than I am.
0:35:07 But I think he was a great philosopher, but up to a certain degree and what comes, what is beyond our comprehension is maybe dubious.
0:35:20 I was rewatching some of your documentaries when I was preparing for this and it struck me again how well you’re able to let people show themselves even when you’re directing them.
0:35:27 Is that a very deliberate thing for you paying attention to people in that way, seeing their true nature and pushing them to reveal it?
0:35:40 Of course, I do not have to push them. Most of the cases there’s no push, but you have to have such a fascination and radiated and awe and sympathy.
0:35:48 They open up and you have to have it in you. If you make films like that, you have to have it in you.
0:35:58 That’s a profession of a director and when you do a documentary, you have to be a director. You should not be the fly on the wall.
0:36:09 The fly on the wall would be the surveillance camera in the bank and for 15 years it records nothing because no bank robbery ever happens.
0:36:17 So wait another 15 years and still there wouldn’t be anything of significance, nothing worth recording.
0:36:31 So I interfere, I shape, I’m the hornet out there that stings and that’s what I think is filmmaking. We are creators.
0:36:43 I think your films have given me an appreciation for how much space there is for revelation in silence and often the only way to see someone is to just shut the hell up and get out of the way.
0:36:49 Which seems simple enough, but a lot of people don’t do it, but you do and I think it’s to your credit.
0:37:05 And many of them follow some sort of a journalistic approach. They come with a catalogue of questions. I never have a paper with a catalogue, I just listen and I start to follow leads and I dig very deep.
0:37:10 I want to look deep into the heart of men and also of course women.
0:37:19 So if you don’t have it in you as a director to see the heart of men, you should not be a director.
0:37:31 Well, you can be a journalist and it’s all what you see on television, day in, day out, totally legitimate, but not my kind of filmmaking, not my kind of writing.
0:37:41 We’ll be back with more from Werner Herzog after one more break.
0:38:14 Support for the gray area comes from Shopify. Every great business starts with a great idea or a kind of “meh” idea that’s so bizarre it becomes weirdly successful like that singing big mouth bass that’s been installed in a million garages.
0:38:23 But to make your business successful over time, you need more than an idea. You need a partner who can help you achieve sustainable growth, a partner like Shopify.
0:38:29 Shopify is an all-in-one digital commerce platform that may help your business sell better than ever before.
0:38:36 No matter where your customers spend their time, scrolling through your digital feed or strolling past your physical actual storefront,
0:38:41 Shopify may help you convert those browsers into buyers and to sell more over time.
0:38:49 There’s a reason companies like Allbirds turn to Shopify to sell more products to more customers, businesses that sell more sell with Shopify.
0:38:58 Want to upgrade your business and get the same checkout Allbirds uses? You can sign up for your $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/box.
0:39:05 You can go to Shopify.com/box to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com/box.
0:39:09 Support for the gray area comes from NetSuite.
0:39:15 Imagine running a magical business where you could see next quarter’s trends before they happen.
0:39:24 No more guessing if pumpkin spice kale smoothies will be the hit of the season or if it’s more of a pumpkin spice deep fried Oreos kind of vibe.
0:39:30 You would just consult your crystal ball and then order enough supplies to make a healthy or very unhealthy profit.
0:39:35 Sadly, that’s just not how things work in this corner of the wizardverse.
0:39:40 That’s why smart businesses get themselves future ready with NetSuite by Oracle.
0:39:49 NetSuite says they’re the go-to business management suite for almost 40,000 companies offering everything you need to stay on track, no matter what tomorrow brings.
0:39:54 Get ahead of the curve and stay focused on what’s coming next with NetSuite by Oracle.
0:39:59 And now I’ll finish this section of the ad by saying the word opportunity.
0:40:06 Speaking of opportunity, you can download the CFO’s guide to AI and machine learning at netsuite.com/grayarea.
0:40:15 The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/grayarea. That’s netsuite.com/grayarea.
0:40:22 Support for the show comes from Into the Mix, a Ben and Jerry’s podcast about joy and justice produced with Vox Creative.
0:40:30 In season three of this award-winning podcast, Into the Mix is covering stories on the ordinary people fighting for justice in their local communities.
0:40:40 Starting with the fight against the workhouse, a penitentiary in St. Louis known for its abject conditions, mold, and pest infestations, and its embrace of the cash bail system.
0:40:47 Host Ashley C. Ford interviews Ainez Bordeaux, who spent a month in the workhouse when she couldn’t afford her $25,000 bail.
0:41:06 Experiencing what I experienced and watching other women go through it and know that there were thousands before us and there were thousands after us who had experienced those same things, that’s where I was radicalized.
0:41:10 Eventually, her charge was vacated, but the experience changed her.
0:41:16 They’re starting a campaign to close the workhouse. Are you interested? And I was like, hell yeah. Hell yeah, I’m interested.
0:41:24 You can hear how she and other advocates fought to shut down the workhouse in one on the first episode of this special three-part series, Out Now.
0:41:27 Subscribe to Into the Mix, a Ben and Jerry’s podcast.
0:41:50 I think the chapter in the book about the projects you wanted to make but weren’t able to for whatever reason, it might be my favorite, certainly one of my favorites.
0:41:55 You wanted to make a film with Mike Tyson, you wanted to blow up an opera house in Sicily.
0:41:59 Well, an abandoned opera house that was built, probably mafia.
0:42:02 I should, yeah, to be clear, yes, there were no people in it.
0:42:15 Exactly, mafia, money, and in the city of a small obscure town, Shakka in southern Sicily built it, I think, mostly laundering mafia money.
0:42:23 And now it’s there. It has no administration, no opera ever was played in there, no technicians, no singer, no choir, nothing.
0:42:27 But I couldn’t do it, so that was the end of the project.
0:42:30 And of course, many other projects.
0:42:42 One of the projects I’m actually trying to pursue now a story about twins, young twin women who spoke in unison.
0:42:50 It’s phenomenal sometimes twins create a secretive language, but they exchange in this language.
0:42:55 But there were two twins, twin sisters who spoke in unison.
0:43:01 Even if you ask them a question, they could not expect, they would ask like a chorus.
0:43:06 And the project is called Bucking Faster.
0:43:10 Not the fucking bastard, but Bucking Faster.
0:43:15 They made the same slip of tongue in a court hearing.
0:43:20 They were testifying together and they shouted across the courtroom.
0:43:30 There were defendants and a truck driver tried to get a restraining order against them and they yell across the courtroom simultaneously.
0:43:34 He’s lying. Don’t you hear every word is a lie.
0:43:39 He’s lying under oath. The bucking faster is lying.
0:43:43 They make the same slip of tongue at the same moment.
0:43:49 How do you come upon these subjects, these stories? Do you just collide with them?
0:43:53 No, no, I find them. I don’t know. Sometimes they find me.
0:43:56 Is there some kind of gravitational pull that they just, they find you?
0:44:00 There’s something, something out there. They find me, I find them.
0:44:12 And I actually was very close in contact with them, let us met them, took them out in the restaurant, for example, which was a big deal for them.
0:44:16 Because they were very shy, they wouldn’t like to leave their apartment.
0:44:24 So I do find them and they, they, I stumble into them or they stumble into me as well.
0:44:33 If there was one project, if you had to pick one project that you never quite got off the ground but wish you did, which one would it be? Is it the opera house?
0:44:47 No, I am describing a dozen or so projects and, and of course there were projects that I couldn’t do, for example, the conquest of Mexico, but seen from the perspective of the Aztecs.
0:44:57 Aliens are landing. The ships are descending from clouds and they bring miraculous stags with them, I mean horses.
0:45:05 And, and they create thunder from barrels, I mean cannons and things. So a totally alien invasion for them.
0:45:26 And of course it would have been very, very expensive. You have to build pyramids and temples and recreate the capital city, Tenochtitlan, which is Mexico City today, canals like Venice today and thousands of extras and open battles and you just name it.
0:45:44 It was just too expensive. It would have required a huge Hollywood budget, but Hollywood would only finance it and side with me if my last film made, let’s say, $400 million box office domestic.
0:45:56 Then they would approach me and say, oh, let’s do that together. But I do not lose a sleepless night over this. It’s okay. And people said, ah, you have to pursue it. It’s so beautiful.
0:46:10 And why don’t you try on asset in 20 years? I’m not going to find the money either because there are some iron laws of the industry, which I thankfully understand them.
0:46:20 And I said, no, I plow on. There’s many other things in these in the last 20 years of this undone project. I’ve made 27 films.
0:46:29 Speaking of expensive, I read recently that you wanted to go to space and even applied with the Japanese company for an opportunity to do it.
0:46:30 I did.
0:46:33 They turned you down, which is outrageous, I should say.
0:46:52 No, they didn’t turn me down. They still, they didn’t respond to my application because there must have been thousands. It’s actually a Japanese billionaire who invites eight guests or something like that and flying out and flying around moon.
0:47:00 And I argued, you got to have a poet along with you. I send a daily poem down to earth in the short movie.
0:47:04 Is that why you wanted to go? Because I wanted to ask, why did you want to go in the first place?
0:47:22 Because it’s a perspective that is completely new for a filmmaker for a poet. I would also go to Mars, but let’s face it, I applied against the vigorous objections of my wife, which I understand, but I applied anyway.
0:47:27 And I was not turned down. I’d never got an answer. So I was not elected.
0:47:30 Well, that’s that’s equally outrageous, but I’ll let it go.
0:47:38 No, no, come on, come on. The other eight people who are instead of me there will enjoy it tremendously.
0:47:43 I’ve always been enamored with what astronauts call the overview effect.
0:47:57 Almost every person who goes to space and looks back down on earth describes the same kind of transformative experience where they can really feel how special this place is against the backdrop of space.
0:48:03 Do you suspect you’d feel the same way? Maybe it would give you a whole new appreciation for the for the chaos of the world.
0:48:11 I do have a lot of appreciation for our world, sometimes even against my better judgment.
0:48:17 But probably I would have a similar experience. I do not want to predict what would happen.
0:48:30 But what I find very, very significant is one of these voyage emissions that has left our solar system, I think, launched in the 70s, made photos back of planet Earth.
0:48:37 The last photo I think that we have is a tiniest speck of a star somewhere out there.
0:48:43 And that’s our planet Earth. So how insignificant we are. That’s really stunning.
0:48:49 But from our moon, planet Earth is very close from Mars.
0:48:58 It’s still fairly close. It’s not this really far out view of what we are and where we are.
0:49:03 But totally fascinating for me, I would instantly go.
0:49:11 While we’re on the subject of Earth, our home, do you think humanity is destroying itself?
0:49:18 That’s part of what is happening to us. But we have to face it biologically.
0:49:27 We are very vulnerable and we have it somehow in us that is self-destructive. That’s not healthy.
0:49:36 But I do not believe that we will have a permanent existence here on our planet.
0:49:44 So the way dinosaurs disappeared, I’m pretty certain we will disappear as well.
0:49:47 It doesn’t make me nervous, by the way.
0:49:51 I’m not sure I’ve ever thought of you as a pessimist.
0:49:56 But I do think of you as someone who’s very clear-eyed about the fragility of civilization, really.
0:50:03 Do you even think in these terms, does the language of pessimism and optimism mean anything to you at all?
0:50:05 Or is it just the wrong language?
0:50:11 No, I avoid it here. It’s too primitive to categorize a person as an optimist or pessimist.
0:50:18 I’m just looking at what’s out there. Who are we? How fragile is our own biology?
0:50:26 How fragile are societies? For example, if the Internet disappears from one moment to the next.
0:50:30 And it can if we have a massive, a real massive solar flare.
0:50:40 Or if we have, let’s say, a war event that will destroy all the servers and rout us, we would be without Internet.
0:50:54 And it would be like New York City, and I’m sitting here in New York City, downtown, when the hurricane hit all of a sudden below 32nd Street.
0:51:00 It was without electricity, without Internet, without cell phone coverage.
0:51:16 And my wife, who was here at exactly that time, says, “Tens of thousands of people were dazed and confused and moving north in Manhattan Island just in search of a toilet, of a flushable toilet.
0:51:26 Tens of thousands. And all of a sudden, within days, we are thrown back in a situation like hunters and gatherers.
0:51:38 And that doesn’t bode well for our species, because you can go up to Central Park and hunt the squirrels, but it will not feed you for long.
0:51:45 Not eight million inhabitants will eat long and survive long on a few squirrels in the park.
0:51:54 So it doesn’t look good. And a good survival would be, for example, for tribal hunters and gatherers like the Inuit.
0:52:03 They don’t need the Internet, or for the Amish, who are doing homestead farming without technology.
0:52:10 They don’t have electricity, or many of the fundamentalist Amish don’t have electricity.
0:52:17 They don’t have cars. They don’t have ridges. And they live very well. They would survive.
0:52:24 I loved your film, Low and Behold, as an exploration of the Internet and what it’s done, what it’s doing to us.
0:52:33 And I think it makes the point far better than I can, and I’ve certainly tried, about how these sorts of technological revolutions aren’t really planned.
0:52:40 And the people who give birth to these revolutions, these technologies, haven’t the faintest idea of what it will lead to.
0:52:49 But it’s interesting, and I guess not surprising, that the digital world and social media and that kind of thing, it doesn’t really exist for you.
0:52:54 You’re not on those things. Is that just a clear decision you made at some point to abstain?
0:53:04 No. I would say long live the digital world. And I’m using it. I’m using it for filming. I use it for editing.
0:53:16 I use it for communications. I do emails. My main tool of communication is email, but I do not need to be part of certain things that are out,
0:53:25 possibly in the Internet. I’m not on social networks. If you find me on Twitter or on Facebook, there are forgeries.
0:53:35 And there are many forgeries of voice imitators out there. I have lots of doppelgangers, lots of duplicates. Let them be out there.
0:53:45 I don’t mind, but if you listen to that, you know, it’s forgeries. And if you find me on Facebook, it’s a complete forgery then.
0:53:51 You asked people at the end of Lo and Behold, actually. I’m just thinking of it, if they thought the Internet dreams of itself.
0:54:00 And I love the question, and I didn’t quite understand it. I still don’t think I understand it. So I think I’m just going to ask you if you think the Internet dreams of itself.
0:54:13 Well, that’s the deepest of all questions, I think, and not really fully answerable. And I have to admit, it is just a projection of a statement by a war theoretician.
0:54:30 Napoleonic time, Prussian war theoretician von Klausiewicz. And apparently von Klausiewicz once in his study on war, which is still a revolutionary insight into warfare.
0:54:42 He said, “It seems that war sometimes dreams of itself.” It’s a stunning statement, and I extended it as an Internet dream of itself.
0:54:50 The strange thing now is that experts on von Klausiewicz told me von Klausiewicz never said that.
0:54:59 Maybe I invented it and talked myself over decades so much into it that I believe it was von Klausiewicz.
0:55:09 So it’s very odd how our memory is shifting and shaping its own world, shaping its own quotations from books.
0:55:15 But it’s the deepest of all questions. Does the Internet dream of itself?
0:55:26 And you can extend it. Does artificial intelligence dream of itself? And that’s why it gets interesting.
0:55:31 Yeah, it’s been a few years since I watched the film. I watched it again a few weeks ago, and the question just lingered with me.
0:55:37 It sort of runs over my head, I think, but I sense the depth of it. If you put it to me, I wouldn’t have an answer.
0:55:46 And there’s not a single scientist in the film who can answer it. They are puzzled. They are stunned that a filmmaker is asking this question.
0:55:53 But I’m not so much a filmmaker in that case. I’m a poet who asks them, and they sense it.
0:56:00 Do you think much about legacy? You talk about being a poet, and you talk about how you think your writing will survive longer than your films?
0:56:02 I think so, yes.
0:56:04 Why do you think that is?
0:56:27 I can’t really give you a clear answer. There’s a gut understanding and feeling that this will last, and that my prose and my poetry has an intensity that is beyond the illumination or the intensity of the films.
0:56:45 And people always are puzzled. How does he reconcile being a filmmaker and a poet? And I have a simple formula now that makes it very easily understood. Filmmaking is my voyage, but poetry, writing, is home.
0:56:54 So is the filmmaking more experimental and exploratory for you, whereas the writing feels more settled and secure, if that makes any sense at all?
0:56:59 Well, we shouldn’t try to analyze now this very simple dictum.
0:57:01 I have a nasty habit of doing that sometimes.
0:57:10 No, no, it’s self-explanatory. I couldn’t even explain any further. I’m glad that I have a simple formula.
0:57:23 It’s a bit simple then. I’ve read your books and watched most of your films, if not all, and I guess I didn’t have a full appreciation for the diversity and the adventurousness of your life until I read the book.
0:57:35 It really is a quite remarkable life, and the connection between your experiences, what you’ve actually done, the ways that you have collided with the world and other people is so essential to the work that you’ve done.
0:57:50 It’s true, yes, and it’s puzzling. It’s puzzling because there was an intensity of life as if it had been five lives in a row and things that you normally do not do as a writer, as a filmmaker.
0:58:01 And people immediately start to doubt, am I telling them wild stories? Did I really move a ship over a mountain? Yes, I did. It’s documented.
0:58:08 Did I put a whole cast of actors under hypnosis? Yes, I did. It’s documented.
0:58:22 Was I shot during a live interview for BBC? Yes, I was shot. I mean, it was not a very big wound that I had, but I was shot on tape. It’s caught on tape.
0:58:33 And on and on, and for example, New York Times, the writer is completely puzzled. Is this all invented or so? But you see, no stone was left unturned.
0:58:45 I gave the memoirs to my two brothers, verified. In some cases I had a different shade of experience, but that’s legitimate. That’s fine.
0:59:00 Well, for example, did I do a stunt at the opera house in Bologna, where I wanted to have a stage worker falling from the skies and through the stage, and there was not money enough for a stuntman.
0:59:09 So I tested it myself. Immediately doubted, but there’s a series of photos, and I have them where you see me flying through the air.
0:59:18 And of course, at the bottom, there was a huge air cushion. The same thing that Hollywood uses for stuntmen.
0:59:32 So things are documented and all the big things, of course, had dozens of witnesses or crew members or actors, extras. You just name it. You can’t make it up.
0:59:39 Werner, I have admired your work for many, many years, and it was an absolute pleasure to chat with you.
0:59:46 Once again, the book is called Every Man for Himself and God Against All. Thank you so much for coming in today.
0:59:48 And thank you and greetings to Mississippi.
0:59:50 Thank you. Come on down.
1:00:02 [Music]
1:00:09 This episode was produced by Katelyn Boguki. Patrick Boyd engineered this episode with help from Chris Shirtleff.
1:00:17 Alex Overington wrote our theme music. Serena Salen is our fact-checker, and A.M. Hall is the boss.
1:00:24 As always, let us know what you think of this episode. Drop us a line at thegrayarea@vox.com.
1:00:29 And please share it with your friends on all these socials.
1:00:35 New episodes of The Gray Area Drop on Mondays. Listen and subscribe.
1:00:40 This show is part of VOX. Support VOX’s journalism by joining our membership program today.
1:00:44 Go to vox.com/members to sign up.
1:00:50 [Music]
1:00:56 Support for the gray area comes from Mint Mobile. Sometimes a deal is too good to be true.
1:01:04 You know the feeling. You find that great deal on a rental car only to realize the lock is broken and the windows won’t roll up.
1:01:09 Well, Mint Mobile says with their deals there are no catches. What you see is what you get.
1:01:15 When you purchase a new three-month plan with Mint Mobile, you’ll pay just $15 a month. That’s it.
1:01:21 No hoops to jump through. No sneaky fine print that you can barely read. Just a great deal.
1:01:29 All Mint Mobile plans come with a high-speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation’s largest 5G network.
1:01:32 You can even keep your phone, your contacts, and your number.
1:01:41 You can get this new customer offer and a three-month premium wireless plan for just $15 a month by going to mintmobile.com/grayarea.
1:01:50 That’s mintmobile.com/grayarea. You can cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at mintmobile.com/grayarea.
1:01:58 $45 upfront payment required equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only.
1:02:04 Speed slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply.
1:02:06 See Mint Mobile for details.
1:02:09 (upbeat music)
Sean Illing speaks with one of his heroes: Werner Herzog.
Herzog is a filmmaker, poet, and author of the memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All. The two discuss “ecstatic truth,” a term invented by Herzog to capture what he’s really after in his work, why he’s interested in Mars, and whether he thinks humanity is destroying itself.
Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray Area
Guest: Werner Herzog, author, Every Man for Himself and God Against All
This episode was originally published in October of 2023.
Support The Gray Area by becoming a Vox Member: https://www.vox.com/support-now
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices